History has a warning for Andy Burnham
Andy Burnham became Prime Minister today.
He's the most popular politician in Britain, and he's earned it. Warm, instinctive, makes people feel something most politicians can't. That's what won him the room, the by-election and the leadership.
None of it tells us whether he can run the country.
History is blunt on this. Since the war, only two Prime Ministers genuinely reshaped Britain: Attlee and Thatcher. Everyone else sits below them, and most were at their worst at the very start. There's no training for the job. No manual. As Anthony Seldon puts it, people think they can walk into Downing Street with a coach-load of special advisers in their mid-twenties and run the country. They can't.
Here's what history keeps telling us. The thing that gets a leader the top job is often the very thing they have to be most wary of once they're in it.
For Burnham, that's the warmth. The need to be liked.
There's a name for this. Your superpower and your derailer are usually the same trait. The strength you're known for, the one that got you the top job, pushed too far or used at the wrong moment, becomes the thing that trips you up. Warmth becomes the need to please. Confidence becomes arrogance. Decisiveness becomes steamrolling. The derailer isn't a different quality. It's the superpower, overused, under pressure.
This isn't another kicking. He might turn out to be good at it, and if he does, it'll be because he built the guardrails early. But the job has chewed up people who walked in looking more ready than him, and history has left a fairly clear map of where it tends to go wrong.
So here's the map. Four warnings, drawn from the last seven Prime Ministers, and what each one means for anyone running a team.
Warning one: build the team around roles, not mates
The first job of a Prime Minister, Seldon says, is to "secure the citadel." Get the right people into No. 10 and keep them there.
It's also the thing they most reliably get wrong. Because they build the team around the people they trust, not the roles they actually need.
Theresa May walked in with two chiefs of staff who controlled all access, wrote a manifesto with the Cabinet kept in the dark, and blew up her own election. Boris Johnson ran for sixteen months with no chief of staff at all, then let his court tear itself apart. Keir Starmer's No. 10 was at civil war within weeks, one chief of staff gone in under a hundred days.
And the quiet killer sits underneath all of it: yes-men. Liz Truss appointed people who agreed with her. Forty-nine days later she was finished.
The management lesson: Build your team around the roles the work needs, not the people you owe. The loyal mate who's been with you since the start is an asset. Until he's the only voice in the room. You need at least one person with the standing to look you in the eye and say no. If everyone around you enables you, you don't have a team. You have a blind spot with a payroll.
Warning two: a weak centre makes leaders hoard
Britain runs a highly centralised country from a surprisingly weak centre. And a weak centre does a strange thing to a leader. It makes them grab everything.
Tony Blair described the machinery of government as a shiny Rolls Royce parked outside Downing Street that he wasn't allowed to drive. Responsibility without power. So he governed off the sofa, a few advisers in a back room, Cabinet sidelined. He later admitted he wasted his entire first term learning the levers weren't connected to anything.
Think about that. His first term. Gone. Working out how his own office actually worked.
The instinct is always the same. The centre feels weak, so the leader pulls more and more into their own hands, and then wonders why nothing moves.
The management lesson: Your job is to set direction and then get out of the way of delivery. Not to do everyone's job for them because you don't trust the system to run without you. If you're the bottleneck, the answer isn't to work harder in the middle of everything. It's to decide, on day one, what you're actually for, and build the thing that lets the rest happen without you standing over it.
Warning three: a majority protects no one
Beyond the building, a leader has to run the team, the wider group, and a load of relationships they didn't choose. This is where warm, consensual leaders have historically been most exposed. Because governing is a series of hard choices that make somebody unhappy.
Truss sacked the Treasury's top official on her first night, sidelined the watchdog, and pushed through a budget nobody had bought into. Gone in seven weeks. Starmer had a landslide and still lost votes to his own side, U-turned on winter fuel, drained the trust anyway. A big majority didn't save him.
The Institute for Government's hardest line, aimed straight at Burnham: he'll need to get more comfortable with being unpopular. A mayor can pass the blame upward. A Prime Minister can't. The buck stops on his desk now.
The management lesson: Bring the system with you, don't declare war on it. And accept the part of the job nobody warns you about when you get promoted: being liked and being in charge are not the same thing. The day you stop being one of the lads and start being the one who makes the call, some people won't like you for it. Do it anyway. Popularity is not a strategy.
Warning four: a mandate is not a plan
The last one is the big one. The thing that separates the two post-war greats from everyone else. Turning a win into actual delivery.
Starmer won huge and arrived with no plan to govern. The verdict: a mandate a mile wide and an inch deep, a government that never told a story about what it was for. Blair confessed he didn't find his agenda until his second term.
Winning the room and running the thing are two completely different jobs. Every incoming team believes it'll be different for them. History says it rarely is. As the Institute for Government put it, straight at him: simply being Andy Burnham is not enough to make government work better.
Vibes are not machinery. Ambition only delivers if it becomes priorities, milestones, and someone accountable for each one.
The management lesson: Walk in with a short list of priorities already agreed, and drive them. Don't spend your honeymoon working out what you're for, because your capital is highest on day one and it only falls from there. Have a story. Repeat it past the point where you're sick of it. That's usually the point people finally start hearing it.
The pattern, in one line
Here's what ties every one of them together. Every leader had a superpower. And every superpower became a derailer, unless they built the team and the machine to keep it in check.
Blair's persuasion. Brown's mastery of detail. Cameron's confidence. May's diligence. Johnson's charm. Truss's conviction. Starmer's forensic caution.
Every one a superpower. Every one curdled into its derailer the moment it met the reality of running things.
Burnham's superpower is warmth. His derailer is the need to be liked, and they're the same trait. The job won't reward being liked on its own. It'll reward grip, a team that tells him the truth, and a plan he can actually deliver.
None of that means he can't do it. Warmth might be exactly what a tired, cynical Westminster needs, if he builds the guardrails around it in time. That's the whole game. History isn't a verdict on him. It's a warning he gets to act on.
Let that land for a second, because it isn't just about him.
What managers can take from this
Your superpower is also your derailer. The exact thing that got you promoted is the thing most likely to trip you up, and nobody warns you about it. If you're decisive, you'll steamroll. If you're liked, you'll dodge the hard conversation. Name your derailer before it names you.
Hire the person who'll tell you no. A team built to enable you is a blind-spot machine. You need at least one voice with the standing to disagree, and you need to actually listen when they do.
Set direction, then get out of the way. A weak leader hoards. A strong one decides what matters, then trusts the system to deliver it. If everything runs through you, you're the bottleneck, not the boss.
A mandate is not a plan. Winning the argument, the pitch, the promotion, none of it is the same as delivering. Walk in with priorities, drive them hard, and tell the story until you're bored of it.
Likeable got Burnham the job. Only those three things, the grip, the honest team, and the plan, will make him good at it. Same goes for you.
Reply and tell me: what's the shadow side of your biggest strength as a manager? I read every one.
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Arran Russell
Founder, Set The Tone
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Ps: If you're the person everyone likes but nothing moves without you, that's not a personality trait. It's a management problem, and it's fixable. Hit reply.