Brexit’s Economic Costs Are Pushing Britain Back Toward Europe

The central economic judgement on Brexit was treated as disputed in scale, not in direction. George Parker pointed to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s standing estimate that leaving the EU has left Britain about 4 per cent of GDP worse off than it would otherwise have been. He said Rachel Reeves has also begun citing studies that put the damage higher, at 6 or 8 per cent of GDP. In fiscal terms, Parker translated those estimates into roughly £40bn, £50bn or £60bn of tax revenues — money that would be useful in the current fiscal context.

That was not presented as a claim that every post-Brexit change has been negative. Parker noted areas where the British economy has probably benefited from greater regulatory flexibility outside the EU. Mario Draghi’s report on EU competitiveness, he said, argued that the EU had overregulated and stifled growth in some areas, particularly technology. But Parker’s bottom line was that “most economists would agree it’s been bad for Britain.”

Katie Martin put the market signal more bluntly. On referendum night, sterling was trading at about $1.50 when it looked as if the UK would remain in the EU. As the Leave result became clear, it fell sharply, down to roughly $1.20, and, in her words, “has never recovered.” For Martin, that exchange-rate move captured a durable change in how investors view the UK: it is harder to attract foreign capital.

The borrowing backdrop has changed just as starkly. Martin said the 10-year gilt yield was about 1 per cent at the time of the referendum and about 4.7 per cent now. She was careful to say many factors explain that increase, but the practical effect is clear: the UK borrows at much higher cost and faces a more difficult external financing environment.

Britain’s growth path has also shifted. Martin said the UK used to track the US more closely; since the vote, it has “peeled away” from that trajectory and, strangely enough, moved closer to Europe. Again, she stressed that other forces are involved. The best case she hears from economists and investors is that the worst may be past because some effects were front-loaded around departure. But the route out is not self-healing. Turning the tide, in her view, would require a “meaningful rapprochement” with Europe.

Delphine Strauss described the evidence base through the metrics used in recent studies. One approach compares Britain’s post-2016 performance with countries that looked similar before the referendum. A study published at the start of this year, comparing the UK with more than 30 countries, estimated the GDP hit at about 8 per cent — higher than the official OBR estimate. Another, more micro-level method compares firms more exposed to the EU with those less exposed. That produced a smaller estimate, around 6 per cent in GDP per capita.

Strauss said there is not much conflict about the direction of the effect. Whichever method is used, the results show a distinct impact on GDP per capita. They show an even sharper effect on business investment, which she suggested may reflect the management time and energy consumed by Brexit itself rather than by other projects that might otherwise have happened. She also pointed to smaller but still damaging effects on productivity and employment, and a sharp fall in the UK’s share of goods exports. Services have fared less badly.

Stephen Bush rejected the argument that Germany’s weak growth somehow proves Britain suffered no Brexit damage. He said that claim “defies plausibility” when measured against ordinary commercial experience: many people who buy or sell goods have encountered transactions that no longer happen because moving goods between the UK and EU has become too burdensome, or because small businesses have decided it is not worth the trouble.

Germany’s problems, in Bush’s view, are not an argument against Britain’s former EU membership. One of Brexit’s less discussed costs, he argued, is that it changed the EU as well as the UK. Britain and the EU have both become “less Anglo-Saxon” since separation. The Leave vision that Britain would become more liberal and more free-trading has not materialised, he said; Britain has become more protectionist. At the same time, the EU lost what Bush called the “Anglo-Dutch alliance” — an engine of British prosperity inside the bloc — and became more inclined to regulate first.

That matters because the UK can now diverge on areas such as AI and financial services, but from a smaller market and with less influence. Bush’s preferred counterfactual was not a Britain freed from Brussels regulation, but a Britain still helping lead a pro-competition agenda inside the whole EU.

Brexit produced concrete freedoms, but the examples offered were specific, sectoral and modest. Parker mentioned gene-edited crops. Strauss pointed to London listing rules, where there has been some flexibility to deviate from EU rules. Bush cited parts of the Edinburgh reforms, saying some would not have been possible inside the EU and had been positive.

There was also a broader, more indirect silver lining. Bush said the growth shock from Brexit had, under Rishi Sunak and then the outgoing Labour government, helped move Britain beyond the post-financial-crisis period in which it was “declaring war” on one of its comparative advantages. Brexit’s economic damage, in that account, forced governments to take growth and financial services more seriously. But he called that “a pretty tiny silver lining on a pretty big cloud.”

