Andy Burnham has had his first real taste of Prime Minister’s Questions as the country’s top job starts to show its teeth, and if this week’s session was anything to go by, he might just have landed himself a useful opponent in Kemi Badenoch.
PMQs is never going to change the world. It’s political theatre, pure and simple, and most voters couldn’t tell you what was said in the chamber ten minutes after it ends. But it matters to MPs, it matters to the press gallery, and it matters for morale. Win it consistently and you build a buffer of goodwill that can carry you through the rougher weeks. Lose it badly and the knives start coming out earlier than anyone expected.
Burnham, for all his northern charm and reputation as a communicator, walked into the Commons this week carrying some serious weight. The feelgood energy of the summer is starting to fade. Bond markets do not care about Manchester positivity. The economic reality facing the country remains brutal, and no amount of well-received announcements can paper over the fact that painful decisions are still coming down the track.
That makes PMQs even more important as a weekly pressure valve. It is one of the few moments where a prime minister can demonstrate they are in control of the narrative, even when the wider picture looks messy.
And here is where Badenoch comes in, though perhaps not in the way she would like.
The Conservative leader arrived at the despatch box this week with her usual air of absolute certainty, the kind that can look impressive when it is backed up by sharp arguments and look deeply odd when it is not. Critics inside and outside her own party have started to notice a pattern. Badenoch has a tendency to get so wrapped up in her own sense of being right about everything that she sometimes loses the thread of what she is actually trying to achieve in the chamber.
For Burnham, that is a gift. A leader of the opposition who occasionally disappears up her own intellectual confidence is far easier to handle than one who is forensic, patient and relentless. Burnham is a decent parliamentary performer and he knows how to read a room. Against a more disciplined opponent he might struggle. Against Badenoch on a bad day, he looks composed by comparison.
Then there is Andrew Griffith, the shadow chancellor, lurking in the background and adding his own particular flavour to the Conservative frontbench operation. Griffith has not exactly set the political world alight since taking on the role, and his contributions this week did little to shift that impression.
None of this means Burnham is sailing smoothly. The economic situation is genuinely difficult and there is no clean path through it. Labour backbenchers, many of whom spent the summer feeling cautiously optimistic, are being gently reminded that the road ahead involves trade-offs that will upset somebody no matter which way the government turns.
International bond markets, as any chancellor will tell you, are indifferent to political goodwill. They respond to numbers, to credibility, to the sense that a government has a grip on its finances. That pressure is not going away and it will continue to test Burnham’s administration in ways that a good PMQs performance simply cannot fix.
But politics is also about momentum, and momentum is built in small moments as much as big ones. A prime minister who consistently holds their own at the despatch box, who comes across as steady while the opposition looks scattered, builds a kind of low-level trust with the parliamentary party and the media that can prove surprisingly durable.
For now, Burnham appears to understand that. He is not trying to be flashy. He is trying to look like the adult in the room, and with the current Conservative frontbench setup, that is not the hardest standard to meet.
The real tests are still coming. The spending decisions, the public sector negotiations, the moments when the government has to say no to people who voted for them expecting something different. Those will define the Burnham era far more than any Wednesday lunchtime in the Commons.
But you take the wins where you can find them. And this week, at least, the opposition handed him one without much of a fight.