Every quarter, in a meeting room with bad biscuits, my team and I sit down and score our suppliers. It is not glamorous work. Delivery against promise, invoice against quote, excuses per annum.
At the bottom of the spreadsheet sits a column, polite but lethal, headed renew. Last month we struck off a firm we had used for nine years. Lovely people, always a pleasure on the phone. They had simply stopped delivering what they said they would, when they said they would, and in business that is the only sentence that matters.
I mention the spreadsheet because this week the Labour Party all but handed Andy Burnham the keys to Downing Street, 322 nominations from 403 MPs, nobody else standing, coronation booked for the 20th. And my first thought was not tax, nor growth, nor what the gilt market would make of it all. My first thought was that the new Prime Minister is about to inherit the worst delivery record in the national ledger, and every business owner in Britain knows exactly which line it is.
Because Westminster, viewed from the customer’s end, is the worst contractor in Britain. It quotes in years, invoices in inquiries and delivers in apologies. And the oldest job in its ledger was booked on 15 April 1989, when 97 Liverpool supporters went to a football match and did not come home, and the state spent the following decades doctoring statements, briefing lies and blaming the bereaved.
I remember, as though it was yesterday, watching Andy Burnham speak at Anfield at the 20th anniversary memorial in April 2009. A Cabinet minister, an Evertonian, sent to represent a Labour government that had managed twelve years in office without lifting a finger on Hillsborough. The Kop interrupted him with a chant of justice for the 96, as the number then stood, and booed him, and he stood there and took every second of it. Then he did something almost unheard of in his trade: he went back to London and acted. Full disclosure of documents. The Hillsborough Independent Panel. The 2012 report, the quashed inquests, the 2016 verdict that the supporters were unlawfully killed. In 2017 he put the first Hillsborough Law before the Commons, and it died on the order paper when the election was called and Manchester claimed him.
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