By Jeremy Kinsman

October 23, 2026

Britain has been in a funk for a decade; ever since the disastrous 2016 Brexit referendum. The COVID pandemic and its mishandling added to the malaise.

The parade of six prime ministers in the murky wake of David Cameron’s fateful tenure — including the bewildering interlude of the improbable Liz Truss — aggravated the disarray and generalized distrust of politicians and public policy pronouncements.

But now, the seventh PM in 10 years, Andy Burnham, has drawn a line on a “decade of drift and division”.

Affable and wonky, earnest and laid-back, Burnham projects confidence but not arrogance, empathy without affectation. Though more discernibly to the left of, say, Mark Carney, he is not doctrinaire; able, for example to renew limited exploration of North Sea energy at a time of whopping home heating bills. Burnham seems to embody the qualities Britain needs to re-set its national compass after a decade of relentless wobble.

“Taking back control”, especially over immigration, had been the motif of the hard-line Brexit faction that dominated the Conservative Party and its series of failed governments. Labour’s lopsided victory in the election of July, 2024 represented a widespread rejection of the Conservatives.

But while the win was a parliamentary landslide in the number of Labour seats won (over 400), it was modest in Labour’s percentage of votes (32%). In a five-party field, the first-past-the-post electoral system shows its democratic shortcomings when multiple parties are competitive (see Quebec, PQ).

Mild-mannered, technocratic, and remote, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s no-drama style both failed to connect with an increasingly sullen general public and to provide firm leadership to pre-empt tawdry drama, symbolized by the failure to vet Epstein pal Peter Mandelson before sending him as Ambassador to the US.

Generally, Starmer seemd to the public to be too deferential to the highly unpopular Donald Trump. He equivocated over re-aligning Britain with the European Union, its primary trading partner. He hoped to reclaim ex-Labour voters who had migrated from behind the party’s “Red Wall” in the North to support Brexit.

They leaned to ultra-right-wing populist and lead Brexiteer Nigel Farage, who led his nativist Reform Party to 23% of the vote in 2024, though only five seats in the creaky first-past-the-post system. Exploiting the politial void, Reform leapt by spring 2026 in opinion polls to a 10-point lead over Labour.

But Burnham’s successful leadership challenge and authoritative leadership since have combined with a string of Farage financial scandals including an apparent $5 million payoff for his role in the Brexit referendum, to change the political landscape in Labour’s favour. Farage and Reform have slumped to third place.

Lauded as a successful Mayor of Manchester after an early career in the Blair/Brown outer cabinets, Burnham needed to be an elected Westminster MP to challenge Starmer. He audaciously chose to run in a by-election in a Manchester-area constituency that had become a Reform stronghold. His landslide win showed Labour MPs he had the right stuff to take on Reform nationally.

Burnham’s leadership gamble is paying off. In Liverpool in September at that most British of political rituals, the seaside party conference, he “galvanized” (Guardian Editor Katharine Viner) Labour delegates with an optimistic vision of a British society re-shaped around a new “social contract” that would offer affordable national social care to complement a reformed National Health Service. He re-infused his fellow Labourites with energy and hope.

Cutting to the elephant in the room, Burnham signaled that the UK would reach toward a “better place” post-Brexit, in which UK and EU interests would align more closely. “All options” would be on the table, including a customs union or even re-joining the EU in due course.

In effect, Burnham has turned the “taking back control” argument on its head, pointing out that control of immigration is an example of a national policy purpose that needs cooperation with EU neighbours, where pooling sovereignty actually enhances national control and effective sovereignty.

Burnham’s observation that public opinion is ahead of received views in Parliament and Whitehall on re-engaging with the EU corresponds to the way he positions himself publicly — not a populist, but definitely not a Whitehall insider either.

His Brexit re-think seemed at first a shock to the political system, and to the psyches of diminishing numbers of die-hard Brexiteers. But Burnham’s categorical assertion in Liverpool that Brexit had done “more harm than good” to Britain is a perception widely shared by the public.

