Burnham government draws fire from left and right as honeymoon fades

The new Prime Minister is being squeezed from both flanks barely a month into office. The Guardian carries Owen Jones arguing that Burnham's government is barely more leftwing than its predecessor, while the Daily Express runs multiple pieces accusing the administration of supine foot-dragging on energy, defence spending, and relations with rural Britain. The Mail warns that ministers are ignoring serious military intelligence from Warsaw about potential Russian escalation.

The complaints from opposite directions are themselves revealing. Jones wants more redistribution and state intervention; the Express wants decisive action on national security and a reset with farming communities who feel abandoned. Both critiques turn on the charge of insufficient will - that Burnham inherited a mandate for change but is managing decline instead. The Daily Express frames Ed Miliband's energy policy as a ticking timebomb that will detonate this winter, with Burnham doing nothing to defuse it.

This is the signature problem of every new government that arrives on a wave: the honeymoon is the period when political capital is highest and the next election feels distant enough to spend it. Spend too slowly and the moment passes; spend too fast and you are explaining failures before you have banked wins. Burnham's Labour won on a promise to be both competent managers and agents of change - a combination that has defeated most of his predecessors when those two imperatives collide.

The test will be whether the government picks its ground or gets dragged onto everyone else's. A Prime Minister under fire from both Owen Jones and the Express opinion pages could mean he is threading a sensible centre, or that he is satisfying nobody. The next Budget and the winter energy bills will tell us which.