The real Andy Burnham

Leo Pearlman is a London based producer and a loud and proud Zionist. His most recent film about the Oct 7 Nova Music Festival massacre, ‘We Will Dance Again’ has won the 2025 Emmy of the 46th Annual News & Documentary Awards for most ‘Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary’.

For the first fortnight of Andy Burnham’s premiership, I made the same mistake as almost everyone else. I was paying too much attention to his speeches.

When Burnham chose his first major foreign policy intervention to criticise Keir Starmer’s handling of Gaza and adopt a markedly tougher tone towards Israel, I wrote about it. It seemed significant that a newly installed Prime Minister had chosen one of the most contentious issues in international politics to distinguish himself from his predecessor. It felt like an important signal of where his government intended to go.

A few days later came another signal. Speaking about Britain’s social care system, Burnham singled out Jewish Care as the organisation the country should aspire to emulate. Again, commentators rushed to interpret the moment. Had he softened his tone? Was he balancing one audience against another? Was this reassurance to Britain’s Jewish community after the rhetoric on Gaza?

The more I watched, the more I realised I had been asking the wrong question, because speeches are supposed to be interpreted, but appointments are supposed to exercise power.

Every politician uses speeches to send signals. They reassure supporters, provoke opponents and attempt to hold together coalitions that often want very different things. A Prime Minister can criticise Israel one week and praise a Jewish charity the next. Both statements may be sincere, equally, both may simply be politics.

Appointments are different.

Unlike almost every other significant decision a Prime Minister makes, appointments are among the few that remain largely his alone. Markets constrain economic policy, Parliament constrains legislation, international events constrain foreign policy, however much we might flatter ourselves about Britain's ability to shape them. Even manifesto commitments eventually collide with political reality, but appointments are different. They are one of the clearest windows into a Prime Minister's instincts, because they reveal whose judgment he chooses to rely upon when nobody else is making the decision for him.

Appointments belong almost entirely to the Prime Minister, they are among the few decisions nobody else really makes for him. They reveal whose instincts he trusts, whose judgment he values and whose worldview he wants sitting around the table when the cameras have gone and the real decisions begin.

If speeches tell us how a Prime Minister wishes to be seen, appointments tell us how he intends to govern.

That is why, in trying to understand the real Andy Burnham, I have stopped looking at the lectern outside Number 10 and have started looking at the appointment letters signed inside it.

Britain’s Place in the World

The first appointment concerns Britain’s voice abroad.

I have already written extensively about Ed Miliband’s appointment as Foreign Secretary, so I will not repeat every argument here. What matters for this discussion is not one speech, one vote or one disagreement over Israeli policy. It is the accumulation of a long public record and Burnham’s decision to elevate that record to Britain’s highest diplomatic office.

Over more than a decade, Miliband has established a consistent position on Israel. As Labour leader in 2014, he led his party in a symbolic vote recognising a Palestinian state and was sharply critical of Israel during that summer’s conflict in Gaza. During Keir Starmer’s leadership he consistently supported recognition of a Palestinian state, yet never argued publicly that the return of the Israeli hostages taken on October 7th should be a condition of such recognition.

Each of those positions is a matter of public record, each has been defended by supporters. Each has also caused profound concern within sections of Britain’s Jewish community, not because disagreement with Israeli governments is illegitimate, but because of what that accumulation of positions suggests about Britain’s approach to the world’s only Jewish state at a time of extraordinary international pressure.

Context matters.

Burnham became Prime Minister at a moment when international institutions increasingly reserve a unique standard of condemnation for Israel; when anti-Zionism has, in too many quarters, become the socially acceptable language through which hostility towards Jews is expressed; and when Britain’s diplomatic choices are watched closely not only in Jerusalem and Washington, but in synagogues across the United Kingdom.

Against that backdrop, Burnham’s speeches on Gaza matter, but they matter far less than the person he has entrusted to formulate Britain’s foreign policy. Foreign Secretaries do not simply comment on foreign affairs, they shape them.

Burnham looked at the Parliamentary Labour Party, considered all the available experience and talent, and decided these were the instincts he wanted representing Britain on the world stage.

That decision tells us more than any speech ever could.

The Rule of Law

The second appointment concerns something even more fundamental than foreign policy. It concerns how government understands and exercises the law.

Most people could not tell you what the Solicitor General does. That is unfortunate because it is one of the Government’s most important legal offices. The Solicitor General helps oversee legal advice to ministers, supports the Attorney General and plays a central role in the legal framework through which government exercises power.

It is therefore impossible to separate Andy Slaughter’s appointment from his long public record.

Again, the issue is not that he has criticised Israeli governments, many politicians have. The issue is the consistency, intensity and character of that criticism over many years.

This is a politician who travelled with Jeremy Corbyn on a delegation that met Hamas-linked Palestinian legislators at a time when successive British governments refused official engagement with Hamas unless it renounced terrorism, recognised Israel and accepted previous agreements.

He has repeatedly accused Israel of indiscriminately killing civilians and was reported as suggesting that Israel “fabricates and invents" reasons to justify killing Palestinian Arabs.

During the violence on the Gaza border in 2018, he marked Nakba Day in Parliament by describing it as the “seventieth anniversary of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians" before accusing Israel of escalating “the murder and maiming of civilians" and calling for Britain to suspend arms sales.

