There is no situation room, no wall of flatscreens or a hotline to the White House, just a few chairs patrolled by ‘quite a mad dog’. But a garden in Golborne, on the outskirts of Wigan, is now ground zero in three different operations which will decide the future of Britain. The first is Op Makerfield, the campaign for Andy Burnham to win this week’s by-election. The second is Op Leadership, to line up Labour MPs, trade unions and donors for the showdown which may follow. The third is Op Transition, the plans to install a Burnham-led government.

‘Loads of it has been done in Andy’s garden,’ says a close ally. ‘Half of us in the garden, the other half online. We’re having to run a by-election campaign, a leadership campaign and preparations for government simultaneously. At the beginning Andy was rightly just focused on Makerfield. But as we’ve got closer, we’ve been carving out time to think beyond.’

Presiding over all three operations are the ‘northern Queens’ – former transport secretary Louise Haigh and Anneliese Midgley, the canny MP for Knowsley and a former political director for Unite – alongside Burnham’s longstanding aide Kevin Lee. Those who remember the exploits of Boris Johnson’s dog Dilyn will be delighted to know there is also a badly behaved hound. ‘Andy’s got quite a mad dog that has been disrupting proceedings on a very regular basis,’ a source reveals. ‘Lots of barking and hunting mice and he took quite a shine to Anneliese.’

‘Keir can go in a dignified way that protects whatever legacy he wants, or he can allow a load of bloodletting’

‘Keir can go in a dignified way that protects whatever legacy he wants, or he can allow a load of bloodletting’

At the time of going to print, Op Makerfield is not a totally done deal. Two of Burnham’s top team parrot the same line: ‘It’s closer than you think.’ But those advising the Manchester mayor think the scale of any win will determine the speed of events. ‘If he wins by low single digits, Keir Starmer digs in and says: “You can’t come for me until after the Manchester mayoral election on 30 July,” and it’s bloody trench warfare,’ one says. ‘If it’s a comfortable, single-digits win, the soft left will try to take power through a conversation, but they will probably discover that power has to be taken by force. If Andy gets more than Reform plus Restore combined, start the clock. There will be an avalanche.’

Burnham’s team rejects claims he will move against Starmer straightaway, accusing the PM’s aides of ‘briefing into existence that it’s going to be an immediately aggressive, hostile act’. A senior figure says: ‘It absolutely isn’t. He’ll want to give Keir proper time and space to come to terms with how things are changing over the weekend and hopefully Keir genuinely reflects on how things have changed. We want to keep this as friendly and controlled as possible. We want it to be negotiated and we really hope that Keir can get into that mindset.’ Burnham’s key allies, along with deputy leader Lucy Powell and Ed Miliband, will lean on Starmer to talk to Burnham. ‘There’ll be an attempt for a meeting at some point next week,’ one says.

Both sides acknowledge that it may not be possible to keep things polite, not least because Starmer is determined to resist a challenge. ‘He’s been saying he’ll fight it with his mouth for weeks, but he didn’t look like he’ll fight it in his eyes,’ says one loyalist. ‘But that has changed. I think he means it. He’s realised that just because someone asks for your job, you shouldn’t just give it to them.’ Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s former chief of staff, sent the PM ‘a note’ calling on him to ‘keep going’. To buy himself time, Starmer’s allies have wargamed the idea that he should offer Burnham a cabinet post immediately to shame him into........

© The Spectator