When the Labour party football team played a group of journalists at Loftus Road two years ago the hacks won 4-1. The politicians’ solitary goal came from a late penalty. When the referee pointed to the spot, the centre-forward stepped up, elbowing well-known names like Ed Balls, David Miliband and Sadiq Khan out of the way in his rush to grab the glory.
There was a notable absentee that day. ‘Keir [Starmer] had been due to play, but he didn’t turn up,’ a witness recalls. ‘If he had been there, he’d probably have grabbed the ball and there might have been a tussle.’ Instead, Andy Burnham said: ‘This is mine,’ and calmly slotted it into the corner. ‘It was a perfect penalty.’ For those who seek further clues to his direction of travel, Burnham kicked the ball to the right as he looked at it, to the goalkeeper’s left. Make of that what you will.
The Makerfield by-election on 18 June will decide whether this was a metaphor for the moment a barely politically present Prime Minister makes way for someone more decisive. If Burnham does win the by-election, even Starmer’s closest allies admit he will have to seek an orderly departure from Downing Street by the autumn. ‘If Andy wins, it’s over,’ a cabinet minister admits. ‘Keir knows that.’
But who is the real Andy Burnham and what sort of prime minister would he be?
Everyone agrees he is a good communicator, as his launch video this week proved. But politically he is a figure of caricature – the self-styled King of the North whose political malleability casts him as the butt of one of Westminster’s most well-trodden jokes (‘A Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walk into a bar. The barman says: “Hello Andy.”’) Others cannot forget or forgive that when asked for his favourite biscuit, in a Mumsnet interview, he replied: ‘Give me a beer and chips and gravy any day.’ One former adviser to Brown says (only half-jokingly): ‘That alone makes him unfit to lead the country.’
The official story is of a working-class lad from Liverpool, who came to London but felt disconnected from the political establishment and was only too happy to leave ‘the Westminster bubble’ and make his political base in the second city. Burnham’s critics see this as the purest cant from someone who went to Cambridge and was one of a generation of special advisers – alongside Balls, the Miliband brothers and James Purnell – who were fast-tracked into cabinet.
‘Nobody’s ever going to doubt the fact that Burnham always wanted
to be in No. 10,’ a key figure recalls
After talking to more than a dozen MPs, friends, cabinet ministers, fellow New Labour advisers, strategists and pollsters, I can say the truth is more nuanced, but the one thing they all agree on is this: Burnham was always hugely ambitious. ‘Nobody’s ever going to doubt the fact that Andy Burnham always wanted to be in No. 10,’ a key figure from the New Labour era recalls. ‘In the end that may be the thing that gets him there.’
Burnham was New Labour royalty but his outsider coding seems real, not a later affectation. Some detected a timidity next to the ostentatious cleverness of Balls and the Milibands. ‘I think he always felt in their shadow,’ a contemporary says. A former minister adds: ‘He’s less intellectual than someone like Ed [Miliband]. For Ed it’s always books and reading and policy papers. Andy’s views are born of experience.’
It is also true that Burnham was always rooted in his Evertonian upbringing, the son of a telephone engineer and a receptionist. ‘He does very much take his politics from his family and where he came from,’ says a former cabinet colleague. ‘Andy was part of that group of advisers, but he never took his identity from it in the way that some of us did.’
Burnham moved his wife, Marie-France, his Cambridge sweetheart, and his three children from London to Leigh, his old seat. ‘He didn’t want [his son] Jimmy having a cockney accent,’ a friend recalls. When a Commons vote was called, ‘He would go and wave at the camera so that his son could see him.’
Burnham worked first for arch-Blairites Tessa Jowell and then Chris Smith. But it was his first boss as a minister at the Home Office, David Blunkett, who shaped his politics. ‘It’s very hard to tell the Andy story without talking about Blunkett,’ a former cabinet colleague says. ‘David is a large part of his representational politics. He believes your job is to come from your area and stand up for the people who put you there.’ Blunkett made his name in Sheffield city politics before moving to Westminster. Burnham recreated his career in reverse, but they shared a world view.
Lucy Powell, Labour’s Deputy Leader, who is tipped to be Burnham’s deputy prime minister, says: ‘Andy really understood a lot more strongly, and was sooner to this than other national politicians, the importance of place in politics. People know that he, first and foremost, is on the side of the North. Some might take the mick out of that, but people say: “He’s our Andy.’”
