Just a month after his election to Parliament, Andy Burnham stood outside No 10 and promised that restoring hope would be his lodestar as Prime Minister.
“Let us make this the moment when Britain starts to believe again,” he said.
What followed was a blitz of policy announcements he hoped would do exactly that. Bus fares in England would be capped at £2, VAT would be cut from electricity bills, and pubs would benefit from a 20pc cut in business rates.
The £1.5bn cost of these measures is small fry compared with the £1.37tn the Government spends each year. For a Prime Minister who has promised the biggest changes to Britain in the last 40 years, a much larger package of measures can be expected in his first Budget.
However, there are serious doubts about whether his message of optimism will survive contact with economic reality on Oct 28.