According to a YouGov poll in September, 59% favoured re-joining the EU, with only 32% against. A poll earlier in the year reported that 58% conclude that it “was wrong to leave;” only 29% still think it was “right.”

Burnham’s observation that public opinion is ahead of received views in Parliament and Whitehall on re-engaging with the EU corresponds to the way he positions himself publicly — not a populist, but definitely not a Whitehall insider either.

He is an outstanding communicator, not because of soaring oratory, but because he speaks candidly as one who knows himself. He doesn’t try to score political points against adversaries (or not yet). He decries London’s mainmise over British life, media, and priorities in general.

His decision to create in Manchester a “Number 10 North” is more than performative; but re-shaping the London-centric imbalance in British life may be more ambitious than deliverable.

Burnham warns against being forced into a false choice between funding social security and national security. How to secure both and manage galloping public debt is the political fiscal challenge of our time.

He faces the same conundrum as other democratic leaders in Europe and Canada — how to reconcile the need to re-invigorate a slow economy and hoist affordable social care, while meeting extravagant demands to boost military spending to unprecedented peacetime levels.

That need is a function of the re-militarization of the post-Cold War world. It is mainly due to the throwback military and adventurist nationalism of both Putin and Trump, who seem aligned in contesting the international rules-based order whose creation the U.S. had led.

UK policymakers in the Foreign Office and armed services, as well as voices in the financial community, have maintained the antidote to Brexit’s narrowing of Britain’s place in the wider world lay in the sacred (to Britain) “special relationship” with the U.S.  But Trump’s second-term nationalist rampages have trashed that nostalgic illusion.

Starmer tried to temporize with Trump but ended up humiliated by him. The UK military’s muscle memory is still stimulated by decades of chummy co-training and equipping with expensive US kit (as is the Canadian) but there is no residual bilateral special relationship to support it politically.

Burnham wants the UK to lead where it credibly can. He agrees with ex-foreign minister David Miliband’s description of Britain becoming just “a cork bobbling in the sea.” He has promised “a new frankness in our voice…that we stand up for what we think is right,” stressing unwavering support of the international rule of law, and effective multilateral cooperation.

Burnham noted that Carney has provided friendly advice that he use the UK G20 presidency in 2027 to launch (at the G20 Summit in Manchester, suitably) a workable design of governance methodology for the safe, beneficial, and just global operation and application of artificial intelligence (AI).

Decreasing reliance on a now-unreliable U.S. requires closer military, security, and economic coherence with European partners. Burnham understands that re-alignment with the EU has to be about more than spiking GDP that he believes the Thatcher era had too exclusively emphasized.

UK leadership needs to draw from commonalities of view and purpose, including social, with the EU and other like-minded partners, and, along with Canada and others, join a common effort to sustain effective multilateral cooperation in the face of Trump’s coercive unilateralism.

The next year or two will continue to challenge stability, especially in Europe, where populist extremists will test the limits of solidarity and in the U.S., where Trump and American unilateralism will not leave the stage in silence.

But a wider “security EU”, including adjacent near-members like Norway and Switzerland, but also the UK, Canada, Turkey, and Ukraine, could comprise a serious aggregation of force and influence if the players can come together in substance.

It would be fundamental to the Ukraine war endgame and to Ukraine’s security. It may imply a change to NATO as we know it, but NATO allies agree Trump has already broken from the fondly remembered trans-Atlantic past.

Burnham evidently felt the invisible “tap on the shoulder” to step forward and propose to the British public a pragmatic, idealistic, transparent, and down-to-earth centre-left governance that listens. He is building back British civic confidence, and he could well become, as Carney has, a respected leader of principle beyond Britain; a contributor to collective stability, decency, and steadiness of purpose.

Policy Columnist Jeremy Kinsman served as Canada’s ambassador to Russia, high commissioner to the UK, ambassador to Italy and ambassador to the European Union. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.