As news channels cut to Euston railway station in London on Monday, just as the new MP for Makerfield, Andy Burnham, was embarking on the final leg of his journey to the House of Commons, I was half expecting to see the man of the moment sitting astride a donkey and being lauded by crowds waving palm branches and laying down their cloaks in front of him.
Burnham’s triumphal entry into Westminster certainly had a weird messianic feel about it, encapsulated most strikingly by a rather odd photo in which he posed before a phalanx of his fellow Labour MPs who seemed to be gazing upon him as some sort of saviour, though presumably of their jobs rather than their souls.
Say what you like about Jesus, he never shirked from saying what he truly felt, even when doing so made him unpopular.
Burnham, on the other hand, has a consistency problem, and the disciples now falling at his feet might like to think about that.
So far, as Burnham has any guiding ideology, it is hard to decipher the nature of it.
And where he has set out his stall on
