The trouble with Andy Burnham? Nobody’s listening to him

John Rentoul on the curious plight of ‘Labour’s lost leader’, aka the ‘King of the North’

Andy Burnham was speaking at an event during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (Andrew Milligan/PA) (PA Wire)

If Margaret Beckett and Frank Field had understood that they shouldn’t nominate someone they believed was manifestly unsuited for a post, Andy Burnham might have become Labour leader in 2015.

He came second, a long way behind Jeremy Corbyn, but if Corbyn’s name had not been put on the ballot paper by Labour MPs, Burnham would probably have cleaned up the anti-establishment vote with his increasingly leftish poses, against Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall.

Who knows how different politics might have been if Beckett and Field, who had no intention of voting for Corbyn, failed to give him the nominations he needed to scrape into the contest.

I doubt if it would have made much difference to the EU referendum. Corbyn, a lifelong Eurosceptic, was criticised for his insipid campaigning for Remain. But Burnham was never a full-throttle federalist either: in fact, he surprised some of his erstwhile colleagues in the run-up to the 2019 election when he said that he would vote to leave the EU if Labour succeeded in holding a second referendum.

But if Theresa May hadn’t been tempted by huge opinion poll leads into an early election in 2017, things might have turned out differently. Her relative popularity depended in part on the media’s hostile coverage of Corbyn, which wouldn’t have been the same with Burnham.

Still, we can follow that alternative history only so far. In real life, Burnham bailed out of Westminster, leaving the post of shadow home secretary to be taken by Diane Abbott, and was elected mayor of Greater Manchester a month before the general election in 2017.

He has been successful in the role. The centre of Manchester feels as if it is reviving, and he has worked well with the 10 local councils under him. His strong defence of the city-region’s interests during the pandemic popularised his title as “king of the north”, and he won re-election in 2021 with an increased share of the vote, up from 63 to 67 per cent.

He is still, rather implausibly, the favourite to be the next Labour leader in the betting markets, although trading is thin and he is given only a 14 per cent chance in a widely dispersed field. Wes Streeting, Rachel Reeves, Lisa Nandy, Yvette Cooper and Angela Rayner are the others who are given more than a 7 per cent chance each, and it is notable that Sadiq Khan, Labour’s other big-city elected mayor, is right down the list with a 2 per cent chance.

Burnham has not given up yet – despite confirming that he will be running for a third term in next year’s Manchester election. He said this week: “If a path opens up in time, then of course I’m not going to turn away from that. So I think there potentially is one last go at Westminster in me, somewhere.”

That path would have to involve re-entering parliament at some point after what said he hopes will be “a Labour government led by Keir Starmer”. At an event at the Edinburgh fringe, he said: “I’m hoping it will bring hope and radical change to the way the country’s run.”

But he is not sure about that because the reason he wants another go at the leadership “would only be going back to enact what I’ve talked about today” – namely, to change the “Westminster system”.

His manifesto for change is rather different from what Starmer is offering. For one thing, Burnham says: “I’m now a very strong proponent – I’ve got the zeal of the convert about proportional representation.” Starmer, on the other hand, has made it clear that he will ignore votes in favour of proportional representation at the Labour conference, and recently admitted that he has had a “longstanding view against” it.

So far, so opportunist on Burnham’s part. Labour members, who will choose the next leader, strongly support proportional representation. More striking, though, was Burnham’s other proposal: “I would remove the whips system from the Commons.” He complained that in his 16 years as an MP, he was “losing the sense of who I was” because he was in “an environment” that makes anyone who is in a leadership position “appear different, not appear sincere – or you have to vote in certain ways and you don’t fully believe it”.

This is raw populism, positioning Burnham as the truth-telling outsider willing to tear up “the system”. He argued that the effect of whipping is to “take power off elected representatives, and concentrate it in the hands of unelected advisers and civil servants”.

It is nonsense, and I would have thought it unlikely to survive a leadership election campaign. The party system developed in Britain, as in all democracies, because it is the only way of organising the preferences of a mass electorate into blocs. Without some kind of party discipline, supervised by whips, a government would be unable to function, and Labour members would have even less say over what a Labour government would do.

But Corbyn won the leadership by going against “the system”, and by refusing to accept the boundaries of what had hitherto been regarded as the politically possible. Just because people like me think that what Burnham says makes no sense is no guarantee that it will not work politically. Perhaps the leader Labour lost will be back after all.