What the hell is Healey up to?

The whole point of John Healey as chancellor was supposed to be that he would not develop an independent power base. Putting Ed Miliband into the Treasury was too dangerous, we were told. He was too ambitious, too experienced in running a department. What Andy Burnham needed was a modest, unfussy man who would quietly roll his sleeves up, support the government agenda and get on with the job.

Flash forward to today. Healey is throwing his tie behind his back and downing a pint, the video’s going viral, he’s contradicting the prime minister on Europe, disrupting his own department on welfare and pre-empting the energy secretary on Rosebank. He’s intervening like a fucking maniac, wading into sensitive areas like a rhino on heat, swaggering about as if he operates independently of the government.

And in each case he is utterly wrong. Wrong on Europe, wrong on welfare, wrong on the whole presentational and methodological approach that you would bring to welfare, wrong on Rosebank and wrong to interfere in a decision being taken by a colleague outside of his remit.

He’d have done much better to deliver his Budget and then shut the fuck up. If it came off the back of a world-shattering Budget, it might at least be understandable. But it came off the back of a purposefully - and sensibly - cautious Budget, so it simply looks ridiculous. It’s like watching someone get drunk on champagne to celebrate the successful completion of a Tuesday morning meeting.

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Let’s count up Healey’s little interventions.

First on Europe. Burnham spent the week ahead of this event carefully teasing open the free movement debate, framing it as a way of controlling immigration and helping Brits find work overseas. Sensible, courageous, forward thinking. The media reaction was to go to every remotely Brexity Labour figure it could think of and try to prise out a critical comment.

It doesn’t matter that nearly the whole of the Labour parliamentary party supports this. It doesn’t matter that support for free movement is impressively high in the country. It was as if nothing had changed since 2016. I didn’t hear a single voice in favour of free movement on TV or radio this week, except the necessarily cautious one of the prime minister.

“It is important that we remain aligned and disciplined as a government in our messaging throughout this period,” Burnham said to his Cabinet on Wednesday. “It will not be appropriate for ministers individually to advocate for specific options or opine on the likely outcome of the process.” Evidently he looked across the Cabinet table and he could see dangers. Home secretary Shabana Mahmood is not likely to be in favour of free movement, given that she looks like she’s jostling to be appointed as minister of the interior in a government led by Attila the Hun. Culture secretary Lisa Nandy has never fit easily into a tribal camp on Brexit but wears her hesitancy proudly. Chancellor Healey is known as an Atlantacist with Leave sympathies. Business secretary Jonathan Reynolds does not approve of the Burnham approach.

Mahmood’s position at least makes sense as home secretary - most previous home secretaries would have probably agreed. Nandy’s position is a result of a long-standing hesitancy around her Wigan constituency, which she’s always spoken about clearly and articulately. But the Reynolds/Healey combination is preposterous. It’s the business secretary and the chancellor, for heaven’s sake. To take this attitude towards Europe suggests not just a faulty political judgement but a basic economic inadequacy.

At the Labour conference, Reynolds seemed to suggest a return to the EU could hurt business confidence. “I think we can frankly get more from what we need for our people, for our businesses here, by pragmatically looking at this through a trade lens,” he said. “How can we improve that trade relationship, rather than these constitutional questions, which, frankly, you know, they cause a lot of uncertainty for business.” The man is evidently an idiot and his commentary is unbelievably foolish.

This week, he adopted a new view. The prospect of far-right governments in Europe put him off rejoining. “I genuinely can’t answer that, because I don’t know what the future of the EU is - because some of the very strong political currents in member states.”

Reynold’s interventions are of limited relevance because no-one knows who he is and never will, but Healey’s have more weight. In a rather cynical way, he acted to directly contradict and undermine the prime minister.

The chancellor went on GB News, a far-right conspiracy theory broadcaster which Ofcom inexplicably allows to pump out disinformation and which the government inexplicably seeks to validate with its presence. “Freedom of movement is not on the agenda, and certainly for this parliament it’s ruled out,” Healey said. So far, still technically within the contours of Burnham’s position, but noticeably enthusiastic. When asked if he’d be in favour of accepting freedom of movement if it helped with the economy, he replied: “No, I’m in favor of accepting that we’ve got a Brexit decision.” The whole tenor and manner of that response is a slap down to the prime minister.

On and on he went. Asked on LBC if growth would be stronger if the UK were in the EU or the single market, Healey replied: “Well, I don’t actually accept that. Brexit has certainly hit our level of growth. It’s certainly hit our level of trade. But we had a referendum. We’re out of the European Union. The challenge for me now is how do we make the best of an economy which this year has proved remarkably resilient.”