When an EU review identified antisemitic material in Palestinian Authority school textbooks, Slaughter acknowledged there were “regrettable passages" before arguing that Israeli policy was “the real root of the problem."

When Labour finally adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism after years of internal division, Slaughter voted against it.

Most recently, he celebrated Britain’s recognition of a Palestinian state and has remained a prominent figure at Palestine Solidarity Campaign events.

Viewed individually, each of those positions can be debated, maybe, but viewed together, they reveal a remarkably consistent worldview.

The question this raises is not about Andy Slaughter, he is exactly what he appears to be, it is about Andy Burnham.

Knowing all of this about him, Burnham nevertheless concluded that these were the instincts he wanted helping to shape the Government’s legal judgment.

That choice demands scrutiny and explanation.

The Architecture of Influence

The third appointment reflects where political power has quietly migrated during the past decade. If the twentieth century belonged to broadcasters and newspapers, the twenty-first increasingly belongs to platforms, algorithms and digital influence. That has transformed the role of political communications.

Once upon a time, communications explained government after decisions had been made. Today, communications increasingly determines how those decisions are understood before anyone has read the detail.

It decides which audiences matter, which platforms receive legitimacy, which interviewers are granted access, which podcasts the Prime Minister appears on, which influencers become validators of government, which clips are designed for TikTok, which messages are amplified by algorithms, which controversies dominate the national conversation.

The Communications Director is no longer simply responsible for explaining policy. Increasingly, they are responsible for constructing the political identity of the Prime Minister himself.

Look no further than Burnham’s decision to give one of his earliest major interviews to Gary Lineker. That was not simply a scheduling decision, it was a communications strategy. A choice about audience, platform, cultural validation, about whose voice Burnham wished to borrow as he introduced himself to the country.

That is the machinery Ali Milani now helps oversee, his own public record therefore matters enormously.

Among the most controversial examples are historic social media posts questioning Israel’s right to exist, calling 9/11 a “false flag", including one exchange in which he wrote: “Nah u won’t mate. It’ll cost u a pound #jew." Milani has apologised for antisemitic remarks made during his student years and said they do not reflect the person he is today.

Readers will reach their own conclusions about those apologies, the larger issue once again is Burnham’s judgment.

Following Burnham’s public apology for Labour’s historic approach to Gaza, Milani publicly celebrated it as an important moral reset. At the very same time, many Jewish organisations continued to express concern about the direction of travel within sections of the party and the persistence of rhetoric they believed had not been adequately confronted. Those realities existed simultaneously.

In an age when misinformation spreads faster than correction, when artificial intelligence accelerates falsehoods and when algorithms reward outrage over accuracy, communications may now be one of the most consequential offices in government.

If any position demands someone whose judgment commands confidence across communities, surely it is this one.

Burnham considered that responsibility and chose Ali Milani.

The Moral Operating System

The final decision is different, different because it is not principally about foreign policy, nor law, nor communications. It is about the moral operating system of government itself.

Every government possesses one, it determines not merely what ministers believe, but what they are prepared to excuse. Who deserves influence, who deserves rehabilitation, where the boundaries of acceptable public life are drawn.

Following Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Labour accepted that antisemitism had become an institutional failure. It apologised repeatedly, commissioned independent reviews and promised Britain’s Jewish community that the culture which had caused so much damage would never again be allowed to take root.

Those promises were never going to be tested by speeches, they were always going to be tested by decisions.

Which brings us to Diane Abbott.

Her restoration to the Parliamentary Labour Party was not controversial because of a single newspaper article. It was controversial because that article came after years in which Labour had promised British Jews that it now understood antisemitism differently. Abbott’s comments, suggesting that Jewish people experienced prejudice differently from those who suffer racism “all their lives", were widely understood within the Jewish community as diminishing the distinct nature of antisemitism rather than recognising it.

For many, the subsequent response did little to restore confidence. The issue was never simply whether an apology had been issued. It was whether there had been a clear acknowledgement of why those remarks had caused such profound concern at precisely the moment Labour claimed to have learned the lessons of its past.

Burnham was under no obligation to make Abbott one of the public faces of his governing parliamentary party at the earliest opportunity. That was a judgment and judgments reveal values.

Taken individually, Ed Miliband’s appointment can be defended.

Taken individually, Andy Slaughter’s appointment can be defended.

Taken individually, Ali Milani’s appointment can be defended.

Taken individually, Diane Abbott’s restoration can be defended.

But governments are not judged by isolated decisions, they are judged by patterns.

When I first wrote about Andy Burnham’s premiership, I thought his speeches would tell us who he was, I was wrong. The speeches were designed to shape the day’s headlines. The appointments reveal the instincts that will shape the years between now and the next General Election.

In just fourteen days, Burnham made four decisions touching almost every pillar of executive government: Britain’s foreign policy, its legal framework, its communications strategy and its moral operating system. None of those choices was forced upon him, each was an expression of judgment, each revealed whose instincts he trusts.

Together they tell us considerably more about the direction of his government than every carefully crafted speech delivered from the Downing Street lectern combined.

Speeches are written for the next news cycle, appointment letters are written for the next Parliament.

Personnel is policy and British Jews should pay close attention to where these personnel lead policy for our communities safety and place in this country.