Frankly Frankie my railway pay deal is on the right lines, says Burnham to his missus as he sinks another pint
The strains of Wonderwall interrupt the hubbub of conversation in the bar. The Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, picks up his phone. It is his wife, Marie-France van Heel, known as Frankie, on the line.
Burnham: Hi, Frankie.
Marie-France: Where are you?
Burnham: I’m in the Crown and Kettle with Belton.
Marie-France: Who?
Burnham: Sir Belton Braces, my new spad at No. 10 North. We’re prepping for PMQs on Wednesday.
Marie-France: Well, that’s easy enough. We all know what questions are coming up.
Burnham: True, but I have to get the mood right. I promised the country a tonal shift. Less confrontational, more wit and humour, an end to the Punch and Judy show.
Marie-France: Good luck with that, Darling. The first thing Kemi will ask you is how come the train drivers on the London to Manchester line got an above inflation pay rise. What will you say? They deserve it? They’re on £70,000 plus already.
Burnham: Well, we can’t have them striking every time I want to come north. How would that look?
Marie-France: So what kind of deal did you do?
Burnham: We offered them a generous pay rise but they wanted more.
Marie-France: And?
Burnham: Belton had a brainwave. A master stroke, in fact. He used to be father of the SOGAT chapel at the Daily Express, you know, virtually next door to where we’re standing now. He knows all about creative deal-making.
Marie-France: So what did he come up with?
Burnham: The drivers get the generous rise but on top of that, we’ve signed them off as neuro-divergent.
Marie-France: You’ve done what?
Burnham: Yes. The deal is they work for three days then the ADHD kicks in and they have to stay at home. They all get PIP, of course.
Marie-France: So they have a three-day week, plus a huge pay rise, plus disability benefits?
Burnham: Right. Genius, isn’t it?
Marie-France: I can see where the humour comes in, Darling. It’s laughable. What else has Sir Belton come up with?
Burnham: He’s been telling me about this Manchester comedian, Mike Harding, known as The Rochdale Cowboy. I must say, Frankie, he sounds like a very funny man.
Marie-France: Try me.
Burnham: A wife phones her husband and says, ‘Where are you?’ He says, ‘I’m preparing a DIY job.’ ‘No, you’re not,’ she says, ‘you’re in the pub. I can hear it.’ He says, ‘Yes, but the barman reckons if I have six pints of Greenall Whitley and a packet of nuts I can go home and pebbledash the bathroom.’ He also does a very good one about a fourteen and a half pound budgie.
Marie-France: Oh, Andy. Don’t even think of trying those in the Commons. You could become the first PM in living memory to be suspended from the House. What will you say if she brings up defence? Why will the Prime Minister not tell the House when the Government aims to achieve its target of spending three per cent of GDP on defence?
Burnham: Well, obviously we can’t do that until we’ve got some money.
Marie-France: And when will that be?
Burnham: When we’ve turned the economy round.
Marie-France: And when will that be?
Burnham: By ‘eck, our kid, you’re worse than she is.
Marie-France: And she will have some gags of her own… The trouble with political jokes is that they sometimes get elected. Remind me, Prime Minister, when did the British people choose you as their leader?
Burnham: That’s not fair…
Marie-France: I see you’re beginning to get it.
Burnham: Yes, all right, point taken. I’ll see you later Darling. Bye… Come on, Belton, we’ll have steak and kidney pudding with triple cooked chips at Sam’s Chop House while you work on another PMQs strategy.
*****
The awful and still unfolding story of the two police officers and five young men who died in a head-on crash has me in its tawdry clutches.
I can’t take my eyes off it and it seems each day brings a new revelation. It is shocking and tragic, of course, but it’s more than that.
I cannot remember the last time a news story told us so much about modern Britain.
It reeks of rot, neglect and despair. Young, white, working class men with no jobs to go to turn to crime and reckless thrill-seeking to make their days mean something.
And a police force is so overwhelmed by the magnitude of its task that it quietly admits defeat and tries to contain crime rather than fighting it.
This is the state of the nation encapsulated in the terrible fate of seven men on the A66 near Middlesbrough.
The five youngsters, pursued by police, drove the wrong way down a dual carriageway and met the two officers coming the other way to join the hunt for them. They all died in the collision.
At first, it seemed like a tale of ill-fated joy-riding. Young tearaways seeking “likes” on TikTok take impossible risks, determined to achieve fleeting online fame or die trying.
They do indeed die and have no one to blame but themselves. But they take with them two men who served their community with dedication and decency. One was an ex-soldier, the other a former teacher who coached children at football.
But then the story took a sinister turn. Two days after the crash, police swooped to arrest nine men and three women on suspicion of being part of an organised crime group.
They are also suspected of offences including possessing an offensive weapon, threats to kill and possession of Class A and Class B drugs with intent to supply.
The following day brought five more arrests and then, on Wednesday, a girl of seven and her aunt died in a fire. A murder inquiry was launched and two men arrested. Police say the deaths might be linked to organised crime but are not directly linked to the crash.
On Thursday, youths gather in Haswell, Co. Durham, to pay tribute to one of the young road accident victims. They crash and burn cars and fire rockets at police drones. The weekend brings seven more arrests.
It seems likely that this mayhem is county lines drugs gangs fighting a turf war. It is brazen, shameless and in plain sight. Cleveland police have called in reinforcements from other forces and deployed armed officers.
The police and crime commissioner has claimed the force does not have the cash and resources to do its job properly. He is probably right. But why did it take the death of two of its own to galvanise the police into action?
If they knew that those arrested in the early swoop had links to organised crime and were suspected of serious offences, why did they not arrest them sooner? If they lacked evidence, how come they acquired it all of a sudden?
And why did they allow the local kids to get away with low-level crime and anti-social behaviour? That must have convinced them that there were no consequences and fed their contempt for authority. They were feral, bringing misery to their community.
Middlesbrough has the highest crime rate outside of central London. The city is deprived, poverty is rife. There are no jobs; people live on benefits. Resentment stews. Society festers.
This is not to excuse the young thugs. Crime is a choice. It is easy to get into and so hard to escape. But it does help to explain it.
This is exactly what Andy Burnham aims to eradicate. But how? We are locked into a desperate spiral. Take away the benefits and the crime will increase.
Every Government since Margaret Thatcher’s – and arguably earlier – has failed to create enough jobs. The term full employment was dropped in the 1970s when unemployment topped a million.
Now we have a 4.9 per cent unemployment rate – that’s almost 1.8 million jobless, many of them young people. Recent graduates struggle to find even menial work.
It needs some radical thinking. Only a growing economy can solve this. Burnham cannot achieve that with ever higher taxes and unrealistic spending promises. The question is: Does he have the stomach for the alternative?
*****
The two newbies in the England batting line-up look like they have a promising Test future. Of course, Emilio Gay and Jordan Cox will face far better opposition than the current Pakistan team so we will have to wait and see.
But aren’t they doing each other’s jobs? Cox looks like an opening batsman with his compact technique and gritty temperament. Gay is more of a dasher. He has a flourishing backlift and a gorgeous square drive. Early days, but David Gower comes to mind.
Somebody switch the batting order round.
*****
The news that Ratko Mladic, the Butcher of Bosnia, had died aged 84 brought a smile to my lips. Not just because the world is a better place without a genocidal Bosnian Serb warlord who massacred 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica during the Balkans war.
But also because I recalled how our own Lord Drone cut him down to size by bestowing a nickname on him when we were both on the subs’ desk of the Daily Express.
Drone called him “Young Fella Mladic”. Witty, no? And contempt in every syllable.