What the fuck are you talking about John? The serious academic work on Brexit finds consistently that being in the single market could boost growth by perhaps four or five per cent. Almost certainly similar figures have been given to him by Treasury officials - there’s a reason Rachel Reeves used to be the most pro-European figure in the Cabinet. It is orthodoxy. Perhaps it’s wrong. Economic orthodoxy sometimes is. But you do need to be able to explain why all the economists are wrong and you are right, or you’re in danger of looking like Michael Gove.

This is troubling stuff, for reasons quite beyond his views on Brexit or the extent of his loyalty to the government. It suggests that the chancellor either does not understand the economics on the subject he is discussing, or has not read it, or is prepared to misrepresent it.

Healey then went on Channel 4 News. Burnham made it clear he wants Britain to rejoin in his lifetime. Does he want the same? “I’m older than Andy Burnham,” Healey said, smiling weakly. “I don’t expect to see that.” We’re told by the Treasury and Downing Street that this is all a joke. But obviously it isn’t, or he wouldn’t have been aggressively shooting his mouth off on GB News and LBC.

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Then he wobbled over welfare. Asked by the Today programme whether there would be cuts to welfare before the next election, he said: “There will be. There will be a reduction in the benefits bill, we’ll do that in a Labour way.”

The most generous interpretation is that this was a mistake. Healey wanted to emphasise that the bill would eventually come down, but did not want to suggest that it would come down before the next election.

The reality is that cutting the benefits bill will almost certainly require spending more in the short term to save in the long term. That is necessarily the case because the Milburn programme is going to suggest helping people into work as a condition of reducing assistance out of work. Purely as a point of sequencing, it’ll therefore raise spending before it lowers it.

That is the right moral approach, the right economic approach and, frankly, the right approach to keeping Labour MPs onside. It’s also the hardest political approach. So it is frankly baffling that Healey chose to answer in this way, when it contradicts the careful narrative required to deliver the Milburn review project - one that has been stage managed to within an inch of its life.

The Treasury quickly began calling journalists afterwards insisting the comments were being misinterpreted. Maybe so, but it was a direct answer to a direct question. So one of two things must be true. Either he knowingly started introducing a much more brutal timetable to welfare reforms than had been agreed by the prime minister, or he was too incompetent to answer a direct question on a sensitive area of policy in the correct way.

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Now energy. The government has approved Jackdraw - a large offshore gas field. Healey was asked on Channel 4 whether he wanted the government to approve the Rosebank oil field too. “The energy secretary will make the decision about that,” he replied. “It has to and it will be for her.” So far so good, although oddly effusive to the point of being patronising. Then he veered off-piste. “I think what you should perhaps take as an indication is that alongside Jackdraw… I’ve set up an Energy Wealth Fund This allows us to see any North Sea gas and oil revenues into that wealth fund”.

What a telling response. What he says with one line he then contradicts in the next. There is no possible interpretation of this statement except that he wants Rosebank approved. And not only that. He is willing to apply public pressure on his Cabinet colleague to get her to approve it. Energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh is a forensically intelligent and principled politician. She is not minded to approve it on the basis that it flies in the face of the government’s environmental commitments. Healey is applying the pressure here, telling reporters that any money will go to the wealthy fund, that it’ll then be used to fund clean energy. The use of the word “indication” is really very irritating in this context. It’s a cynical move.

One after another: Brexit, welfare, energy. Wrong on each, wrong to have spoken on each, wrong in his instincts and wrong in his conclusions.

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There are really only so many free wheeling political spokespeople any government can handle.

Burnham does more than enough thinking on the cuff on his own without needing assistance. Generally speaking, he just about manages it. Yes, he will often say things and then take them back. Yes, the mere fact he has said something does not mean it will happen. But because he seems sincere, he gets away with it.

The chief quality he has is that he is intellectually and emotionally present in the moment. Most politicians wait for the reporter to stop talking so they can say whatever prepared statement they have to make. They speak in deadened managerial tones, as if the real personality is hiding beneath the skin somewhere, kept safely away from the public. Burnham wins plaudits for being the opposite and that just about protects him from the obvious pitfalls of his rather lackadaisical approach.

If the public wants politicians to sound human, they will have to accept that they make human mistakes. None of us would sound normal if we thought any of our daily comments could haunt us forever. If that is the standard applied to a person they will sound like a petrified robot, which is precisely what most politicians do sound like.

But there really can only be one guy doing this in an administration. If the chancellor - the chancellor for fuck sake - is just freestyling it out there, it really does look like a government that is going off the rails, where nothing that anyone says means anything, it’s just a temporary gaggle of humans following their own discreet pathways through politics.

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Healey’s various PR cock ups have managed to disguise the fact that this was a successful Budget. The government’s intention was to keep the ship steady amid higher-than-expected growth and a sense of nervousness over the new prime minister.

