Labour's chosen one didn’t quite promise to build a new Jerusalem among the dark satanic mills, but he came close.

In a speech dripping with evangelical zeal, Andy Burnham told the adoring party faithful that his ‘new politics’ would raise up every part of Britain.

‘I will be a leader for the North, the South, the East and the West, for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland… and unite the people in a common cause,’ he said. Alleluia!

All very inspiring for his ecstatic congregation, no doubt, but how exactly does he plan to transport us to this land of milk and honey? And, more pertinently, who pays the fare?

Mr Burnham’s ascent to power has effectively been a coup d’etat. He will become PM on Monday without any contest and despite having offered no detail of how he intends to govern.

He has avoided all scrutiny, refused to be quizzed by the media and hasn’t yet announced a single member of his Cabinet. It’s the stitch-up to end all stitch-ups.

Yesterday’s speech, while long on maudlin sentiment was predictably short on substance. However, there were some hints about where he wants to take the country – all of them troubling.

Far from ushering in a new politics, he seems to be preparing for a return to the ruinous policies of the 1970s which brought this country to the very brink of bankruptcy.

Mr Burnham lamented the last 40 years of ‘neo-liberalism’ – a clear dig at the Thatcherite reforms of the 1980s and New Labour’s failure to reverse them.

Criticising the ‘wrong turns’ of the past, he suggested the remedy was renationalisation, reindustrialisation, more union power and a large dollop of tax-and-spend socialism.

What he fails to understand – or perhaps chooses not to – is that it was precisely these policies which made the Thatcher revolution necessary in the first place.

Thanks to permanent strikes and weak management, the nationalised industries were moribund. Taxes were insanely high, inflation hit 25 per cent and the International Monetary Fund had to bail us out because the Labour government ran out of money.

Not for nothing did we become known as ‘the sick man of Europe’. Painful decisions had to be taken to break union power, get spending back under control and make work pay by cutting taxes. If it hadn’t been Mrs Thatcher, it would eventually have had to be someone else.

Mr Burnham also says he wants to overhaul the ailing social care system, something successive governments have failed to do since the 1990s. But again, who pays?

He has warned he will be asking taxpayers to give ‘a little bit more’. Where Labour is concerned, that invariably turns out to be a whole lot more. 

Rachel Reeves has already saddled families and businesses with an extra £66billion in tax. How much more does he think they can take?

He further intends to devolve much more power to the regions. What will this mean for council tax? And what sanctions will there be against those councils that are wasteful, dishonest or profligate?

Where does Mr Burnham stand on defence spending? Will he cut our unsustainable welfare bill (a staggering £333billion last year)? What plans does he have to get the one million unemployed young people into the workplace?

On these and so many other issues, he is an unknown quantity. He can run from scrutiny only so long. After Monday, the public will demand hard policies, not soft platitudes.