Correction: an earlier version of this piece, published on 16 July, reported the widely expected appointment of Shabana Mahmood as chancellor, based on the reporting at the time and before Andy Burnham announced his decision. He appointed John Healey instead. This piece has been rewritten to reflect what happened.
Andy Burnham has made John Healey his chancellor. Almost nobody saw it coming.
The frontrunners were Shabana Mahmood and Ed Miliband, and most reporting expected Mahmood to take the Treasury. In the end she stays where she was, as home secretary. Miliband becomes foreign secretary. Healey gets the top economic job.
There is an irony in the choice. Healey resigned as defence secretary only last month, over what he said was a lack of funding for the military. Now he controls the funding, for defence and everything else.
The surprise matters less than how the job changed hands.
Burnham became prime minister without a general election. His chancellor was picked the same way: by the prime minister, announced in an afternoon, with no vote and no public say. The Treasury has passed from Rachel Reeves to John Healey without anyone casting a ballot.
Healey is not a novice at this. He was a Treasury minister two decades ago, as economic secretary and then financial secretary, and he has spent a long career in and around government. That is more hands-on Treasury experience than the chancellor most people expected would get the job.
But knowing your way around the building is not the same as having a mandate. Voters have not been told what a Healey Treasury will do on tax, VAT, borrowing, pensions or the fiscal rules, and they have not had the chance to accept or reject it. Neither had they for his predecessor, nor for Burnham himself.
That was the point of the original version of this piece, and it outlasts the plot twist. The name turned out to be a surprise. The bigger fact did not change.
Britain has a new chancellor, and nobody voted for his plan, because no plan has been put to them.