RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Burnham’s Britain is a state-run Fantasy Island of rigged elections, sky-high taxes and rampant welfare

My first TUC conference was in Brighton, in 1978, when ‘Sunny Jim’ Callaghan reneged on a promise to his union paymasters to call a snap General Election.

Having banked their cheques for his campaign war-chest, he mocked them in his keynote speech with a clumsy rendition of the old music hall song Waiting At The Church, about a jilted bride. He left them in the lurch.

That night in the hotel bars all hell broke loose, as the unions plotted their revenge. Callaghan’s refusal to go to the country provoked the notorious Winter of Discontent wave of strikes against his attempts to peg pay rises at five per cent.

Rubbish piled up in the streets and the dead went unburied. The resultant public disgust ushered in the Thatcher revolution and an unbroken 18 years of Tory rule.

I was there, too, at the Labour conference in Bournemouth in 1985 when Neil Kinnock finally summoned up the backbone to tackle Derek Hatton’s Militant Tendency head-on.

And also in Blackpool in 1994 when Tony Blair launched ‘New Labour’ with a pledge to scrap the sacred Clause 4 commitment to the ‘common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. I was in the hall for all these historic speeches, as a newspaper reporter and columnist and subsequently as presenter of live radio and TV shows.

They have gone down in Labour history as transformative or treachery, depending on your point of view. Callaghan’s cowardice in postponing an election he‘d probably have won condemned Labour to almost two decades in the wilderness. Kinnochio’s crusade against Militant didn’t pay off, either. He crashed to defeat by Thatcher in 1987 and to John Major five years later.

The only truly transformative address was Blair’s decision to shed Labour’s socialist baggage, in the teeth of entrenched far-Left opposition. He modernised the party and delivered three stunning election victories.

So where will Andy Burnham’s ‘Back To The Future’ speech in Liverpool this week figure when the dust settles? It was received rapturously in the hall.

The Boys In The Bubble showered him with praise, but much of the media has a tendency to get swept up in the contagious conference hysteria. A sort of Stockholm Syndrome sets in, a sense of proportion can be lost.

I admit, certainly in the early days, I wasn’t immune to conference fever. But by the time my nightly Sky News show ended in 2004, I concluded that the best way to cover any of these gatherings was from as far away as possible.

Inside the hermetically sealed conference centre, the politicians, delegates and pundits may feel they are at the epicentre of the universe. Outside, more people are watching Bargain Hunt.

Blair’s genius was to go over the heads of the activists and appeal directly to the voters beyond. Whatever you think of Blair, Kinnock or even Callaghan, they at least had the courage to go against the grain, to tackle the vested interests in their party.

Burnham chose cheap applause. He was preaching to the choir, telling them what they wanted to hear, and to the Green and Lib Dem supporters he’ll need to stand any chance of remaining in Downing Street.

I thought the way in which he milked his family background and exploited his father’s death was mawkish and distasteful.

We’ve all got a backstory we could peddle. Burnham told us his grandad worked on Liverpool docks and bought the house in which he was born. Big deal. My grandad worked on London docks and bought a similar home by the sound of it. I was born in my grandparents’ front bedroom, but that doesn’t qualify me to be PM.

Burnham’s dad was Labour through and through, as he kept reminding us. My grandad, despite belonging to the stevedores’ union, voted Tory all his life and was so disgusted at the state of Labour’s Britain in the Sixties that he emigrated to Australia as a Ten Pound Pom.

Call me callous, and anyone who loses a parent deserves our sympathy. But the place to grieve is in private, not to parade your grief onstage for political gain. As the late columnist John Junor, formerly of this parish, used to remark: Pass the sick bag, Alice.

Burnham poses as a ‘straight kinda guy’ to borrow from Blair’s self-estimation. But his brief tribute to Starmer – ‘Thank you, Keir’ – was nauseating, especially when you consider he spent over a year scheming to stab him in the back and succeed him as PM.

Britpop Burnham likes to sing along with the Common People. He came from Wigan with a thirst for knowledge, He studied English at a Cambridge College…

But he’s also never had a proper job in his life, Mayor of Manchester being largely ceremonial and his ‘achievements’ based on the efforts of others. He graduated from Spad to MP to Minister in a New Labour government he now trashes as being part of a failed ‘neo-liberal’ experiment.

This week he cynically unveiled plans for electoral reform, primarily to stop a united Right – and Nigel Farage in particular – forming a government. To wild cheers, he said someone with just 30 per cent of the vote should never be allowed to become PM.

Dear Kettle, love Pot.

Yes, there is something skewed with an election system which rewards over 4 million Reform voters with just five MPs while the Lib Dems get 72 on the basis of 500,000 fewer votes.

But need I remind him Labour is sitting on a huge majority on the basis of a 33 per cent share – and the support of just one in five of those eligible to vote. Burnham was anointed PM unopposed after gaining just 25,000 votes in Makerfield. That’s what I call an elective dictatorship.

He’s also planning to reverse Brexit by stealth, if not altogether, something else for which he has no mandate. Again, let me remind him, 17.4 million people voted Leave. Just 9.7 million voted Labour last time.

Yet, while doing nothing about the defence of the realm or the Net Zero-driven cost of living crisis, he’s already announcing grand ten-year plans, a programme of nationalisation and more power to the unions. He intends to turn the clock back to the 1970s, which he seems to think was some kind of golden age.

He was still in short trousers when I was cutting my teeth as a Labour and industrial correspondent in the Seventies. It wasn’t all space-hoppers and Curly-Wurlies.

State-controlled industries were strike-infested, sclerotic and loss-making. When I was covering British Leyland, there was a grand total of 27 separate strikes across the company on a single day. When the toolmakers went back to work, the delivery drivers walked out. At Longbridge, workers on the night-shift were literally sleeping on the job.

Back then, it took six months to get the Post Office to install a telephone in your home.

Try telling that to a generation who upgrade their mobiles every five minutes. If you wanted a cooker, you could buy one only from the nationalised electricity or gas boards and then wait obediently until they could be bothered to hook it up.

And so on, and so on and scooby, dooby-dooby. (Which might explain why minister Lucy Powell has started calling working people ‘Everyday People’.)

Meanwhile, in another piece of conference madness, some obscure minister has smeared traditional British pubs and black labradors as a ‘far-Right fantasy’.

Doesn’t she know that Black Labs Matter, too?

But this is what we can expect in Burnham’s Britain. Not a ‘far-Right fantasy’ but a state-run Fantasy Island of rigged elections, sky-high taxes, useless union-controlled public services and uncontrolled immigration.

They may have cheered his ‘Hope Again’ hypocrisy to the rafters in Liverpool, but I’m hoping the British public are wise enough to see through the hype.

Let’s also hope that if and when he does pluck up the courage to call an election, he suffers the same fate as Sunny Jim Callaghan.