Andy Burnham had a reasonable first outing at Prime Minister’s Questions today. He didn’t flounder, but he didn’t make it look easy, either. He did, though, manage to provide answers to Kemi Badenoch’s questions in a way that his predecessor had routinely failed to. Unlike Keir Starmer, Burnham actually engaged with what the leader of the opposition was asking. It’s early days, though: he also agreed to have meetings with a lot of MPs about their pet issues, and he may find that he quite quickly gives up both the habit of answering the question and of accepting invitations to discuss everything with everyone. 

Badenoch opened by jokingly congratulating the new prime minister on his ‘stamina’, which raised a laugh. She noted that he had spent three hours in the Commons yesterday, but asked him if there was a single spending request that Labour MPs had made to which he’d said........

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