Daniel Boffey writes:

Andy Burnham had emerged victorious, but niggling doubts remained about his mandate. It was the summer of 1987 and the 17-year-old had represented Labour in a school hustings as Margaret Thatcher and Neil Kinnock were battling it out in that year’s general election.

“Andy was standing against another guy, a really nice guy who was the Conservative candidate,” said Steve Harrington, a former English teacher at St Aelred’s Catholic high school, in Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside. “Andy gave a speech, which was excellent, then the other guy came on to make his speech and Andy’s fans – unbeknown to Andy – snatched the plug out of the microphone. So they couldn’t hear what he was saying. Andy won by a landslide. Having said that, he probably would have anyway, as it was a heavily Labour area … But he was innocent, he hadn’t been involved in [the prank] and wouldn’t have been.”

If there was a whiff of illegitimacy to Burnham’s first election, his uncontested selection by the Labour party to be the UK’s next prime minister now leaves him with a particularly fraught task: create the change he has promised without clear electoral backing. He will need to outline a vision more sharply than the outgoing prime minister, Keir Starmer, defying his critics’ caricature of him as a man without principle: a “Captain Flip-flop”.

It is the contention of many of those closest to him that Burnham will be aided by what they claim is a remarkable consistency in the 56-year-old’s “communitarian” belief that people can only enjoy their individual rights if rooted in well-functioning communities with control over their surroundings.

Friends note that, two decades ago, Burnham worried privately with aides that children would need to be protected from the “wild west” of the internet. He had a huge mock-up of an ID card in his office as a junior Home Office minister. Today, he talks about public control over utilities and an active state directing planning and investment. There is a thread, they say.

As to the character of the new prime minister, the picture painted by those who know him well is that of a warm, affable man who likes to be liked. Burnham is a Cambridge graduate and poetry lover who insists on writing his own speeches, but picks up policy ideas while doing the family shop at Asda and Costcutter. He counts his mother, Eileen – a retired receptionist at a GP surgery – as a political sounding board.

Yet, there is perhaps another side that is underappreciated. He has been willing to risk the closest of relationships, including with his new chief of staff, when determined on a course of action. In 2020, he declined to support the leadership bid of Keir Starmer, who had backed Burnham’s own attempt to be Labour leader in 2015, on the grounds that he would not choose him over north-west MPs and fellow candidates Lisa Nandy and Rebecca Long-Bailey.

“They had been pretty tight but Keir loathes him now,” said a source close to Starmer. Burnham is said to be capable of being extraordinarily stubborn. “There is a steeliness,” said a longstanding friend, who added that they believed this would lead to another bold decision. “I think he will want to go to the country [for a general election] sooner rather than later. He will want his own mandate.” [Continue reading…]