‘He’s oversensitive about criticism… I honestly don’t know how he’d respond to not being loved’
For many of his admirers the thing that turned this political vibe into something more concrete was his experience of being booed by Liverpool fans fighting in vain for a public inquiry into the Hillsborough disaster. ‘You either crumble or you grow,’ says John McTernan, Blair’s political secretary. ‘He was confronted with the fact that the villain of the story was actually the state. It was the police who were doing the lying, it was the courts, it was the system. That was the moment.’ McTernan says the health union Unison ‘threatened to take away funding for him over health policy, and he just looked them right in the eyes and went, “Look, I’m not changing because you’re saying that. This is the right thing to do.” I saw steel in him as a junior minister.’
Allies cannot explain why Burnham did not show the same resolution when it came to the Mid-Staffordshire hospital scandal when he was health secretary (where he launched a limited independent inquiry, rather than the full public inquiry the victims were demanding) or, more recently, the grooming gangs scandal.
The same caution and indecision is recalled by other Labour figures: ‘I remember him first of all as a terrified Blairite in the days when we were trying to get rid of Gordon Brown as prime minister in 2008. Lots of people either plotted furiously behind the scenes or told us to shut up and back the leader; he just froze and tried to make himself invisible.’
Burnham was a distant fourth in the 2010 leadership election but was favourite to win in 2015 until he abstained on a vote on welfare cuts, opening the door to Jeremy Corbyn. ‘In 2016 when frontbenchers were resigning from Corbyn’s team, he had promised to quit,’ recalls one former MP now in the Lords. ‘The day came and went with no announcement from him. I am told he said that he had done a hustings with Labour members to be mayor of Manchester and realised that: “It is not in my interests to criticise Jeremy.”’ Burnham’s team does not recognise this account.
Burnham was early to spot that the metro mayors could build their own power bases. A Labour strategist recalls a meeting of party candidates in 2017. ‘All of the MPs were miserable. Steve Rotheram [now the mayor of Liverpool] and Andy Burnham were the two happiest people in the room. They’d figured out Westminster was rubbish.’
As mayor, Burnham stood up for Manchester when it was forced into Tier 3 Covid restrictions during the pandemic. After the suicide bomb attack at Manchester Arena which killed young fans of Ariana Grande, Powell recalls: ‘He brought everyone together. He spoke for the city. It was a sort of Princess Diana moment.’ After the attack at the Heaton Park synagogue in October, a serving ministerial aide adds: ‘He was the only politician who was cheered, not jeered.’
Yet the ‘Manchesterism’ he espouses remains only vaguely defined. It involves public ‘control’ (but, crucially, not ownership) of public utilities like buses and a vision for a more interventionist state to overturn what Burnham sees as decades of decline. He wants to build more council houses. Doubts remain about how much Burnham is responsible for Manchester’s boom. Richard Leese, who led the council for two decades, deserves much of the credit. An investor in one of the city’s biggest developments says: ‘He [Burnham] had absolutely nothing to do with it. But we’re happy to play along and let him take the credit.’
Some question whether his experience is any preparation for No. 10. ‘He’s petulant and oversensitive about criticism,’ says a source with deep roots in Whitehall. ‘I honestly don’t know how he’d respond to not being loved. Being a Labour mayor of Manchester is playing politics on easy mode. He’s had no serious opposition. It’s also a very small job. The budget is less than £3 billion.’
Burnham supports proportional representation and rejoining the EU and has publicly resented the bond markets. However, in the first three days of the by-election campaign he recanted all three positions, committing to Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules. Burnham has not yet changed his position that natal males should be able to self-identify as women. ‘That will be next to go,’ says a cabinet ally of Starmer.
Yet his fans see a politician who has grown and knows how to get things done, in contrast to Starmer. ‘He’s more politically confident,’ a former cabinet minister says. ‘He’s outgrown Tony and Gordon. He’s created his own approach.’
Burnham is more popular with voters than Starmer. While Labour now trails Reform by 29 per cent to 22 per cent, new polling from More in Common found that if he becomes leader, Labour would lead by 30 per cent to Reform’s 27 per cent.
Luke Tryl from More in Common observes: ‘What’s striking is how far his popularity extends beyond Greater Manchester. In the East Midlands and West Yorkshire we’ve had people saying they’d like their own Andy Burnham. He appears to have the best shot at slaying the twin dragons currently devouring Labour’s coalition – defections to Reform and the Greens.’ A cabinet aide adds: ‘Andy is the only man who can unite the three points of the triangle: the parliamentary Labour party, members and voters.’
The biggest call Burnham will have to make if he gets the job of centre-forward, will be whether to call an election. Starmer’s former pollster Deborah Mattinson has told ministers the bounce a new leader gets is never higher than after three to four months. ‘Andy will have to decide whether he has the balls to call an election or bottles it like Gordon did in 2007,’ a minister says. ‘He should let Keir stay until conference, then call an election in the spring.’ And that will be harder than scoring from the penalty spot.
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