Andy Burnham hasn’t even picked up the keys to Number 10 and already the alarm bells are ringing.
His choice of chief of staff – the single most powerful unelected job in government, the person who decides what lands on the PM’s desk and what quietly disappears – is James Purnell. Until this week, Purnell was chief executive of Flint Global, a lobbying and ‘advisory’ firm that has counted Thames Water, BP, Apple and Amazon among its clients. Flint doesn’t publish a full client list. We only know what’s leaked out.
One Labour MP has already called it “a very bad sign”. They’re not wrong.
Here’s why it matters. A chief of staff doesn’t just organise the diary. They gatekeep. They decide which fights the boss picks and which ones get quietly parked. And for months, Burnham has told anyone who’ll listen that he’s serious about bringing water back into public ownership. Given the state of Thames Water – record fines, raw sewage in rivers, a company propped up by a debt pile that bondholders are now fighting over – that’s a promise a lot of people are holding him to.
So, ask yourself this. Can the public trust that the man now controlling Burnham’s priorities won’t quietly steer that promise into the long grass? Flint has advised Thames Water’s junior bondholders. It has represented tech giants and firms with grim human rights records. Its entire business model is helping powerful clients manage governments, not the other way round.
It gets worse. Reporting from Democracy for Sale has linked Purnell’s old firm to an undeclared lobbying meeting with Douglas Alexander, when he was trade minister – a roundtable and a private sit-down that never appeared on the transparency register. This isn’t paranoia. It’s a pattern.
None of this means Purnell is guilty of anything by appointment alone. But it does mean that the burden of proof now sits with Burnham, not with us. Vague reassurances just won’t cut it.
Burnham should commit, publicly and unambiguously, to no lobbying by vested interests anywhere near his government. He should either think again about handing this job to a man who spent last year working for the industries he now needs to face down – or come out and say, in plain terms, that water nationalisation is not off the table and prove it with action, not words.
This issue cannot be allowed to be buried under the noise of a new government finding its feet. People need to keep asking questions. Keep the pressure on. Because if nobody’s watching, this is exactly the kind of promise that quietly disappears.
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