India, July 17 -- Andy Burnham was confirmed on Friday as the seventh person to lead Britain's governing Labour Party in a decade of head-spinning political turnover, inheriting a fractious parliamentary party, a restive electorate and a mandate that, for all its size, papers over deep uncertainty about whether the former Greater Manchester mayor can hold his own MPs together long enough to fight the next general election.

His coronation at a special conference at the Trades Union Congress headquarters in central London was never in doubt; he ran unopposed after securing nominations from 379 of Labour's 403 MPs, but the ease of his ascent belies the far harder task now facing him, which is converting an anti-Starmer coalition of convenie...