00:00Friday, Andy Burnham became the new leader of the UK's Labour Party after Keir Starmer resigned as Prime Minister last
00:06month.
00:06Now, tomorrow is going to be a major day of transition for UK leadership.
00:10First, Starmer will officially step down. He has to resign to the King.
00:13After that, Burnham will be officially invited to meet with King Charles and to form a new government.
00:19And then the new Prime Minister will make his way to 10 Downing Street.
00:23Joining us now is Bloomberg's UK reporter, James Wilcock.
00:26James, I still think of this process as requiring the Queen.
00:30I can't quite get it in my head that she's not part of it anymore.
00:33But it is now King Charles. Can you just walk us through how this works?
00:36It's still kind of odd for Americans to watch a country get a new leader without a general election.
00:41Kissing of hands, I believe.
00:43It was kissing of hands? James, what's going to happen?
00:46Yeah, I mean, basically, you've got to let the King, and you're right, I do this too.
00:49I also use the Queen on air and I should be using the King.
00:51You've got to let the King know what's going on.
00:55So you have to go to Downing Street and say, hey, this current government's not working out.
00:58There's going to be another guy coming in in about an hour who is going to pull the next one
01:01together.
01:02I don't actually know what the King says. It's never normally released to the public.
01:05He normally presumably shakes the hands and lets someone go.
01:07And then Keir Star will go to Downing Street and he will have set out his speech.
01:12He will be gone. Everything will have moved out.
01:14Andy Burnham, who is the new Labour leader, will then walk in, set out a speech for government,
01:18will walk inside and will quite literally get given the nuclear codes and said by civil servants,
01:23tell us who's in your government because we still don't know.
01:25And that is one of the most striking things of this coming administration.
01:30Normally, with an election, you have all the shadowed cabinet positions.
01:33You know who's going to be chancellor. You know who's going to be the home secretary.
01:36We have nothing.
01:37And this is not without the difficult work of a lot of reporters in Bloomberg and UK media trying to
01:43say,
01:44Andy, who is going to be in this top team? What are they going to do?
01:47We know remarkably little.
01:50And to your point, it is worth saying that of the past 10 UK prime ministers, six have not been
01:56elected.
01:57Six have come from in their own parties, so-called like takeover prime ministers.
02:01But even so, this one is especially unique because six weeks ago, Andy Burnham wasn't even a member of parliament.
02:10He was the mayor of Greater Manchester, and it has been kind of a fairytale ride.
02:15He has romped to victory in a sudden by-election, has taken over his party by near unanimous consent,
02:22and now goes into government.
02:24But I will say this is where the problems start.
02:27This is where the rubber hits the road, and this is where the choices start to become difficult.
02:32That packing team at Downing Street has been very busy over the last few years.
02:36Very good at what they do.
02:38James, I'm curious as you think about the way that this government might be formed.
02:41It strikes me there are a lot of, it's like a rotating cast of characters.
02:44I think of David Lammy and Yvette Cooper, David Miliband for the role of foreign secretary.
02:49It's a rotating cast of people that we know, you know as well.
02:53So when we think of him kind of making his mark or casting a new stamp on this government,
02:57how likely is it that he brings in new blood or different individuals than we're accustomed to?
03:03I mean, just on the packing, there's a famous story about when Gordon Brown got kicked out in 2010,
03:08where there were still mugs from the Labour election victory when the Conservatives went in,
03:12because the packing team had cleared everything else out, but the mugs were still there.
03:14They hadn't had time in the hours that go through.
03:16Amazing.
03:17It's really tough.
03:20Right.
03:21I'm going to talk about Ed Miliband.
03:22Ed Miliband is the current energy secretary.
03:24He, we reported a few weeks back, was the first senior cabinet minister who told Keir Starmer to go.
03:31He is one of Burnham's closest backers.
03:32He's seen as left wing.
03:34He is by far the most hated politician in the city of London of who could become the next chancellor.
03:40We are reporting that Ed Miliband is currently second in the race to become the next chancellor
03:45after Shabana moved the current home secretary.
03:47That's changed in the past week.
03:49I still cannot tell you today who is going to be the chancellor tomorrow.
03:54If I don't know that, and Burnham hasn't made up the decision, on Friday he openly said he hadn't made
03:59the decision yet,
04:00we can't decide who the next home secretary is, because then if Shabana moved to not leaving that position, we
04:06don't know who's moving on.
04:08So, David, you're asking the perfect question.
