Rafael Behr neatly summarises Andy Burnham’s strengths as a potential leader and he rightly emphasises that he needs a united party behind him (Andy Burnham is playing the long game in an age of short attention spans, 22 July).
He then accurately identifies what Burnham needs to do, but makes no reference to what the parliamentary Labour party needs to do. Leadership is interactional, and Labour MPs outside the government – particularly those (in Behr’s words) with hair triggers on the radical left and those aggrieved Starmer loyalists – have to realise that Labour is in the last-chance saloon here, and they have just as much a role as he does to ensure the success that leads to a second term.
