It was a throwaway aside in a piece by Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator for The Times, and to be honest I can’t remember much else about the article, but as a pin portrait of our new Prime Minister, the phrase has stuck with me. Watching Andy Burnham’s impassioned speech to the 2026 Labour Party conference this week, I found myself crooning in a poor imitation ’60s heartthrob Davy Jones of the Monkees. Click here if you want to bring a swoon to your day.

First things first, I like Andy Burnham. Having lived in Greater Manchester for 38 years, I have voted for him three times to be our city’s mayor; our very own King of the North; Best Dressed Saturday Dad, blah blah blah. The buses are great (even if I much prefer the tram ever since spending an interminable and stomach churning 55 minutes next to a pool of something extremely unpleasant on the top deck of the 197 from Heaton Moor into Central Manchester) although most of what really defines the city’s eye-popping regeneration long pre-dates Mr Burnham’s tenure. Even Tom McTague, editor of the Labour supporting New Statesman, detailed last week the disconnect between Burnham’s version of ‘Manchesterism’ and yer actual history. McTague described how the regeneration of Manchester city centre into a thriving residential nexus is predicated on (perhaps questionable) foreign investment which has largely failed to ‘trickle down’ to the conurbation’s satellite communities such as Oldham. Has Manchesterism offered ‘good growth in every postcode’? No. For anyone interested in reality, it absolutely has not.

Manchester is, like for Andy Burnham, my adopted home. It’s an amazing and inspirational city, but the Manchester I have ‘lived experience’ of every day is not the same one that furnishes Mr Burnham’s waking reveries. Perhaps the idea that he is the architect of Manchester’s prosperity is the first of Andy’s daydreams, albeit one he believes with complete sincerity.

(FTAOD ‘Lived experience’ is what used to be known as ‘experience’ – although, to be fair, it is helpful to distinguish it from what my corpse might encounter in the back room of a Co-Op Funeral Parlour.)

There’s no doubt that our Andy is highly personable, with communication skills second to none. As one Labour minister reportedly observed on Tuesday, unlike his predecessor, Burnham doesn’t look like he’s been taken hostage and is reading his speech for the very first time. But… as our country’s Prime Minister I’m still waiting to be convinced, and this week’s speech was a sort of exclamation mark at the end of his first ten weeks that summed up why.

As he kicked off, promising to ‘break the mould’, not to do any tub thumping, insisting that this was going to be a completely ‘different’ kind of conference speech, I remembered this quote from my good friend James Leach’s recent Substack:

‘If there’s one thing you should beware of, it’s a politician saying he wants to “do politics differently.” In fact, if there’s one way that politicians could do politics differently, it would be to stop promising to do politics differently. ‘

I mean, really, please, Andy, stop! You’re either ‘different’ or you’re not. It’s not for you to tell me that you’re ‘different’ that’s up to the audience; an audience who might want to pause to reflect on what ‘different’ means, and also ‘different’ from what? I’d be amazed if I was the only person rubbed up the wrong way by being told what to think, a bit like a comedian telling you how funny their routine is going to be, or the guy in the office who says: ‘I’m crazy, me!’. I have no doubt that Andy believes in the daydream of his own exceptionalism, and such was his conviction the whole congregation had no hesitation in daydreaming with him. I could feel my own eyes starting to spiral like Mowgli confronted by a benevolent, pint-wielding, Everton loving incarnation of Kaa the Constrictor from The Jungle Book.

Don’t get me wrong, though: I want to believe!!

In a brief foray with reality, he went on to make a decently edgy joke about his grandmother walking five miles to put a deposit down on a house without telling her husband, adding wryly that he promised not to repeat the offence with his chancellor John Healey…

…before going on to spend billions in his policy announcements.

Fundamental to the ‘differentness’ of his speech, Andy told us, was that unlike ANYONE EVER in the history of speeches, he was going to be HONEST. That’s properly HONEST – not just ‘I’m-not-even-lying’ HONEST. Okay I’m exaggerating ever so slightly, but if you saw it you’ll know what I mean. But an hour later as he was banging home the ‘honesty’ schtick a final time I was scratching my head. I’d just listened to a mouth watering menu of what would be achieved over the next ten years. Utilities brought back under public control or even public ownership, specifically in the case of water; the realisation of Angela Raynor’s housebuilding targets; the return of the Tories’ Help-To-Buy/Your First Pony scheme, or whatever it’s called now; no ‘crude’ cuts to welfare payments (i.e. no cuts at all) but increased investment in growth and youth opportunities and social housing on the promise that people will simply stop claiming; and of course the establishment of a free-at-the-point-of-use National Care Service.

Oh yes, and we’re going to rejoin the EU and reform the electoral system, as well as re-industrialise the country, devolve loads more stuff to local communities who will always make the right decisions about everything because they’re… local! Go Piddington! They know best what’s right for their community, isn’t that right Andy?
…
What?