04:10I wish I could tell you we had a better answer.
04:13Having talked to civil servants in the past week, they also wish they had known about who the next person
04:18is going to be.
04:18It sets up a big policy vacuum.
04:21It sets up a big leadership vacuum.
04:23And it's worth saying that two years ago, a very popular Labour leader rode into number 10 Downing Street.
04:30We had big questions about whether his plans would hold together.
04:33We had big questions about he, this is Keir Starmer, could keep together a team for five years, how that
04:39would look.
04:40And quite soon, after a very good first couple of weeks, the fiscal reality sets in and difficult and popular
04:46decisions start to be made.
04:48Two years on, I can kind of copy and paste that analysis to this moment, except this time I don't
04:54know who's going to be in charge.
04:55It is going to be very interesting.
04:58It's going to be very interesting.
04:59But I think the one thing that's different is Andy Burnham is a far more veteran politician than Keir Starmer.
05:05He has been the mayor of Manchester.
05:06He has been the House Secretary back in the 2000s.
05:09He was also the Culture Secretary.
05:11This is someone who knows what he's doing and doesn't have a very clear amount of experience.
05:15The question is, is there really a plan?
05:18And has he made these decisions?
05:20And how is it all going to go out?
05:21But what we do know is he's going to go out guns blazing.
05:25Next, we are going to get a raft of policy announcements, a raft of big, big picture thinking as he
05:31tries to reset the agenda.
05:32James, it seems like some of those have already been announced.
05:34It's interesting to me you don't know who the cabinet is going to be.
05:36You've already heard from him on a couple policies.
05:39He's going to reverse this new digital ID law that was supposed to go into place that was a Keir
05:44Starmer policy.
05:45Talk us through that.
05:45And then something about possibly nationalizing or doing something that looks like nationalizing a London water utility.
05:52Yeah, exactly.
05:54He's going to scrap digital ID.
05:56This was a Starmer policy.
05:57It was going to cost around 600 million pounds.
05:59It was seen as a big thing on the center of the left of the Labour Party.
06:02And so, therefore, scrapping is a signal that Andy Burnham is kind of moving away from Starmer.
06:08He's going to potentially announce new drilling in the North Sea as well.
06:11And also, like you said, Thameswater has a very difficult history, right?
06:14It is in debt to the tune of about $18 billion.
06:17It is looking to raise its bills on consumers by something like 50% over the next five years.
06:23And it has been kind of a test case for a few years now about will the creditors get a
06:28haircut?
06:28Will it go into nationalization?
06:30That's not the sort of difficult bit.
06:32I'll be fascinated to see when he announces this, what does he think about the wider water sector?
06:36Andy Burnham has talked about wanting to have far more public control of utilities.
06:40So, is that just taking Thameswater into public ownership?
06:43Or is it the wider water sector into public ownership?
06:45Is it going to be more of a regulator?
06:47So, to your point, I know we can talk about this one company, the largest one in the UK for
06:52water utility.
06:53Sure, big deal.
06:54What is the wider rubric going to look like?
06:57What's that going to mean for other utilities?
06:59What's that going to mean for the regulator?
07:02These are big, big decisions.
07:03And these are just the ones we know he's going to announce.
07:06I've got a laundry list, as long as my arm, of defense spending, social care, which we hear we might
07:11get some next week on.
07:12What's going to happen in the budget around tax?
07:14Are we going to get big decisions?
07:16The reason why we have all these problems in the UK is there are very clear, well-known policy problems
07:21that the government can fix.
07:22But they involve difficult political trade-offs and often quite a lot of time as well.
07:28People do know these things.
07:30Politicians do know these things.
07:31But the story of the past two years has been Keir Starmer being unable to find the will to take
07:36these decisions, especially on welfare.
07:38It's one where he lost the big flagship sort of vote of his career that, in many ways, people say
07:43paved the way for him leaving office.
07:46The question is, can Andy Burnham do different?
07:48He is very popular.
07:50I can't understress how popular Andy Burnham currently is.
07:53But what politically is going to come in the next week, it's going to be fascinating.
07:57This is the big moment for him to make his mark.
08:00And we don't yet know everything he's going to do.
08:03James, always good to catch up with you.
08:05I'll have you back.
08:05We want to talk about the sartorial choices of the future prime minister as well.
08:08I know that's a hot-button issue across the country.
08:11It's giving cool-dad energy.
08:12Exactly.
08:13A lot of cool-dad energy.
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