Forget Burnham's pick for chancellor – No 10's grip on strategy will be far more important
Andy Burnham in Downing Street, 31 March 2026 (Credit: Justin Ng/Alamy Live News)
6 min read
Who Andy Burnham will send to the Treasury has become the consuming question of Westminster’s frenzied speculation.
As the commentariat and market watchers sweat through this heatwave and Chancellor-induced fever, guesses have become ever wilder. And yet this misses the point: the fate of Burnham’s government will be determined not by who occupies No 11 but by whether his No 10 can exert the grip on political and economic strategy that has eluded its occupants for many years.
The word ‘strategy’ has earned a bad reputation; it now brings to mind ridiculous documents stuffed with organograms, circular charts and fluffy aspirations, thrust out into the world in the hope of giving the impression that an organisation has done some serious thinking.
But strategy proper, as Richard Rumelt set out in his seminal book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, begins with a diagnosis – a controversial act, because a diagnosis involves commitment where most would prefer safe ambiguity. From that first step should follow a small set of reasoned bets for overcoming the obstacles identified, and only then comes the ‘announceables’ that Westminster calls policy.
This discipline forces trade-offs, for not everything can be a priority; and the reward is leverage. Unfortunately, Whitehall's habit has been to start at the third step and work backwards, which is how governments end up with plenty of policy and no strategy.
Why does any of this matter? Because a modern progressive party cannot win and hold onto power when its politics and economics are built in silos. A government that promises change from the centre while seeking to preserve stability from the Treasury will struggle to achieve either. No 10 is the only part of government positioned to hold politics and economics in a single frame. It has failed to do so for at least two decades, and Andy Burnham must be the PM who changes that.
It has not been for want of trying. Boris Johnson replaced Sajid Javid with Rishi Sunak and installed a joint unit of special advisers answering, in effect, to Dominic Cummings. Once Cummings departed, though, and Sunak grew into the role, No 10’s whip hand over the Treasury was lost.
Keir Starmer reached for heft rather than structure, appointing the respected economist Minouche Shafik as his chief economic adviser. The result was the ‘budget board’ process that culminated in a fiscal event derailed by an accumulation of earlier political missteps.
Calls for reform of the centre are not in short supply. Louise Haigh was right last week to argue for a properly beefed-up economic unit in No 10, while the Future Governance Forum's work on a potential ‘Department for the Prime Minister’ – a report to which the incoming chief of staff James Purnell contributed – put a ‘politics and strategy’ function at its heart. It is a fusion of the two approaches that holds the most promise.
Pure economic firepower will never overcome the institutional weight of the Treasury, however big No 10’s hitters. Politics and strategy that neglects the economic dimension could produce serious work but would still fail to confront the central divide that has felled so many administrations. The centre requires the capacity to hold both in the same hands.
The practical effect is clearest in the Budget process. Insiders describe the traditional pre-Budget bilaterals as a ceremonial plod: the Treasury arrives with the scorecard and the options carefully presented, and the PM is walked, slowly and courteously, toward Treasury consensus.
Imagine instead a prime minister equipped by a centre truly in command of its governing strategy: knowing precisely where this fiscal event sits within it, what it must demonstrate, to whom, and in what sequence, and carrying three or four hard political tests against which its success will be judged. The Treasury's expertise would then cease to be a means of steering the PM and act instead as the most powerful delivery instrument in Whitehall, pointed in a chosen political direction.
The gains beyond fiscal events are just as tantalising. Choices currently reach the Prime Minister as disconnected departmental submissions and siloed political channels, each focused on one issue and none on the whole picture. Sue Gray found the leadership structures of Downing Street “fragmented and complicated”; others who have worked in them tend to put it, privately, in less polite terms.
A strategic centre would change the questions asked of the machine – who does this benefit, who resists, what are we refusing and why? – and combine the answers into integrated advice for the prime minister. A saving that looks good on the scorecard but would cost far more in public consent would be pushed back.
Nor is strategy a document handed over like the operating manual for some great machine waiting to be rewired. The country is no such machine – it is a complex set of living, inter-connected economic and social systems; it does not stand still while a static, sweeping plan is implemented. The work should be continuous, testing whether the government's bets are holding against events, resequencing what comes when, revising course when the facts change.
The prize extends well beyond the smoother operation of government. Ask serious investors what most undermines their confidence in Britain, and the answer is almost always political instability. That we have burnt through six prime ministers in a decade owes far more to the divorce of politics and economics at the heart of government than to the simplistic idea that we have an “ungovernable” electorate.
The final days of speculation will pass, and the anxious glances toward Bloomberg terminals will soon be rewarded with a name. The better question is how seriously the incoming No 10 takes the design and execution of a strategy that combines the task of growing Britain's economy with winning and sustaining power. Burnham achieved this over many years in Greater Manchester, and there is no reason he cannot do the same for the country at large.
The strength of that central operation, more than the identity of any chancellor, will determine whether he can break the run of political and economic failure that has defined British administrations since the financial crisis – and keep alive the hope he currently represents long after the heat of this heady, restless summer has faded.
Mark McVitie is the outgoing director of Labour Growth Group