Katie Martin struggled to identify a large benefit beyond paperwork providers for customs and some areas of regulatory flexibility. She agreed with Bush that the EU misses Britain’s role in European finance. In her view, the UK had been “driving the bus” on European finance, and its absence is one reason Europe has struggled to simplify regulation, remove duplication and build a more dynamic financial markets ecosystem.

One of the largest feared costs did not materialise in the way many had expected. Before the referendum, Parker said, the great fear in the FT building was that the City of London would be eviscerated: huge job losses, major business relocation and a hollowing-out of financial services. That did not happen. The City and the wider British financial services industry adapted. Martin agreed that the City survived in far better shape than many predictions suggested, though she was less sure than Parker that financial services firms would reject a return to the single market if offered.

Martin also acknowledged another point Leave campaigners can plausibly claim: the predicted immediate cliff-edge recession did not arrive. That made the early post-referendum debate awkward for those who had warned of severe damage. But she argued that the long-term forecasts of economic harm have since been borne out.

The difficulty, then, is not that Brexit produced no operational flexibility at all. It is that the benefits identified were fragmented and incremental, while the costs were macroeconomic, fiscal and strategic.

Strauss added a political consequence that could matter in any future shift back towards Europe. Even small regulatory deviations can create interest groups. Companies that benefit from new UK-specific rules may object if there is a sudden rush back into EU structures. The route towards Europe would therefore be contested not only by ideology, but by commercial arrangements created after departure.

George Parker said the Brexit referendum introduced a toxicity into British political discourse that he had not previously experienced, though he saw a foretaste in the Scottish independence referendum two years earlier. Both campaigns, he argued, were bitter identity contests built around the idea that power was being exercised somewhere else and that “the other” was to blame: London in the Scottish case, Brussels in the Brexit case.

That helps explain what appears at first to be a contradiction: widespread regret about Brexit, but strong polling for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Parker said Farage hardly talks about Brexit now because he understands that voters do not want to revisit it. Instead, the grievance has moved. The claim is no longer simply that Brussels thwarted Britain, but that Westminster failed to deliver Brexit as imagined. The target has shifted from Brussels to the political class in London.

Stephen Bush approached Farage’s position through the limits as well as the strength of his appeal. He described Farage as a “used car salesman” whose previous vehicle is widely disliked, yet a quarter of the country appears willing to buy another. But Bush stressed that Farage’s support is still around 25 per cent. Poll leads can translate into local election strength, but in parliamentary by-elections voters have reached for whatever lever stops him. Bush cited an Ipsos finding that 21.5 per cent thought Farage would be a great prime minister, while 59 per cent thought he would be a bad one. Those numbers, in Bush’s view, make the apparent contradiction less mysterious: Farage is the candidate of those who are not experiencing regret.

Brexit’s effects on the premierships of the past decade were, in Bush’s view, direct and severe. David Cameron would not have had to resign without the referendum result. Theresa May was left “on the hook” for Vote Leave’s impossible promises, which Bush said would always wreck her premiership. The Conservative party then turned to Boris Johnson because it believed he was both a winner and incapable of being prime minister; Bush said Johnson proved both judgements right. Keir Starmer, in this account, ran on the premise that he could keep Johnson’s impossible promises simply by being diligent and sober in office, but that too proved illusory.

The larger damage was not only toxicity but a collapse in honest talk about trade-offs. Brexit legitimised, in Bush’s account, the idea that talking about trade-offs was weakness: promise the moon and leave tomorrow to manage the consequences. Until Britain relearns how to discuss trade-offs, he argued, it will continue to cycle through prime ministers as each discovers that promises cannot abolish constraints.

Delphine Strauss and Parker both widened the frame beyond Brexit. Parker said the roots of political instability go back to the financial crisis, stagnant living standards, weak income growth, declining public services and accumulating anger. Brexit compounded that, but did not create all of it. Strauss noted that before the referendum there were signs of improvement: strong jobs growth and wages beginning to recover. Parker recalled growth around 3 per cent going into the 2015 election, though he described it as catch-up growth.

