When Andy Burnham ascends the No 10 staircase to the flat above, he finds the portraits of his predecessors looking down on him.
Some, like Margaret Thatcher, will provoke a shudder in his socialist soul. He will gaze at others, like the Labour reformer Clem Attlee, and wonder if he too will one day claim a great radical legacy.
But there is one figure, above all, who should give him cause to stop and reflect on what it is to be genuinely progressive – to be a proper liberator of working people.
William Gladstone was the greatest prime minister of the Victorian Age.
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