I guess Burnham’s idea of devolution is a bit like Henry Ford’s dictum that you could have a Model T in ‘any colour you like as long as it’s black’. Cynical hyperbole aside, the ever growing list of things that local mayors are going to do so brilliantly ought to make any serious democrat just a tiny bit twitchy.

Nonetheless, I heartily I support many of these things. I imagine all of them will poll pretty well in isolation. I’m 66. If Andy could crack on with the National Care Service, that’ll do very nicely!! It’s like sinking back into fluffy clouds of candy floss, everything is going to be ‘brilliant!’ – just like Paul Whitehouse used tell us on The Fast Show.

But despite all my doubts, resistance is futile. I find myself Hoping Again, exactly as the conference slogan instructs me, writ large behind the Andy steering my dreams. I recognise this feeling. At the end of every month I ‘hope’ that I’m going to win the premium bonds. Sometimes I am ‘hoping’ so hard I’ve spent the whole million – giving massive wads of it to good causes of course.

Most months I’m lucky to pick up fifty quid. Hope doesn’t pay the bills.

But with no mention at all of the dire financial position of the UK economy – where tax increases seem inevitable just to stand still, to service our debt, and to meet the minimum 3% GDP defence budget that John Healey resigned over – is this really ‘honesty’?

For anyone bothering to remember any actual facts beyond the last two weeks (I know, it’s ever so hard when you’re mainlining The Dream), they might recall a certain Ed Miliband at the Party Conference in 2014. He attempted his leader’s speech without notes or autocue, and promptly forgot to include a whole section concerning the humungous budget deficit plaguing the British economy. He was roundly condemned – his credibility destroyed – with even devout Miliband loyalists struggling not to roll their eyes. But in Burnham’s case the omission was not accidental. He doesn’t want to bother our heads with it, why spoil a good daydream. Perhaps he doesn’t want to bother his own head with such horrors – although for all our sakes I hope he does, and soon. It seems to have been a great strategy, though, because no one at the conference seemed to give a toss. Indeed the only mention of the parlous state of our economy came the day before in Chancellor Healey’s speech where he mentioned that he didn’t have as much cash to play with as Blair and Brown had in 1997, but in a reassuring ‘don’t-you-worry-your-little-heads-I’ve-got-it-covered’ stylie.

But before any of the dreamers had a chance to consider this potential collision with reality, Burnham used a classic piece of magician’s misdirection, pledging to turn the ‘triple lock’ on pensions to a ‘double lock’ after the next election factored by only by CPI or 2.5% whichever was higher. The commentators gasped!! The headlines popped into our newsfeeds!! Number Ten swiftly reassured everyone that it was still a triple lock but the earnings element would only be selectively applied. Estimates of potential savings varied from as low as £800 million if it were applied this year to anything between £5bn and £20bn (according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies) by 2040. A National Care Service is currently priced at £18bn which is surely an underestimate, and bound to swell exponentially by the end of the next decade if it’s to fulfil the promise and be worth doing in the first place. The squall of contradictory numbers and projections was head spinning, and without a concrete formula for the ‘adjusted’ triple lock it was all frankly meaningless.

In terms of funding an £18 billion care service, with savings of not much more than a billion in 2030, Burnham is talking about roughly 6% of the required budget. It’s something – but also nothing. It’s a distraction, a misdirection. Far, far more significant was his promise not to fund the NCS with borrowing. In his most honest policy statement of all, he acknowledged that such a service would involve a tax surcharge of some variety. A fag packet calculation (ie Google given that I don’t smoke) is that to raise the rest of that £18bn would require about 2½p on Income tax… perhaps akin to the 1.25% Boris Johnson slapped on NI in 2021 when he made a start on a similar scheme – without waiting for an election three years ahead. At least Andy’s doing things differently from that.

I’d be more than happy to pay an extra 2½p, but then of course, I’m of retirement age, and looking down the very steep hill of whatever my senior years hold in store for me. All other things being equal, I genuinely believe someone with Burnham’s communication skills could persuade the electorate to vote for it – but all other things aren’t equal. In fact, they are so unequal it is ‘dishonest’ at a fundamental level not to be upfront about the tsunami of economic challenges overwhelming us right now, with the full force of the tidal wave yet to hit. We are going to be very lucky to get through the next 2 years without getting swallowed up in a sovereign debt debacle. Perhaps that’s the idea. After all, we know how much Andy loves the nineteen-seventies before Thatcher and Major and Blair and Gordon Brown spent twenty-nine years rescuing the country from its well-deserved reputation as an economic basket case. I was a teenager in the 1970s. I have lived experience. More immediately, we are falling headlong into a major energy crisis that will suffocate any of Burnham’s much vaunted ‘breathing space’, with household energy bills set to rise by more than £250, increases that will hit every family and far worse for businesses across the country this winter. With no sign of a resolution between the US and Iran, if the Houthis tighten their grip on the Bab al-Mandab Strait, and God forbid, President Trump imposes his threatened ban on diesel exports then the consequences are all too imaginable… provided we can stop dreaming about how we’re going to spend all the money we don’t have.

