For all his cosplaying as an outsider, Andy Burnham is an Oxbridge-educated career politician: a creature of Westminster.

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His formative political years were spent serving under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, in governments that perfected the dark arts of spin. I suspect what we’ve witnessed with his arrival in Downing Street today was a piece of political PR of which even Alistair Campbell would have been proud. New Labour spin is back, but it’s dressed in Uniqlo and re-branded as ‘vibes’.

Credit where it’s due, Burnham is a far more impressive political communicator than his predecessor. Sir Keir Starmer’s default setting was to look tense and sound strangulated. By contrast, Burnham’s confident performance outside Number 10 projected a calm optimism that will........

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