We forget now, but not so long ago Burnham was thought of as a major financial liability. His comment in 2025 that “we’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond market” - overinterpreted, but still badly phrased - led to investors concluding that he was one of those Mélenchon-style nutters who sees investors as some kind of tyrannical global puppet-master rather than an agglomeration of people willing to lend government money.

It is of absolutely paramount importance to the Burnham project that bond markets do not fly out of control, or he will never recover and none of the genuinely radical things he wants to do - on rough sleeping, electoral reform, Europe, social care, and devolution - will be possible. The bond markets are very volatile at the moment. There are signs that they are starting to conclude that US debt is too high. Certainly, they are hawkish about France, where the political debate shows zero signs of appreciating the need for spending restraint.

This is why Burnham’s move on pension reform was so crucial. It sent a message that the government was prepared to do risky things in order to balance the books. It has won him a period of calm. This week, in the wake of the Budget, bond yields dropped to a five-week low. The ten year gilt fell to 5.25% at one point on Thursday. That is a triumph. It is precisely what the Budget set out to do. It was barely mentioned by the right-wing press of course, even though any miniscule rise would have been breathlessly plastered over the front page.

Instead, this was all ignored by the merry-go-round of ‘is that it’ coverage. The Express ran with: “Really, is that it Mr Healey?” The Mail suggested the Budget had “all the cha-cha-cha of siesta hour in a Mexican border town”. The Economist cover said: “Andy Burnham’s government talks of change then does nothing. Britain’s unimpressive Budget reveals a lack of ambition.”

But this, of course, was the point, and had been extensively briefed as the point in the weeks and months leading up to the event, where journalists had been repeatedly told that this would be a modest steady-the-ship affair. All the big news events come later - the Milburn review, the ten year plan, the spending review. And they will need fiscal support which is more substantial than what was presented this week.

This was the right thing to do. It was the necessary thing to do. A great deal of stability is needed now in order to make the full extent of those future changes possible. It was a precondition of the Burnham government’s radicalism that it could safely deliver this boring Budget.

It’s striking that so many parts of the press - including sensible parts of it - refuse to acknowledge any of this, even though they are well aware of it.What is even more striking is that Healey, having delivered it, should do a round of media interviews where he betrays the guiding principle of his Budget with a series of cynical and cack-handed interventions at the expense of his Cabinet colleagues and his government.

The right-wing press is just doing what it always does - failing to inform its readers. But Healey should damn well know better. His Commons performance on Wednesday was commendable. His performance since then has been an absolute fucking disaster.

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Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

My column for the i paper this week was a quick-turnaround reaction to the Budget. You can read it here. I also wrote for Arguably on the new movement to rejoin the EU and how we have to argue for it with our heads but also our hearts. Quick excerpt below. You can read it here.

“The case for Rejoin must therefore be a case for Europe as our home: a continent that is prepared to take on and defeat Russian imperialism, an economic union which can shelter countries from the storm of a global trade war. But it is also about identity. British voters understand now, in a way they have not always done, that we have far more in common with our European neighbours than we do with the US, which seems every day to become more belligerent and unhinged. We are bonded together not just through our shared history and geography but through our values, our ideals and our joint vision of the future. We want collective solidarity, the rule of law and democratic institutions rather than despotism and war. The case for Europe is the case for stability, safety and wealth.”

Origin Story Season Ten kicked off this week with the start of a two-parter on Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch is the psychological equivalent of an empty cardboard box. In all this time we have never investigated someone so fundamentally uninteresting. There’s no great mystery beneath it all, no great puzzle about whether he pursues ideology or commerce. He’s just a bloke that likes doing deals. His mind is like a rudimentary electrical circuit.

But this terribly mundane mind, with its bog-standard motivations, is able to create a planet-wide media empire, giving him an unprecedented degree of influence over human thought.

The story runs from the Battle of the Dardanelles in 1915, when the Murdoch empire is secretly born, to the courtroom battles with his traumatised children in 2025, where the ruin he made of his life is revealed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

I watched La Bola Negra this week, by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi. Within the opening five minutes I knew I was going to love it with every fibre of my body. I don’t want to say too much because you’re best going in knowing nothing. One of the early scene transitions, which would have been spoiled if I’d read a review, was genuinely up there with the all-time classic in 2001. It took my breath away. All I can say is that it is a gay epic grounded in the Spanish Civil War. It deals in beauty, conformity, fascism and the resilience of people in the face of that which would extinguish them.

I particularly loved the way the camera captured men in this film. It is utterly enraptured by male beauty, which is portrayed in countless ways, framed in perfect angles. It is the beauty of wounded men in hospitals and vivacious men in nightclubs, their cigarettes hanging from their lips. It’s the beauty of athleticism but also blinking Bambi-like innocence, and even of over-weight, badly kempt men who are serious about their work. And that vision from the camera, of desire, is a reflection of the core theme that runs throughout. You’ve never seen a film like it.

Right, off you fuck lads.