Andy Burnham’s purge of the Starmerites may store up problems for the future

By Charles Lees, Executive Dean, City St George's, University of London

If he were alive today, Machiavelli would have enjoyed watching the first days of Andy Burnham’s premiership. An enemy of the Medicis, the Florentine diplomat (full name Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli) was a student of power. He would have appreciated the clarity, focus and – yes – the brutality of Burnham’s move against loyalists of former prime minister Keir Starmer.

This was not a purge comparable to Harold Macmillan’s “night of the long knives” in the 1950s. Back then, Macmillan sacked one third of…

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