Andy Burnham began his first statement to the House of Commons as Prime Minister with an attractive promise: problem-solving rather than point-scoring.

Listen to this article

He also offered a blunt diagnosis. From the 1980s onwards, he argued, political power was centralised, economic power privatised, the country deindustrialised, austerity hollowed out local government and Brexit compounded the damage.

There is truth in parts of that account. But a government elected to shape the future can become consumed by prosecuting the past. As Winston Churchill warned in 1940: “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.” That is good advice for Burnham now.

The Prime Minister has set himself an almost impossible programme. We need our politicians to think ambitiously about what Britain can become, but ambition also requires choices. My own working life taught me the discipline of the possible: understand where you can make the greatest difference, concentrate your resources behind it and accept that choosing what to do also means choosing what not to do.

I first learnt that........

© LBC