Bush said it is impossible to know the true counterfactual. Britain would still have been exposed to high gas prices because its energy system is tied to gas; it would still have been exposed to financial services because that is one of its strengths; it had already suffered the 2008 financial crisis. But without Brexit, he argued, governments could at least have focused on those problems. From 2016 until Sunak became prime minister, no government had the bandwidth to concentrate on much beyond Britain’s institutional relationship with the EU.

Katie Martin pointed to Spain as a contrast: an EU member that pursued very high immigration and an aggressive solar energy project, helping untether itself from gas-price pressures. Her point was not that the EU is perfect, but that countries can innovate around structural challenges whether inside or outside the bloc. Britain poured an enormous amount of political energy into the Brexit project instead.

A return to full EU membership is not, in Parker’s view, a likely near-term scenario. Polls suggest regret about leaving, but that is not the same as a stable appetite for rejoining once the conditions are specified. Support begins to evaporate when voters are asked about the single currency, large EU budget contributions and free movement.

Parker also argued that the public does not want to reopen the Brexit argument. Like COVID, Brexit has become part of the national psychology that many people have put “in a box” and do not want to revisit. That creates a political ceiling on even a pro-European government.

The realistic path, according to Parker and Martin, is incremental. Keir Starmer had said incrementalism was no longer enough, but Parker said the truth is that the UK will move back towards European integration step by painstaking step. Before a postponed UK-EU summit, the kinds of measures under discussion included reducing trade barriers for food and drink, co-operation on energy and a youth mobility scheme. Parker said these would make a tangible difference but are nothing like re-entering the customs union or single market.

Katie Martin agreed that incrementalism is the only politically viable route. Britain has an allergic reaction to talking about Brexit, she said, and only the 10-year anniversary forces the country to confront how much has changed. The EU, meanwhile, would impose serious demands if Britain sought to rejoin, with the single currency the most obvious. Europe also cannot risk Britain changing its mind every decade. Martin said Britain had been a good member of the EU, but “we can’t push it too far.”

Delphine Strauss emphasised the EU’s perspective. There is little point, she said, in negotiating seriously with a “manifestly unstable negotiating partner.” Conditions could change, and to some extent already have changed because of US withdrawal from NATO commitments, broader geopolitical anxiety and the renewed emphasis on defence. But for a future negotiation to be meaningful, Britain would need a clearer mandate. She said the next manifesto under an Andy Burnham premiership could matter if it created a clearer basis for what the UK was trying to negotiate.

Stephen Bush was sceptical that changing from Starmer to Burnham would by itself unlock the relationship. Burnham, he noted, is not a stranger to Brussels: as a New Labour cabinet minister he would have dealt regularly with EU counterparts. But by the end of Starmer’s premiership, Bush said, European politicians were tired of a position that wanted a closer relationship without changing any of the red lines inherited from Sunak. Unless Britain is willing to move on payments, free movement of goods, people and services, or customs union membership, the relationship may already be as close as it can get.

Bush also offered a historical warning. Britain only joined the European project after repeated attempts and after politics changed on the other side of the table, particularly in France. Similarly, he argued, EU membership for Britain will only become realistic again when the EU no longer looks like something that could change with a UK election. That means the British right would have to learn to love the European project again. He suggested this could happen faster than expected if the European project itself shifts in a more Faragist direction.

Parker saw some areas where UK and EU interests are beginning to align despite the divergence. Defence is one. The external threat from Russia is pushing Britain and the EU into discussions about co-operation and joint defence funds. Global trade conflict is another. Britain is caught between three large blocs — China, the US and the EU — and is being forced to consider European procurement arrangements designed to protect the European industrial base from external competition.

That creates the conditions for closer integration. For Parker, the customs union is the easiest next “big step” beyond incremental measures. He said it could plausibly appear in a Labour manifesto. Rejoining it would mean giving up independent trade arrangements of the kind Starmer had been proud of, though Parker’s list was explicitly off the cuff: he mentioned America, India, South Korea, Switzerland and perhaps the Gulf while acknowledging he might have missed some. His broader point was that the economic gains from such arrangements are a fraction of what Britain lost through Brexit.

Strauss made the point more starkly: the OBR scores the impact of the UK’s post-Brexit trade deals as “pretty much nothing.” The counterfactual is not necessarily no trade deal with those countries; it may be the trade deal the EU has, which could be quite similar.

