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Time is short for Andy Burnham to return to the Commons if he wants to be a viable leadership candidate this year, think some in Labour. This comes after the Manchester mayor made another eyebrow-raising intervention in national politics on Tuesday morning with a speech to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (read more about his speech on Manchesterism and stuck Britain here).
The speech has set tongues wagging again in the Parliamentary Labour Party about how he might actually become an MP and challenge Keir Starmer for the leadership. Burnham-curious MPs are describing the situation as a “groundhog day” in which the Manchester mayor says exciting things about how he would fix the country but has no way of doing them.
And so now we have the Burnham countdown. It’s the ticking clock, the ever-shortening window of opportunity for him to get back into parliament.
The assumption is that if he were to stand a chance of winning any leadership election he would have to return to the Commons benches before the English local and Scottish and Welsh devolved elections on 7 May. They are widely expected to deliver a poor result for Labour. The expectation is that, if there is to be a general election this year, it will be triggered by these results.
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If he won a by-election on that day, the result would be announced on the Friday and Burnham would be sworn in beside the despatch box of the House of Commons the following week, likely on Tuesday 12 May.
According to parliamentary rules, such a by-election would have to be triggered by the submission of writs at least 21 working days before 7 May in order for the necessary preparations to be made.
Twenty-one working days before 7 May means a deadline date of Tuesday 7 April. That’s the final cut-off point for Burnham’s sacrificial lamb to resign their seat and trigger a by-election in which the mayor could stand.
Realistically, any resignation would have to be a few days earlier, before the Easter bank holidays, because it would take a bit of time after a resignation for writs to be submitted. For example, in the case of Christopher Pincher, who resigned from the House of Commons on Thursday 7 September 2023, the writ was not submitted until a week later, on Thursday 14 September. The by-election was then held 25 working days after that on Thursday 19 October.
That’s 11 weeks, or less than three months, to make any move.
There has been no end of briefing to the Sunday papers from alleged Burnham allies saying that everything is ready and the groundwork for a resignation has been laid (though Burnham has dismissed a lot of this as “rubbish”). Now, any campaign will be working against the clock.
[Further reading: Inside the Labour factions pressuring Starmer to rejoin Europe]
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