NB I find out about next month Premium Bond winnings on Friday. I’ll be rich, I tell you, rich beyond my wildest dreams!

To switch metaphors, with all his shining castle on the hill optimism, it’s a bit like having Lawrence Llewlyn Bowen showing you fabric swatches for a promised makeover just as the house is catching fire and you can hear the fire engines screaming towards you. Other commentators have made comparisons to the passengers partying on the Titanic. That’s the trouble with basing your appeal to the country on a daydream. Absolutely everything Burnham proposed was contingent on him winning his own mandate at a general election, which he has repeatedly insisted won’t be until 2029. The man who claims he’s proving he can make tough decisions isn’t making any decisions at all for at least another three years… but the iceberg/flames (delete according to metaphor preference) are going to strike within months, if not weeks.

If you want an example of a Prime Minister who was honest with the British People, I can give you one.

It was Keir Starmer. He won a landslide election victory and promptly summoned the press into the Number Ten Rose Garden only to tell us all how tough things were going to be. He wasn’t lying. It was about as truly honest a speech as any PM has ever made, but what was the reaction? ‘Shut up!!’ the country cried out, as if with one voice, ‘we didn’t mean THAT kind of honesty! We want honesty that tells us what we want to hear. Duh!!’

There’s a standing joke in our house. When a day out is planned, my better half will scour an assortment of weather apps until she finds one that predicts the sunshine she craves. That kind of honesty. I don’t mind Mr Burnham wanting to spread a few upbeat vibes, but please don’t call it ‘honesty’. What it is, is good old fashioned spin. A less charitable observer might call it gaslighting – albeit a sort of benign, daydreamy and utterly sincere form of gaslighting. Watching coverage of the Labour conference (I was a member of the party for 38 years on and off) it was hard to summon much respect for the fawning ministers and MPs and local activists who were glowing with excitement largely because someone they feel they could have a pint with has told them that everything is going to be wonderful. That’s not vibes. That’s stupidity.

That Keir Starmer overdid the technocrat misery is beyond debate, but Labour needs to be very careful about over-correcting with its new leader. At the beginning of his speech, Burnham observed that people too often felt that government was working against them and not with them. This, of course, is exactly the argument Nigel Farage uses to rally support for the right wing Reform party.

It’s populism, pure and simple. And populism, as we know, has a habit of offering simple answers to complex questions. Plus it tends to be selective when, for example, a village votes overwhelmingly against having migrants billeted nearby; or a contrary mayor from the opposite end of the populist spectrum wants to use any extra cash to give back to constituents as tax relief; or a third runway might be a good idea to underpin a reindustrialisation agenda (no, you idiot! Not THAT kind of reindustrialisation!). I guess the thing about a daydream is that it might come true. I might win the Premium Bonds tomorrow. But I probably won’t and right now the odds are stacked heavily against Burnham’s dreams. He just doesn’t want to admit it – and he visibly hates to talk about it. The true test will be whether the Daydream Believer can wake up to the real tough decisions, decisions that can’t be deferred until after the next election, but that he’s going to have to make next week, next month, next year.

The reason I’m such a party pooper is that in that speech – packed as it was with sincerity, conviction, vision, theatre and genuine emotion – I was left without any clue as to whether Burnham was up to the challenges not just presented by a struggling economy, but by the horribly real possibility of a major air and land war spreading west of Ukraine in the very near future, which could turn ‘after the next election’ into the end of a rainbow we will be lucky to reach in my lifetime.

In the cult sci-fi The Matrix there is a famous scene where Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne) offers Neo (Keanu Reeves) with a choice of whether or not to confront the bitter reality of his existence. The scene has entered the lexicon as a cipher, popular with conspiracy theorists, for the idea of ‘waking up’ to a hidden ‘reality’ where we are all living as puppets in a secret totalitarian state. It’s bollocks of course – although very entertaining bollocks – but I have found myself flipping the scene on its head and wondering if the whole country – especially the Parliamentary Labour Party – might do well to listen to Morpheus’s words.

‘You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Remember, all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.’ To be honest, if I’d have been Neo, I would have opted for the blue pill. Shorter movie but a lot less aggro.

The irony, given his remarkable communication skills, is that Andy Burnham is the one person in our political firmament who could tell the country the truth and they might just listen.

I live in ‘hope’.