Asked how a trading nation such as the UK can grow if EU membership is not on the agenda for five or 10 years, Delphine Strauss resisted the premise that any government can simply generate growth. There are incremental changes to the EU relationship that would help. There are also domestic reforms that may not produce immediate results but could matter over time: planning, energy infrastructure and other measures already set in motion.

Some of Burnham’s interests could be positive depending on their design. Fiscal devolution, for example, is something many people have wanted for a long time, though its precise meaning remains unclear. Strauss also identified AI as a major uncertainty. Nobody knows exactly how deployment will play out, but the UK has a potentially strong starting position: skills, concentration in professional services, London clusters, and investment around the King’s Cross tech hub.

Katie Martin located that growth question in Europe’s wider dependence on the US. Europe relies not only on the dollar as the world’s dominant currency, but on Google, Amazon Web Services, Visa and other American infrastructure embedded in daily commerce and finance. She referred to an FT story from May about international war-crimes lawyers sanctioned by the US who, as she described it, woke up to find booking.com reservations gone, Expedia unusable and UPS packages returned. For Martin, the lesson in Europe is that the continent cannot continue with this degree of dependence on American systems simply because the US has been a friend and ally for 80 years.

Europe needs homegrown alternatives, she said, and there is no reason they could not be “born and raised” in the UK as well as in the EU. The implication is that industrial strategy in technology, payments, cloud and financial infrastructure is not separable from the UK’s European relationship.

Martin also described the UK tech sector’s recurring failure point. Britain is good at incubating ideas and early-stage companies. The problem comes when companies need funding rounds in the billions; they tend to go to the US because that is where the largest pools of capital are. She did not claim to have a simple solution, but said the issue is not talent, ideas or early-stage capability. It is scale-up capital, a problem shared across Europe. Working together would make a solution easier.

Strauss added that technology is already the fastest-growing part of the UK economy, though it receives less attention than it should. It is also becoming more productive, which is unusual in the UK economy and therefore positive. Financial services used to be the economy’s clear motor, but productivity growth there tailed off after the financial crisis and has been a drag since. The tech sector, by contrast, appears to have “things happening.”

The growth path described here was not a rerun of the Leave argument that independence alone unlocks dynamism. It combined domestic reform, a stronger technology base, closer European co-operation where scale matters, and a more candid assessment of what post-Brexit trade policy has and has not delivered.

Andy Burnham was discussed as the very likely next prime minister, but the fiscal question was framed less as a personality test than as a constraint on any incoming leader. Katie Martin objected to Burnham’s suggestion that Britain should not be “in hock” to the gilt markets. The problem, she said, is that “in hock” means owing people money — and Britain literally owes money to the bond markets.

With debt at about 100 per cent of GDP, Martin said it is absurd to suggest otherwise. Any politician needs a constructive relationship with the market. She compared hostility to bond markets with the earlier habit of blaming the EU: it turns an external constraint into a scapegoat. Burnham, in her account, has had a somewhat wobbly relationship with markets. He recently had a chance to speak to hedge fund managers — important participants in the UK government bond market — but pulled out late, citing scheduling issues. Scheduling problems happen, she said, but the relationship needs to work more smoothly.

Martin’s larger point was about trade-offs. UK governments have “pretty much forgotten” how to talk to voters about tax and the fact that desired services must be paid for. If money does not come through taxation, it often comes through borrowing. When the bond market functions well, it can be a relatively affordable funding source. But the UK’s structurally high borrowing costs mean debt service consumes large sums. Martin cited Rachel Reeves’ statement that the UK spends four times more on debt repayment than on nurses.

For any new administration, Martin said, the job is to pull borrowing costs as low as possible. That means controlling public spending, not borrowing too much and preventing inflation from running out of control. Markets may still lend if a government slips, but they will charge more. Martin argued that politicians should translate each fraction of a percentage point in borrowing costs into nurses, hospitals and schools. That is how the trade-off becomes legible.

Parker noted that Burnham had already been forced to retreat quickly not only from the “in hock” language, but also from the suggestion that defence borrowing could somehow be parked off the books. Parker characterised the idea as pretending borrowing would not count if called something else.

The question then became whether markets distinguish between borrowing for investment and borrowing for day-to-day spending. Parker mentioned arguments from figures such as Lord Jim O’Neill, who has been advising Burnham, that markets might be more relaxed if extra borrowing were directed to projects designated by an independent body as likely to boost long-term growth.

