8.42am on Monday 20 July. We’re on the scene in Downing Street with only two-and-a-half hours to wait before Keir Starmer gives what’s already being talked about as the least consequential speech of his career, a speech in which he’ll tell the nation: “Bye guys”. On the BBC News liveblog, BBC political editor Chris Mason has just read a newspaper interview with soon-to-be-PM Andy Burnham that suggests today could be “political and personal”. Mason follows up this trenchant analysis by setting the scene in Downing Street: “A roadsweeper has just trundled up the road,” he reveals, “doing what roadsweepers do.”
9.13am Shadow cabinet minister Alex Burghart is on BBC One with a snappy reaction to Burnham’s policies: “We need to see the plan,” he says, and this means: “I don’t know what his policies are. I want to imply they’re bad, but I just don’t know what they are.”
9.15am We’re back to Downing Street, where multiple news crews are providing live feeds of Larry, the Downing Street cat. The changing of prime ministers has “become all too familiar for the feline in recent years,” opines the Sky News live blog.
9.27am We’re on Whitehall, where barricades have been set up. A man is holding an oil painting of Andy Burnham, who is depicted naked but for a single red sock on his left foot. The artist tells the New Statesman the sock represents the fact that Burnham was elected by his party, but not by his country; if he’d won an election, he would have given him two socks.
9.42am Steve Bray, the tedious professional irritant who tried to ruin Starmer’s previous resignation speech by blasting out Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” at maximum volume, is outside Buckingham Palace with a megaphone. In a rare win for common sense, loudspeakers have been temporarily banned from the area.
10.00am: BREAKING Burnham has been spotted outside his temporary London HQ wearing a black t-shirt. Is he going to see the King in that? Is he going to call His Majesty “lad”? Time will tell, as Chris Mason often points out. Plus the first resignation of the day: it’s back to the cobblers’ shop for the prisons minister, James Timpson. All those keys, and not one of them could unlock the friendship of Andy Burnham.
10.42am Keir Starmer is busy inside Downing Street, removing all the lightbulbs from his flat and popping a frozen haddock down the back of the radiator in his office; he’ll call Andy in a couple of weeks to tell him where the smell’s coming from. Outside, guests and press gather on opposite sides of the street. What’s gonna happen? What’s he gonna say?
11.04am “Feels like Starmer’s departure is imminent,” writes BBC chief political correspondent Henry Zeffman. He might be on to something there.
11.18am And it’s all lecterns go! Keir Starmer, who resigned outside Downing Street last month, gives it another go. This time he nails it. One last empty boast about the country being all better now, and he’s off to the palace to hand in his badge and his gun. On the BBC liveblog, Chris Mason delivers the key insight: for many people on Downing Street, this is “a really big moment”.
11.46am Interregnum break: Starmer has resigned and Burnham won’t be instructed to form a government for about 15 minutes. The ungoverned country shrugs and continues with its day.
11.50am Out on Whitehall, a young couple is walking past the Ministry of Defence, hand in hand. She’s in the lead, hurrying him along, impatient with the crowd of protestors and onlookers that has gathered to whoop across the road at the old prime minister and the new Prime Minister. Her boyfriend slows and their arms stretch out as they pull in different directions. “Nah, I wanna watch it, bro!” he calls, “this only happens, like, every two years.”
11.53am The crowd on Whitehall is a mix of protesters (mostly against North Sea drilling, war in Gaza and Brexit), tourists, international news crews who don’t have a spot on Downing Street, civil servants walking hurriedly between offices, and of course the crocodile-formation groups of Italian teenagers that are to be found on every street in Zone 1. And as always with historical events, it’s a commercial opportunity: two young women who describe themselves as “marketing girlies” are handing out discount cards with Andy Burnham’s name on them. Presumably they checked the rules on identity theft first.
11.59am We’re in the media queue to get in to Downing Street, and there hasn’t been a line of journalists this hot and disgruntled since the wine ran out at the New Statesman’s summer reception. An adjacent line of invited guests files past: Josh Simons, who stepped out of his Makerfield seat to make way for Burnham; Steve Rotherham, the metro mayor of Liverpool and Burnham’s fellow exponent of Scouse Dad populism, is carrying a very well-behaved baby; Dale Vince, one of Labour’s biggest donors, is wearing camouflage trousers and a t-shirt that says: “chips are vegan”. The New Statesman, in a wool suit, is sweating like parmesan on a radiator.
12.48pm BREAKING Britain’s “lectern economy” has boomed in recent years, with a regular turnover of PMs creating demand for lectern production and maintenance. Well, the party’s over: Burnham’s gone off-lectern. There’s not a lectern in sight. From the press area, the New Statesman winces. What if he needs to rest a document at waist height? Burnham’s not bothered. He’s getting on with the job. He tells the crowd he’s actually going to do something, now, right now, to give people “breathing space” against the cost of living. Or, tomorrow, anyway. As Burnham speaks about “a new national sense of unity, of common purpose and positivity”, an anti-Brexit campaigner can be heard singing the “Ode to Joy” (the EU anthem) at the top of his lungs. The British people will resist unity and positivity at all costs.
1.37pm The BBC’s Chris Mason writes that the speech gave “a sense of Andy Burnham’s desire to project a big message on day one.” This guy simply does not miss.
1.43pm Back on Whitehall, the New Statesman has found the man who tried to ruin Burnham’s speech by singing the “Ode to Joy”. He’s called Gareth and his business card describes him as a “flâneur”. He has a long blond ponytail, two keffiyehs and his shirt is open to the sternum. He introduces himself as a “classically trained actor”. Is he pleased to have cheapened another historical moment? Gareth takes a theatrical breath. “History is not clean and sanitised,” he intones. “The French Revolution – do you know how messy that was?” The New Statesman believes it has a sense of how messy that was, and frankly it seems Gareth doesn’t. When history is taking place, when a new PM is being introduced to the nation, would it not be a service to other voters to just pause acting like a total ballbag for five minutes? No. Gareth says it’s necessary, because our membership of the EU isn’t debated enough. The high point for Gareth was the day Boris Johnson resigned; Gareth remembers the “absolute party” that rolled up and down Whitehall that day. He and his friends will continue to blare over any political moment, in the name of Remain, to send “a warning to the rest of the political class”. Be warned, then, Andy: succeed, or you’ll have to listen to more of Gareth’s singing. No one, with the obvious exception of Gareth, wants that.
[Further reading: Andy Burnham still has everything to prove]