Andy Burnham arrived for his first day at No. 10 North on a Government jet, prompting accusations of hypocrisy for a party immiserating the country for the sake of Net Zero and telling the public to cut air travel. The Telegraph has more.
The Prime Minister took the VIP Airbus A321 from London to Glasgow on Thursday afternoon for the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games.
He then travelled to Manchester – the home of No. 10 North, central to his devolution agenda – on a 38-minute flight on Friday morning.
Burnham’s decision to take a Government jet domestically is likely to prompt accusations of hypocrisy after Labour attacked the Tories for doing the same while in opposition.
The Prime Minister flew from London Stansted to Glasgow at 12.45pm on Thursday and arrived at 2.28pm, Guido Fawkes first reported. The plane then left Glasgow at 9.19am on Friday, landing nine minutes behind schedule at 9.57am.
It would have taken Burnham three hours to take the train from Glasgow to Manchester. The average train journey from London to Manchester takes two hours and 46 minutes.
Burnham could have chosen from six trains departing Glasgow Central for Manchester Piccadilly and scheduled to arrive in his adopted home city before 11am. …
The drive from Glasgow to Burnham’s Makerfield constituency is three hours and 30 minutes, meaning he could have asked his driver to take him home from Scotland on Thursday night or early on Friday after attending the Commonwealth Games opening.
Confirming that Burnham had flown up, No. 10 did not respond to questions about whether his flights to No. 10 North would be a weekly occurrence. The Prime Minister has said he plans to spend at least one day a week working from Manchester. …
In opposition, Labour had attacked the Tories for using jets to travel domestically. At the party’s annual conference in 2023, Rachel Reeves said Labour would curb the use of private jets by ministers.
She hit out at Rishi Sunak, the then Tory Prime Minister, for his “private jet habit” and said Labour would seek to save taxpayers millions of pounds. Sunak defended his use of domestic flights, saying air travel was the most effective use of his time.
In July 2023, Labour demanded that Sunak explain why he used an RAF plane to fly to Scotland when scheduled flights were available.
The Ministerial Code states that private planes should only be used when no alternative is available.
Last year, Ed Miliband, the then energy secretary, was described as an “eco-hypocrite” after he refused to reveal how many domestic flights he had taken.
Ministers said Miliband, now the Foreign Secretary, would not disclose any details about his air travel within the UK since Labour took office in 2024.
Miliband had previously said that Britons should cut down on domestic flights “as much as we possibly can”. He also suggested that the Government should encourage ordinary voters to take trains and buses rather than flying.
Kevin Hollinrake, the Tory Chairman, accused Burnham of hypocrisy, saying: “He has Ministers in his Cabinet who attacked previous Prime Ministers for doing exactly this.
“To add insult to injury, his own Energy Secretary wants to tax people more to stop them flying. If this is how the Prime Minister is going to travel to No. 10 North, then the cost of this project really will be sky high.”
Worth reading in full.
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A very interesting story has emerged about just how long ago that building that hosts GCHQ had a lease taken out for the messiah’s new northern base – and no it was not before he became PM, no it was not before he became leader, and no it was not before he was elected as an MP but it was before a by-election was even called. The owners Manchester City Council received an application from the government to lease the space in the building on 11 May – 3 days later the snivelling Simons resigned as an MP. The lease agreement was approved on 10 June – EIGHT days before the by-election!!
And another thing that smells to high heaven is the publicity stunt double decker bus. You don’t just take a huge bus to a paintshop for a respray like a car. That had to have been booked in before he was leader or PM. Has the country just been taken for mugs with a coup that has been planned for months and the blubbing Two Tier’s I will fight on just theatrics given the new northern HQ building was already booked.
I remember being part of a discussion decades ago, talking about transport, and even back then people were moaning about traffic and clogged unreliable trains. The chairman of the meeting said – there is one sure way to improve transport: make all senior politicians travel by it for all travel within the nation. A few laughed and said…but they would never get anything done! The chairman replied, exactly, so they would ensure the system works.
