Andy Burnham will NOT formally announce his Labour leadership candidacy or be publicly confirmed as leader-designate by 2026-07-09; the formal process will begin but resolve outside this 14-day window, with modal announcement timing in the 3–8 week range following Starmer's eventual resignation.

The synthesis pivots on a single structural fact all four frameworks leave implicit: no vacancy trigger exists. The institutionalist analysis makes this explicit and operationally specific — Labour’s formal rules sequence vacancy before candidacy, and the path-dependent orderly-transition norm (Brown/Blair, 2007) reinforces this even under high pre-coordination. Three of four frameworks predict NO within 14 days; only the Marxist framework predicts YES, and it does so with only 0.41 confidence while acknowledging the vacancy-precondition. The Keynesian ‘weeks’ framing is the key linguistic signal: ‘weeks’ in this context spans 2–8 weeks empirically, placing the 14-day window inside the lower tail rather than at or above the mode. The Austrian knowledge-problem insight adds a second mechanism: the managed timetable cannot substitute for genuine preference revelation, producing slippage. Base rate of formal political succession announcement within 14 days of first major press coverage, where no vacancy yet exists: approximately 25%. Adjustment downward for institutional sequencing constraint (no vacancy) and ‘weeks’ framing: –8 points. Adjustment upward for visible elite pre-coordination and possibility that informal confirmation satisfies the resolution criteria: +5 points. Final: P(NO) ≈ 0.72, P(YES) ≈ 0.28.