Martin said markets claim to make that distinction, but in reality the mechanics are supply and demand. If more bonds are issued, borrowing costs rise. She allowed that markets would be more receptive at the margin to borrowing clearly aimed at growth — energy infrastructure or innovative industries, for example. Defence is necessary, she said, but does not itself create additional growth. At the end of the day, “extra borrowing is extra borrowing.”

She also cautioned against overreading recent gilt moves as a referendum on Burnham. UK borrowing costs had drifted higher during recent political drama, but Martin said this was not simply because gilt markets disliked Burnham. In her account, global borrowing costs had been rising because of war in Iran and higher energy prices, and bond markets dislike inflation. She said Burnham could get lucky if markets concluded the Iran crisis was effectively over, while stressing that the memorandum of understanding had not yet been seen and the substance of any US-Iran agreement was not clear. In that scenario, falling global borrowing costs could allow Burnham to take office during a decline in UK borrowing costs and receive credit for it.

The speculation over Burnham’s chancellor was treated as a signal of the same underlying uncertainty: what kind of trade-offs would a Burnham government make, and who would enforce them? Stephen Bush said most Labour MPs in Westminster do not know Burnham well enough to know which version will enter Downing Street. It could be the Manchester mayor with a pro-business, even Blairite, emphasis on getting growth first and redistributing later. Or it could be the soft-left figure whose project is defined by control of buses and the “essentials of life.”

That uncertainty explains the internal lobbying. Bush did not read continued chatter about Ed Miliband as proof Burnham still intends to appoint him. It may simply mean Miliband’s supporters will keep advocating for him until the decision is made. He listed possible alternatives including Shabana Mahmood, Darren Jones and Heidi Alexander, whom he called underpriced because of her long-term loyalty to Burnham. He also noted that Wes Streeting had not been known for economic views until very recently, though he had been bound by collective responsibility.

George Parker said Miliband has thought deeply about the economy and has a long track record in the Treasury. That may be precisely why he does not get the job. Parker said some people argue that appointing Ed Miliband as chancellor would mean handing the premiership to him. Miliband is unusual, Parker added, in having angered left-wing trade union leaders, people in the City and many Labour MPs. Parker’s guess was that Miliband would not be the next chancellor.

The alternatives carry their own signals. Shabana Mahmood and Wes Streeting are strong communicators, but their economic views are less clear. Darren Jones is seen as a fiscal hawk. Johnny Reynolds, a former business secretary and Manchester MP, might reassure some in business and the City. Pat McFadden was another possible figure. But Parker noted the political optics: without Miliband, the team could start to look like “a Blairite tribute act,” especially with James Purnell as chief of staff and talk of David Miliband returning as foreign secretary. Burnham may need someone from the left somewhere in the senior team.

Bush added that Burnham is self-aware about one weakness: he has joked that he was not a very good chief secretary to the Treasury because he did not like saying no. Bush therefore expects Burnham to want a chancellor who can do much of the saying no for him — someone who can tell colleagues that the prime minister’s attractive promises cost too much.

The qualification the markets appear to want is not necessarily economic intellectualism. Lucy Fisher noted that successful chancellors have not always been serious economic thinkers. Strauss cited Alistair Darling as a respected chancellor without presenting him as an intellectual economist. Bush went further: intellectual chancellors often have poor records, naming Kwasi Kwarteng and Stafford Cripps, and saying the group of chancellors who were both intellectuals and good chancellors “begins and ends with Nigel Lawson.” Strauss said that when she speaks to markets about potential chancellors, strong economic intellectual views are not the main criterion.

On immigration, Delphine Strauss gave the standard economists’ answer: in aggregate and over time, immigration does not solve a labour shortage because it increases both supply and demand. More workers also mean more consumers and more demand for services.

That does not make immigration economically irrelevant. Strauss said it can smooth demographic adjustment by shifting the population somewhat towards working age, at least initially, and making a rising pension bill less painful. It also clearly helps industries that hire many immigrants. Whether immigration should be the answer when those industries are simply not offering good jobs is a separate question.

Brexit created disruption in particular sectors, followed by a sharp rise in immigration, which Strauss said clearly contributed to the subsequent backlash. She was cautious about the idea of a refined guest-worker visa. In theory, it can work: a country brings in workers it wants without permanently adding future pensioners. In practice, many countries find that people stay and settle. If integration matters, Strauss suggested, it may be better to accept that reality rather than rely on an unrealistic “guest worker” label. She pointed to Germany, where the original guest-worker model did not play out as imagined and later citizenship reforms were needed to help people feel more part of society.

