Anthony Albanese and Andy Burnham met in person for the first time last week, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York. The key topic of discussion, according to the Australian media? Rugby league. Burnham, who happens to be the former president of the league’s UK governing body, was apparently recruited to support the PM’s Rabbitohs. It was the second time they had connected over the sport, having spoken by phone in July after Burnham became prime minister.
But if they ever get beyond such ice-breakers — and bilateral issues such as AUKUS — the pair should trade notes on domestic politics. Indeed, Albo might ask his British counterpart for some advice. Their political fortunes are starkly diverging: Albanese’s popularity is waning while Burnham is riding high.
‘Thank God that wasn’t awkward’
Albanese might have been reluctant to ask for tips and relieved to bro out about the footy, for the two leaders have history. Almost exactly a year ago at British Labour’s 2025 conference (this year’s one is now underway), Albo jetted in to make a guest speech. Amid speculation Burnham might soon re-enter parliament and challenge for the party leadership, Albo told the crowd “it takes time for plans to work” and encouraged “unity of party”. It was a thinly veiled swipe at Burnham and his supporters, in favour of his “mate” Keir Starmer. Clearly Burnham doesn’t hold a grudge.
Albanese intervened on Starmer’s behalf because he saw in him a kindred spirit: a fellow left-winger-turned-plodding-centrist with a small agenda and few hard-and-fast principles (no coincidence, as Starmer’s team had purposefully copied the ALP’s strategy).
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But Starmer has since unceremoniously crashed out of British politics — there is currently a tight by-election underway for his former seat, in which Greens leader Zack Polanski is running — and now Albanese is also in trouble. As neutral journalistic observer Latika Bourke so delicately put it at his New York press conference — in a “question” that Tony Jones would once have “taken as a comment” on Q&A — Albanese is “taking Labor to one point shy of Julia Gillard when you rolled her, and your net negatives are worse than Scott Morrison”.
Burnham, on the other hand, couldn’t be jollier. Back at home, he is surging in the polls, with Labour now comfortably in first place. Even better, the party previously topping the polls, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, slipped to equal third place with the Tories in the latest YouGov poll for the first time since early 2025. Polling outfit Survation found that tactical voting could even see Reform slip to fourth place in seats.
The laughable Piddingt-exit
As Reform’s polling position has declined, so too has the populist right’s control of the media agenda. Don’t get me wrong, the right-leaning press is still hyperventilating about migrant crime and wokeness. But the weight of such claims is starting to feel more marginal and, dare I say, hysterical at times.
Take, for instance, the recent kerfuffle in the usually sleepy village of Piddington near Oxford, population 350. It voted to symbolically secede from the UK on September 15 over a Home Office proposal to house up to 1,256 male asylum seekers at a nearby former military base. Various Reform and Conservative MPs have since paid the village a visit, including Tory leader Kemi Badenoch. Now a second village, Barnham, is considering following suit with a symbolic independence vote.
The previous system of housing asylum seekers in hotels while their claims were processed was criticised for being expensive and attracting far-right protesters. The government is rightly moving to a different model. But if they can’t use former military sites in the middle of nowhere, where can they put them?
There is something farcical about Badenoch trekking to rural Oxfordshire to make common cause with these eccentric villagers. Are these really your people, Kemi? And how can you call yourself a patriot while indulging people literally renouncing the flag? This tension, between traditional conservative patriotism and saying the country has gone to hell in a handbasket, plagues the British right — and its contradictions are increasingly apparent.
The Mancunian Mamdani?
The reason such culture war issues feel less resonant is that Burnham has focused on practical, close-to-home issues for working and middle-class families. He has made a flurry of announcements (including one every day for his first fortnight in Downing Street), almost all related to cost of living. He has also been telling voters about them relentlessly, particularly on social media. This has allowed him to regain the political centre of gravity by owning one of voters’ top concerns. Most polls find migration and the National Health Service are voters’ next biggest concerns.
One can see clear parallels here to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani — indeed, it’s a shame he didn’t get an invite to the Albo-Burnham chinwag, given they were on his turf. (I guess he’s more of a round ball guy.) Mamdani’s relentless focus on cost of living, his ubiquity on socials, his general affability and good vibes… do they teach these things in Mayor School?
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This is perhaps the only reliable blueprint for successful centre-left government in the world right now. In a socials-first media landscape with finite voter and media attention spans — and with higher interest rates and rising essentials squeezing families — one must produce a constant stream of policies, packaged into vertical video format, reminding voters you’re there to help. It also draws an implicit contrast with the less grounded concerns of the right-wing culture warriors — I’m saving you money on your power bills, they are faffing around with nutty parishioners declaring themselves a principality!
Whether these bite-sized announcements are sufficient to shift the dial on affordability remains a long-run question, and how Burnham will handle harder decisions beyond these initial easy wins remains to be seen.
But as political scientist Ben Ansell put it, “The Burnham strategy is not to produce a 100-page, five-year plan to be carefully considered by wonks and gleefully eviscerated by columnists. It is emphatically not about deliberating slowly and tacking and jibing according to the concerns of MPs, think tanks and stakeholders. It is about doing things and making sure the public sees you doing them. Burnhamism, it seems, is about urgency. Sometimes just acting for acting’s sake. Showing the public that you care …”
Ansell’s intended foil for Burnham here is Starmer — but it could equally be said of Albanese, that approach’s modern progenitor. The Australian prime minister’s innate caution leads to picked-apart reviews and long-awaited half-solutions, too often allowing others to set the agenda and leaving him on the back foot.
Andy Burnham said after his meeting with Anthony Albanese that he’d gotten halfway to Australia (New York), and that he’d have to get the full way at some point. But Albo can’t wait that long for more pointers. For now, he should simply pull up Burnham’s Instagram page and watch how modern retail politics ought to be done.
