Andy Burnham: How the failed Labour leadership contender became the king of the north

Manchester’s mayor is a ‘professional northerner’ and a winner in the new game of territorial, transactional politics, writes Sean O'Grady

Struggles with Whitehall have given Burnham a national profile (Getty)

Andy Burnham, minister in the Blair and Brown governments and reborn as the mayor of Greater Manchester was almost prime minister, you know. He may now be king of the north, an unlikely sex symbol and the moral victor of his short war with Boris Johnson, but he could now be in an even more exalted position.

It is forgotten now, but way back in 2015, after Ed Miliband had led Labour to a poor election result and quit the leadership, Burnham was the favourite to succeed him. Had some Labour MPs who should have known better not “lent” the nomination to put Jeremy Corbyn on the ballot, Burnham might well have won, beating Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall. As it was, Burnham lost badly to Corbyn – 19 per cent to 59 per cent.

It’s not the might-have-been that seems to bother many, though the defeat hurt Burnham. He tried to put the best spin he could on it a few years later, safely ensconced in power in Manchester: “It’s hard – especially being the frontrunner–  but nothing is a given in politics, hence why I fell out of love with Westminster. The defeat was bruising; leadership elections always are. Getting rejected from people you know was tough, but it epitomised the shallowness of Westminster. I was always the loyal Labour person, a team player and thought it would serve me well, but it didn’t come my way, and it exposed the fickleness of politics at a national level”. 

After a brief spell as Corbyn’s shadow home secretary – this once-rising New Labour star is ideologically flexible – he ran to be the first mayor of Greater Manchester, and, in effect voice of the north. It has plainly been the making, or at least refashioning, of Burnham.

Consciously or not he looks different these days. In his diaries, Alastair Campbell wrote this of Burnham in 2008, shortly after he’d been promoted to Gordon Brown’s cabinet: “Andy seems so young [He was 38]. He needs to get himself some decent suits.” Burnham never looked particularly comfortable in any business wear, and he’s been transformed these days into a rather hip-looking Mancunian, all smart-casual with fashionable specs and the old monobrow bifurcated. Some have a crush on him. He still comes across as a bit needy and put upon, but it suits the new persona and the new political dynamic perfectly.

The impassioned speeches Burnham delivered in Manchester also sounded different from the old New Labour automaton - emotional but authentic with a real political edge to them: just as well he’s always kept his accent. He found a ready audience for his message that his city region was being cheated of its financial rights for the sake of a quibble over £5m. He tapped into the idea of London as a remote place where conspiracies are hatched about the northern, Labour half of the nation the Tories “hate”, according to one Labour MP. The north was not going to be picked off on the cheap by a government “grinding communities down through punishing negotiations, treated as the “canaries in the coal mine for an experimental regional lockdown strategy.” 

He carefully referred to the people who work in pubs and bookies and taxi drivers as, “people too often forgotten by people in power”. He skilfully forged a broad if fragile cross-party regional front against the prime minister. “The north c’est moi” might sum up Burnham, so completely has he merged his identity (and interests) with those of 5 million disparate people in a disparate region. Within what passes for the United Kingdom these days, only Nicola Sturgeon is a match for him in the new game of territorial, transactional politics. Baron Burnham is born as a national figure to be reckoned with. His future, regional or national, looks brighter these days. His star shines more brightly than his main Labour mayoral rivals, Sadiq Khan in London and Dan Jarvis in south Yorkshire. After all, Boris Johnson proved his campaigning ability as a two-term mayor of London. As in America and France, a mayoralty can be an enviable base for a politician on the make.

If Burnham wanted to fall back in love with national politics, he now has an option, though there really is no vacancy for the foreseeable future. In the past Burnham has complained about not being invited to address the Labour conference and being left out of the 2019 election campaign. These days he’s more box office, and harder to ignore.

He is a professional northerner if not yet a master craftsman in the Geoffrey Boycott/Michael Parkinson/Peter Kay league and has handily wide credentials encompassing Liverpool, Manchester, the psycho-geography of the respectable upper-working class northwest made flesh. The place names on the CV are evocative, though he’s never claimed Rebecca Long-Bailey style, to have been born virtually on the pitch at Goodison Park (he’s a lifelong Evertonian). Maybe a racecourse, though: Andrew Murray Burnham was born in Aintree on 7 January 1970. The family lived in Formby and his mum (a receptionist) and dad (a telephone engineer) met at Maghull phone exchange. They were Protestant and Catholic respectively, but sectarian doubts about Burnham’s father being a suitable husband were assuaged when his girlfriend’s dad realised they’d both been to support Everton against Blackburn. 

