Reader Q&A: Ask Polly Toynbee about Andy Burnham’s first week as prime minister – live

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senoj1 asks: Do you think Burnham has enough momentum, resilience, and mental capacity to ‘change the rules of the game’, or will the relentless intensity and pressure of being PM dealing with ‘events’ overwhelm him.

Is constitutional change going to be relegated again - the right calling it ‘introspective navel gazing’ - and therefore zero votes or public approval. When I actually think constitutional change is the most important thing - and the cheapest too. Change the rules - make it more collaborative, all parties have to compromise and adapt their policies.

These are the great questions of the moment. I know now the hard way that you can never tell until too late how a PM will turn out: how resilient, how brave, how determined? I thought Gordon Brown would arrive with a fine blue print for doing things differently, for radical change, after he had champed at the bit – and bit Blair – for so long. His first weeks were fine, dealing well with a foot and mouth crisis. But he turned out to lack the backbone to force through things he had hinted at. He really did “save the world” with Alistair Darling in the bank crisis, but by then it was too late to save his reputation. I thought Keir Starmer was a good fit for Labour after the chaos years post-Brexit. He turned out to lack the capacity to explain any direction and purpose. The degree of his unpopularity remains a mystery to me: I hope this isn’t now the fate of every PM in a politician-hating era.

Burnham has started out with the boldest of statements: an end to neo-liberalism, he says, an end to the long 40-year Thatcher hegemony. Really? Quite possibly that era is over, her privatisations now generally seen as a disaster ad he is the one to reverse her depredations.

Burnham has always been a strong supporter of proportional representation: he delighted a rally for it at the last Labour conference with a rousing speech. He has always said it needs to be in the next manifesto. That requires him to set up a national commission to lay out the facts, to persuade voters, already a majority in favour but hardly a high priority. You can rely on the Tories and possibly now Reform, to put up the same dishonest arguments against as they did in the AV and Brexit referendums. Will he invest the political capital in this when so much else is higher up the list of public concerns? One advantage is that it costs nothing, and Lords reform might be a saving.

This would be by far the most lasting legacy, if he can pull it off. If it’s in the manifesto, the right will make it the key electoral issue, a fight to the death for them, never again in power alone. That’s risky. But it must be done. No more empty, loveless landslides on 34% of the vote….