Should Ed Miliband be appointed chancellor under Andy Burnham?

The chamber threw out the idea of an Miliband chancellorship decisively, 20 votes to 5, a rout rather than a close call on the personnel question that has been trailing Andy Burnham's expected coronation. With four in five voters saying no, this reads less like hesitation over one man than a verdict on the whole prospectus of a Miliband return to the Treasury.

The real story is gender, not age. Women split evenly, 4 yes to 4 no, while men voted almost as one against, 14 to 1. That 43-point gender gulf dwarfs anything in the age data, where every bracket from 16 to 65+ landed somewhere between mildly and unanimously opposed, with the oldest voters registering no dissent at all.

It echoes a recurring pattern on this platform when Miliband's name comes up: net zero and his 2015 leadership legacy still divide opinion by gender in ways that outlast the man's actual policy record, with women markedly more open to rehabilitating him than men. Lucy Powell's public endorsement does not appear to have moved the numbers much beyond that fault line.

For Burnham, if he was testing the water on Miliband at the Treasury, the water came back cold, and colder still among men.