Labour winds are blowing towards Burnham – and Streeting knows it

Now former health secretary and Manchester mayor could be about to make an unlikely deal to oust Keir Starmer

Who said the Labour party needs “a battle of ideas, not of personalities or petty factionalism … It needs to be broad, and it needs the best possible field of candidates”?

Until Thursday morning, almost everyone would have attributed those words to Andy Burnham, the mayor or Greater Manchester. But those were the closing paragraphs of the former health secretary Wes Streeting’s resignation letter, a cadence so similar to Burnham’s own that it cannot be accidental.