Who is Andy Burnham, the ‘man of the people’ likely to be next UK prime minister?
In the story that Andy Burnham tells about himself, “the turning point” in his political life came in 2009 when he was booed at a football ground in the north-west of England. He had been an ideologically reliable middle-ranking minister under Tony Blair, the centrist New Labour prime minister between 1997 and 2007, and had gone on to be appointed as secretary of state for culture, media and sport under Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown.
On the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster – the fatal crowd crush that killed 97 Liverpool fans in 1989 – Burnham was representing Brown’s administration at Anfield, Liverpool’s famous stadium. But as he began to offer his words of condolence into a microphone on the pitch, the then 39-year-old minister’s speech was interrupted by loud and angry calls from the stands for justice for those who had been killed due to no fault of their own. A series of British governments had refused demands for a public inquiry into the disaster.
Footage from the day shows Burnham, who was born in Aintree, a suburb of Liverpool, rattled and close to tears, before nodding and mouthing “OK”. He later explained: “My journey away from Westminster began at Anfield that day. It was the turning point in my life. To be honest, I fell out of love with it.”
On Monday, as a result of Keir Starmer’s announcement that he intends to resign as prime minister once a successor has been chosen, Burnham, 56, looks likely to be the country’s next leader.
After spending the last nine years as mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham is on the brink of taking the top political job in the land on the basis of a certain sort of boyish charisma and charm but also with a promise that he will be different to those who have gone before, offering a politics that understands the motivations and concerns of those outside London and who feel unheard.
His political shtick as a man of the people was given a healthy boost during the Covid pandemic when Burnham went to battle with Boris Johnson’s government over its treatment of his region during the Covid pandemic. While Burnham’s critics characterise him as “Captain Flip-flop”, on the grounds that his politics have appeared to change over the decades, others see him as a man who is listening. [Continue reading…]
On a bone-chillingly cold morning in January, it felt as if I had suddenly found at least part of the reason for Keir Starmer’s chronic unpopularity. I was in the Mancunian constituency of Gorton and Denton, where the prime minister and his people’s decision to block Andy Burnham from standing was about to hand victory to the Green party. More specifically, I was in a forlorn covered market about to be regenerated into a “food and drink cluster”, talking to a sixtysomething man nursing a mug of tea.
What, I wondered, did he think of the man at the top? He gave me roughly the same answer that I’d heard from a lot of my other interviewees: “I really don’t like him at all.” But like most other people I met that day, he couldn’t quite explain what fired his antipathy, which seemed to make it worse. His face scrunched into a mixture of scepticism and exasperation. “I don’t know why – I just don’t,” he said. The most specific answer I got from anyone else was: “He hasn’t done what he said he’d do.” So there it was: as well as a modern tendency to loathe politicians that regularly seems arbitrary, whipped-up and way over the top, a sense that Starmer’s sheer blankness – his painful lack of clarity and the absence of a halfway coherent story about his own government – was making a lot of people dislike and mistrust him all the more. [Continue reading…]