Parker described Burnham as a liberal on immigration. He separated illegal migration — including the politics of asylum hotels — from legal migration. On illegal migration, Parker expected Burnham to continue taking a hard line, potentially with Shabana Mahmood remaining at the Home Office. On legal migration, he thought the debate inside Labour would soon tilt. Net migration, he said, had fallen sharply from the “Boris wave” peak; he recalled the last figure as “170,000 or something” and referred to projections suggesting the UK could be heading towards net emigration. At some point, he argued, Britain will need a more sensible debate about bringing in the right people for the right jobs, and Burnham is likely to be open to that.

The immigration discussion reinforced a broader pattern. Brexit was sold as a way to regain control, but the actual policy problem remains one of trade-offs: demographic pressures, sectoral labour needs, integration, public consent and the quality of jobs cannot all be wished away by a different visa label.

Asked whether the populist wave had crested or instead dissolved into the mainstream, Stephen Bush said the answer varies by country. In France, the centre-right’s attempt to adopt the rhetoric and positions of the populist right — what he called the “Pécresse strategy” or “Pécressification” — did not work. The French centre-right no longer exists in the same way, and the populist right is now the dominant challenger.

In Britain, Bush said Kemi Badenoch’s strategy appears effective at making Reform voters say they also like her, but it is doing “the square root of naff all” for the Conservative party’s electoral prospects. Unless something changes, he said, the Conservatives risk being replaced. In Germany, adopting harder language has not put the AfD to bed.

Bush contrasted this with Margaret Thatcher’s handling of the National Front. He acknowledged that Thatcher used ugly language, including “swamped,” in her first term. But he argued that race relations in the UK were in a better state in 1990 than in 1979. The unresolved question is whether today’s centre-right parties across Europe and beyond can repeat that trick: absorb enough pressure to defeat extremists without permanently shifting politics onto extremist terrain.

For Bush, the lesson is stark. If a liberal democracy’s centre-right gets into trouble, the country has “big, big problems.” The most important question in the UK, he argued, is not whether Labour succeeds, but whether the centre-right can avoid the fate of its peers. So far, he said, the omens are not good.

That diagnosis fits the broader Brexit argument. The referendum was not only a policy rupture. It scrambled party systems, moved grievance politics from Brussels to Westminster, and left the Conservative party vulnerable to a movement that claims Brexit was betrayed rather than flawed.

Burnham’s political identity as a northern outsider is complicated because, as George Parker put it, he is a Westminster insider turned outsider. Parker first met him when Burnham was a ministerial special adviser in his twenties. He is a creature of the Westminster system who reinvented himself successfully through Greater Manchester.

Parker said Burnham was preparing a major speech on devolution in which northernness and regional identity would feature strongly. He also said the FT had done a story that week about Burnham planning to move part of his Number 10 operation to Manchester as a symbolic shift. In the discussion, that was treated as part of the emerging political presentation around a possible Burnham premiership, not as a settled institutional transformation.

Parker compared Burnham to politicians who have traded on outsider status despite deep establishment roots: Harold Wilson with the pipe and Gannex mac, Boris Johnson as an apparent anti-establishment figure despite Eton and Oxford, and Nigel Farage, who attended Dulwich College.

Stephen Bush argued that when voters say they want authenticity, they often mean the performance of a stereotype. Johnson performed the role of an affable landed figure who was somehow above ordinary politics. Farage dresses and speaks as if he represents an older City world before credentialism, a lost world his voters miss. Burnham’s version is the casual, authentic northern man who is different from Westminster.

The challenge is that voters also want a prime minister to look like a prime minister. Bush said the winning condition in British politics is not to win the north or London, but the Midlands. He doubted voters there would respond well to a language that treats them as if they do not exist, or as if they are merely an adjunct to the north or the privileged south.

The possible route is adaptation without losing the role. Bush pointed to Margaret Thatcher, who changed the way she presented herself in the early 1970s and, in some cases, almost literally borrowed Barbara Castle’s style to become a tougher, more commanding political figure. She then backed that presentation with policy. Burnham, Bush suggested, may have to manage a similar transition: keeping the authenticity that made him powerful outside Westminster while acquiring the authority required inside Number 10.