I looked at the image of Andy Burnham doing a mass selfie with Labour MP’s today and it didn’t leave a good taste in the mouth. For all his faults, which are many, Kier Starmer is still Prime Minister, Andy Burnham has still not got the key to Number Ten, at present he’s still a lowly Labour MP and not his party’s leader.
The mass selfie with Burnham looks to me as something that is in bad taste and smacks of hubris on Burnham’s part. Burnham should have turned down the opportunity to massage his own not inconsiderable ego and not taken part in this. It is terrible terrible political optics. It makes him look as if Burnham believes that the Labour leadership is his for the taking, that might well be the case but it might have been less obnoxious had Burnham didn’t parade his personal belief in this way.
When I looked at the picture it reminded me of something. It reminded me of the time a week before the 1992 General Election when Labour were so up themselves about what they saw as a good chance of victory against incumbent Tory Prime Minister John Major, that they held a now notorious and also cringeworthy massive rally in Sheffield.
Like Burnham’s mass selfie with Labour MP’s Labour’s 1992 Sheffield Rally looked presumptuous and tacky and lacking in any sort of consideration for how it might have gone over with voters.
The result for Labour was that they got trounced at the election with the public returning John Major and his Conservative Party to office. It has been debated for years about how much influence the ill fated Sheffield Rally had on the electorate’s decision but from what I recall from the time it caused a lot of jaw dropping. However the sight of Labour leader Neil Kinnock throwing his fists into the air and shouting ‘we’re alright’ like some fairground barker trying to get you to buy their substandard hot dogs might not have gone down that well with the electorate. Looking back on it it certainly seemed shallow when what might have been needed was something more sober and in keeping with a country that was going through some economic and social problems.
Kinnock’s attempt at razzamatazz looked really tacky and so does Burnham’s Westminster selfie. Maybe future political historians will look back at Burnham’s Westminster selfie as the moment when his leadership honeymoon ended. If that’s the case then it will be worse than what Kinnock did. At least Kinnock was leader for a while before he and his campaign team made this terrible error, Burnham has made a similar error even before he became leader. Hubris is never a good look in British politics and maybe Burnham will rue the day that he decided to create this image.
Here’s some video of Labour’s 1992 Sheffield Rally. Watch it and see if you can see the parallels with Burnham’s big selfie as I can.
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