Simon Tormey

His values are very much things that I think people can recognize as being fundamentally fair and decent.

I think history will sort of judge him in a very ambivalent way.

A kind of decent person who unfortunately was a little bit out of his depth and made some missteps early on in his administration.

Decent but boring.

Exactly.

It is in bad shape.

I mean, it's not in disastrous shape.

So this is also a bit of a challenge is that Britain sort of stumbles along.

It's still, depending on your reading of the numbers, either the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world, it can still feel quite wealthy depending on where you are.

You're doing the tourist sites in London or going to Oxford or Cambridge or Bristol or some of these bright-eyed cities.

And you think, well, what's all the fuss about?

But

The truth of the matter is that the public finances are in an absolutely terrible state.

Britain owes £3 trillion, that's $6 trillion, to the international markets.

We've got 100% debt to GDP.

Tax is very high.

It's gone up noticeably under Labour.

National insurance rises and so on.

And Burnham has already said that he doesn't intend to change those tax settings.

So he's kind of already sort of boxed himself into a very difficult looking macroeconomic case.