Burnham faces first PMQs as PM after unusually soft launch into office

Six weeks into his premiership, Andy Burnham stepped into the full weight of parliamentary accountability on Wednesday, facing Prime Minister's Questions for the first time after a summer recess had granted him an unusual period of quiet. The inherited crises of overcrowded prisons, underfunded defence, and unreformed social care now arrived not gradually but all at once, compressed by circumstance into a single reckoning. How a leader absorbs that pressure — and whether composure in the chamber translates into solutions beyond it — is the oldest question Westminster asks of its prime minister