Andy Burnham is having a good time. I can’t remember the last time a prime minister (or indeed any high-profile British politician) actually looked as though they were enjoying what they were doing. I saw a clip the other day in which Burnham remembered arguing with his dad about the point of an English degree, quoted poetry and discussed the importance of mastering words. It was almost enough to make you feel sorry for Keir Starmer. In his entire time as leader of the Labour party and then the head of the government, Starmer delivered not a single unprocessed moment. No natural sentiment escaped the carapace. And here is his successor, practically oozing it.

It matters. It’s good and healthy to have a leader who looks as though they want to be where they are. Whose approach isn’t that of a scold or a receiver who has taken control of the premises, or someone whose sole aim is to tenaciously clamber up to the top job and hold on for dear life.

I hadn’t fully realised, until Starmer cleared off, how much his premiership gave off the sense that the public were doing a bad job. That it was somehow their fault Starmer wasn’t as popular as he thought he should have been. As though it were the public’s job to deliver stable government and stop being so restive and fickle; stop having feelings and opinions on your prime minister that show up in the polling. Poor Starmer, some said, smashed fatally against the rocks by the waves of the roiling, insentient electorate of an ungovernable country.

Burnham’s approach restores the basic principle, lost for so long, that you have to woo people and establish a connection. Over the past two weeks, it looks as though it has been easier to get a reply from his X account than for business executives........

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