My point, if the road network was good, and the nation not overpopulated, a drive or train ride to Manchester would not be too much of an issue.
That shadow under his nose could be mistaken for a moustache ….
Private jet?
Perhaps semantically correct but it’s the largest plane in the A320 class, capable of seating up to 240 proles in ‘Ryanair’ fit out, with prominente VIP versions seating 50 or as low as 18 (room for a game of footy perhaps?
Lumo estimates the flight cost for London to Manchester at around £6,000, but the parking and insurance for the rest of the day would be around treble that.
Was there Champagne and canapes served?
So Burnham is a Prize Pig of the Labour Party Variety and a Prize Hypocrite.
Is this news?
Not really. It was entirely predictable.
Napoleon is always right.
Was UK energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh with him? It was her who telling us two days we mustn’t fly to save the planet.
He needs at least one nickname, maybe it could be Airmiles Andy and/or Bullshit Burnham.
Burnhapoleon.
Crash and Burn’em
Andy Crapp ?
Perhaps when the timetable for his 10 North sessions are established, they will have to book batches of seats on certain trains. No discounts for them from the operator, no doubt!
They could book the entire train carriage nearest the front or rear of the train,with a security guard at the communicating door from the next carriage for each journey. Not only would it be cheaper, it would eliminate travel time from his office to the airport. But I guess that wouldn’t sit well with his vanity.
I have always regarded the Midlands as ending just north of where I live – if you draw a line from the North Welsh coastline across to Lincoln, that was the boundary. That would put parts of Manchester in the Midlands not the North. I yearn for one of the AI video people like Crewkerne to make a video of Sean Bean dressed as Ned Stark, slapping Burnham across the face telling him that he’s not the King o t’North, cos Manchester ain’t the bloody North, Yorkshire mate, that’s the bloody North.
And, why the hell all this focus on Manchester anyway. What about the rest of the country, East, West, North East. We are continually conned with the supposed economic miracle of the town, but what we actually know now is that disposable income for Mancunians during his period went down more than any other part of the country, he put it into more debt than any other mayor bar one, having gone down, homelessness was rapidly rising under his stewardship, he bunged shed loads of cash to favoured builders and got his wife a job managing EV charging points, something she’d never done until he gave the company… Read more »
Like tax fraud Rayner, amazing how the biggest communists make the best capitalists in their do as I say not as I do lives.
Even more stunning is the amount of money that Ranting Ginge has been paid for speaking gigs since she resigned as a minister.
Why should anyone be surprised at any of this? They’re all about telling us – the plebs – what to do, while judging themselves too important to be bound by the same rules. And by “they” I mean everyone in the upper echelons of the uniparty.
I do wonder how much it will cost us to have Burnham running two Number 10s concurrently, not just in terms of his transport expenses, but also the expenses incurred by all his flunkeys and other civil servants traipsing between the capital and the provinces. It’s a silly and pointless political gesture made at my expense, and I’m not happy about it.
Is he going to spend any time in his constituency as well?
So, Not-My-Prime-Minister has created a ZIL-lane in the sky, which is both laughably hypocritical and not in the least surprising.
ZIL Lanes ! You beat me to it! Leader Burnham taking centre stage, putting the little people at his service and making them pay for the privilege.
It’s all so wonderfully “egalitarian”, isn’t it? Soviet-style “equality”: one rule for us, another rule for him.
Burnham has just shown that he is not prepared to demonstrate any awareness of the connection between people yielding taxes on their hard-earned income and government profligacy. He is obviously convinced the public should fund his grandiosity. This is a mentality that only knows how to spend what others generate.
Priceless! Friendly “Local-Lad-of-the-People” Burnham didn’t waste a minute, did he?
I don’t actually mind how many flights politicians take, or how much champagne they guzzle, as long as they don’t lecture us proles about it.
Mind you, if I were PM, the first thing I would do is auction off that flea-bitten Lazy Larry the Cat! He’s probably wired up with a microphone in his collar anyway. 🙂