Burnham was brought up a Catholic, and he holds to the faith, leaving him as a surviving example of an older type of working class Labour MP, often as not with Irish Catholic roots and a tendency to social conservatism. Burnham has sometimes been embroiled in controversies about LGBT+ rights.  Burnham says his political heroes are the late Paul Goggins (Catholic Labour) and David Blunkett, whose instincts were and are very old fashioned. There’s a contrast there in Labour culture between the metropolitan liberalism of a Corbyn or a Starmer, and the more cautious approach of a Blunkett or Burnham. In due course, his father got a job and they moved to Leigh, Greater Manchester which he was to proudly represent in the Commons from 2001 to 2017, then a solid Labour seat, now a Tory held marginal. His first unpaid job was as a newspaper reporter on the Middleton Guardian. Grandad drove a lorry for Tate and Lyle. 

His socialism was inculcated early, aged 9: “I remember very clearly going to Chester Zoo, not long after the 1979 election. There was a sticker on the car in front that said ‘Don’t blame me, I voted Labour”, and I asked my dad what it was. I remember him saying ‘well, there’s a woman called Maggie... ’.” By 14 Burnham was in the Labour Party, just in time for the miners’ strike.

He says he got his ambition from his gran, who sounds a bit of a proto-Thatcherite: “She grew up in Great Mersey Street and worked for the brewery as a cleaner or in the kitchens. One day she walked over the fields, unbeknown to my grandad Jimmy, and put a deposit down on one of the new houses being built. He couldn’t believe what she had done.” Perhaps it wasn’t such a surprise that Burnham’s doomed 2015 Leadership bid had the theme “aspirational socialism”.

He was certainly socially mobile and has become quietly cosmopolitan. He met his Dutch wife, Marie-France vanHeel, known as Frankie, when he was studying English at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Married in 2000, they have three children.

Unlike, say, Blunkett or Corbyn who made their start in politics in local government, or Alan Johnson or John Prescott who rose via the trade union movement, Burnham has a typical modern background as a parliamentary researcher and special adviser before getting his seat and ministerial office, and an impeccably New Labour climb up the greasy pole one at that. He worked for Tessa Jowell, Chris Smith, David Blunkett and Patricia Hewitt and was a treasury minister, culture secretary and health secretary under Gordon Brown. Although he often protests that he’s never been part of the Westminster in-crowd he certainly gives the impression of it. In an interview with the Spectator in 2006, after winning their “Minister to Watch Award”, he admitted to knowing the Miliband brothers, James Purnell and other youthful outriders of the Blair cult, but tried to imply a certain distance when asked about cosy meals at their homes in Primrose Hill: “The thing that excites me at the moment is a chip shop I’ve found which sells both mushy peas and gravy. That’s more me than Primrose Hill. And that is where I do not fit the archetypal new Labour mould.” Like I say, professional northerner.

To be fair, though, in that same interview you can see how Burnham detected a mood swing in the north that was later to do so much damage to his party and urged his party to pause and reflect on people “lost along the way”. Criticising David Cameron he made a sensitive point about the coming culture wars: “Most of my constituents can’t afford wind turbines on their houses. I sense the metropolitan world being very much wooed. But the larger country is asking ‘what the hell is this all about?”

When he was in government, in quite a long and varied career, Burnham wasn’t too heavily tested. After he was booed at a 20th-anniversary commemoration of the Hillsborough disaster he persuaded Gordon Brown to set up the inquiry that eventually led to justice for the 96. As health secretary he was accused of failings in the Mid Staffs hospital scandal, but was never officially censured. His two leadership bids in 2010 and 2015 were disappointments. The capture of the Corbynites, the scale of which was aided by Burnham’s lacklustre campaign, left him isolated and in a dead-end. Yet the Manchester job has turned out to be much more than some cushy early retirement gig. Weeks after he took over as mayor he had to respond to the terror attack on the Manchester Arena, which he did in a dignified way, and his recent struggles with Whitehall have given him a national profile. No matter that Johnson just bypassed Burnham and dished £60m out directly to the individual boroughs in Burnham’s fiefdom, Burnham had the better of the politics of it all.

People say Burnham is a bit of a flip-flop, but surviving anywhere near the top of Labour politics in the past decade requires a degree of pragmatism, and Burnham has certainly been all over the place on Brexit – but who hasn’t? These days, aside from Covid-19, Burnham is pursuing a war on homelessness in his city region, condemning even the present “top-down London-centric Labour Party” and banging on about converting the House of Lords into a PR-elected chamber.

Probably the best thing that ever happened to him was losing the Labour leadership in 2015 and trying to hold the party together after the 2016 referendum. At just 50 years of age Burnham is the same age as Sturgeon, and younger (and younger looking) than Keir Starmer, Boris Johnson or Michael Gove. He’s fond of the band The Courteeners, and once tweeted the lyrics to their single “Take Over The World”: “I’m only a paperboy from the northwest. But I can scrub up well in my Sunday best.”

Having been a bit of an underperformer, at last it’s coming true for Our Andy.