Burnham takes office as papers debate Labour's new direction

Andy Burnham walked into Downing Street on Monday as the United Kingdom's new prime minister, and by Tuesday morning the country's newspapers had already begun the work of deciding what his arrival meant. The photographs were everywhere—the new occupant of No. 10, the successor to Keir Starmer, the man who would now set the direction for a Labour government that had lost its footing. But the papers could not agree on what they were looking at.

The Guardian saw possibility in the transition. Burnham's takeover, the paper suggested, offered Labour a chance to reset its relationship with voters, though it cautioned that the reshuffling of the cabinet could just as easily produce more of the chaos that had defined recent months. The Daily Mail took a different tack, focusing its mockery on the purge of Starmer loyalists and dubbing the night "the night of the long eyelashes"—a barbed reference to Burnham's notably prominent eyebrows, a detail that had apparently lodged itself in the national consciousness. The Financial Times, meanwhile, trained its attention on the appointment of John Healey as chancellor, flagging a potential problem: Healey, who had previously served as defence secretary, had consistently pushed for higher military spending. Putting him in charge of the nation's finances, the paper implied, could prove expensive.

One of the first genuine questions hanging over the new administration concerned tax. Would Burnham introduce a 50p income tax rate for high earners, using the revenue to raise the personal allowance for lower-income workers? The papers offered contradictory signals. The i reported that the idea remained on the table, not yet ruled out. The Times, citing sources close to the prime minister, insisted the opposite—that Burnham's team had explicitly rejected any such move. The uncertainty itself was telling: even as Burnham settled into office, the contours of his economic policy remained unclear.

The editorial pages revealed the deeper fault lines. The Guardian drew a comparison to the post-1945 Labour government, the one that had built the welfare state and reshaped Britain through state action. That was the model Burnham seemed to be invoking—a revitalised, purposeful state delivering tangible progress. But the Daily Mail heard something else entirely. It detected echoes of the 1970s, that decade of strikes and stagflation and state overreach, complete with talk of renationalisation and reindustrialisation. The Mail saw a government preparing to expand its reach into the economy in ways that would prove counterproductive. The Daily Express was blunter still, calling for a "reality check." Every policy, the paper insisted, would need to be properly costed and fully funded—a warning that the public appetite for ambitious spending had limits. The Daily Mirror, by contrast, found reason for optimism in Burnham's pledges on cost of living support, seeing in them a message of hope for millions struggling with household finances.

The newspapers were not entirely consumed by the machinery of government. The Sun's front page was devoted to Kevin Keegan, the former England, Liverpool, and Newcastle footballer who had died at seventy-five. The paper called him a "fearless superstar and idol to millions." The Guardian remembered him as a player of relentless energy and predatory instinct. The Times described an "effervescent figure" whose cultural reach had extended far beyond the pitch. In the space of a few column inches, the papers acknowledged both the transition of power and the passing of an era—Keagan's death marking the end of a particular chapter in English football and English life.