Burnham’s afternoon of the long knives

By the late afternoon, the announcements came with metronomic regularity, the great and the good of the last Cabinet eliminated. Rachel Reeves, gone. David Lammy, gone. Liz Kendall, Darren Jones, Steve Reed, Peter Kyle, Richard Hermer — all dispatched in quick succession, with Hermer appropriately announcing his removal on Bluesky. The last Blairite standing from the Starmer experiment is Pat McFadden, who remains at work and pensions. Yvette Cooper is also still in the Cabinet, though she’s now health secretary. Shabana Mahmood, for all the talk of a promotion to No. 11, remains at the Home Office. Given she reputedly didn’t even want to be chancellor, perhaps that’s not so surprising. This, then, was the Downing Street clear-out of the decade, less a reshuffle than a political detonation