The Burnham Wager

While Westminster was consumed by the pantomime of Nigel Farage’s by-election stunt in Clacton, Andy Burnham and his team were quietly preparing for power. They are delighted to have pulled off an unprecedented, long-planned bloodless coup that forced the resignation of Keir Starmer, who will leave office as the most unpopular prime minister of modern times.

The pretender from the north will, at the end of this week, become Labour leader and on Monday 20 July be “crowned” as prime minister. There will be no leadership contest, no “battle of ideas” inside the party as demanded by Wes Streeting, the former health secretary, after he resigned from Starmer’s cabinet, and not much democratic scrutiny.

If Burnham has a worked-out programme for, or theory of government, he has not shared it. Leadership rivals such as Streeting and Angela Rayner, the former deputy leader, who at one point had a team of at least 40 people working on her own plan for power, have been managed through back-channel talks and their respective challenges contained.

Last week Burnham was meeting Labour MPs at Portcullis House, Westminster, and the mood among many of them was one of heady celebration, as if their next leader had won a national mandate in Makerfield rather than a by-election in a constituency that Labour has held since the First World War. “Even if it all falls apart within twelve months it would have still been worth the risk,” one MP said. “There was no prospect of recovery under Starmer.”

Burnham has pulled off something remarkable: he has temporarily united a previously demoralised and divided party behind him. Yet consider this: he is a putative national leader whose character, ideas and policy proposals have not been tested in a general election campaign or leadership contest and, outside Westminster and Greater Manchester, remains largely unknown in the country.

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The euphoria in the parliamentary party may therefore be short-lived. Already there is unrest about what is perceived to be a lack of direction from Burnham’s inner team. Senior figures who were expecting cabinet roles are still waiting to hear from Burnham. There is shameless jostling for position and influence. Even now, Rachel Reeves is still canvassing for support among MPs in a doomed attempt to continue as chancellor. Ed Miliband’s team are doing the same. Some of those who thought they were on the inside, or acted as intellectual outriders for the project, are angry at being marginalised.

Burnham has spoken in broad generalisation about what he is for – greater devolution within the UK, the “productive state”, “business-friendly socialism”, Manchesterism – but how these concepts will translate into a clear political positioning and hard detail of policy is anyone’s guess.

The image Team Burnham wants to project is one of authority and an orderly transition of power, but the mood is increasingly one of uncertainty and trepidation. Everyone is in a hurry, but no one is properly prepared. “You only get one shot at the first hundred days but I’m picking up a lot of indecision,” one Burnham ally said. “At present, there is a vacuum and we all know what happens when there is a vacuum.”

Access talks with senior civil servants are being led by Louise Haigh, the former transport secretary, Anneliese Midgley, a possible chief whip, and James Purnell, the Blair era veteran who has returned as chief of staff. Haigh and Midgley, the so-called northern queens, led the political campaign in Makerfield.

Miatta Fahnbulleh, Labour MP for Peckham and former head of the New Economics Foundation, and Josh Simons, who resigned in Makerfield to make way for Burnham, have been working in haste on a policy programme. Had Rayner become prime minister I understand she would have made Fahnbulleh her chancellor.

The appointment of Purnell has divided opinion. While some Burnham allies praise his corporate experience and strategic intelligence others are irritated that his most recent position was as chief executive of Flint Global, a lobbying company, with all the inevitable scrutiny that follows. As young politicos, Burnham and Purnell shared an office at Westminster and were mentored by the late Jessa Jowell. On busy Westminster days, the phones would start ringing at the same time in their office: BBC Radio 5 for Burnham and Radio 4 for Purnell.

They were both part of what I once called the “Golden Generation”, the network of intensely ambitious, invariably Oxbridge-educated, mostly entitled, football-loving special advisers who gathered around Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson and who were fast-tracked into safe seats and then cabinet positions.

Others prominent in the Golden Generation included David and Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper and Douglas Alexander. In 2010, the Milibands, Balls and Burnham went head-to-head in an increasingly bitter contest for the party leadership. Burnham, suffering from social and intellectual insecurities because of his northern working-class background, lacked the burnish and confidence of his peers. Ed Miliband narrowly won. By then, Purnell had already quit politics, utterly dejected after resigning from Brown’s cabinet. “The way we do politics in this country is juvenile,” he told me.

Now Purnell is back, and there is speculation that Balls and David Miliband may follow him. Both are restless to return to frontline politics and hoped to be gifted safe seats before the 2024 general election but were blocked by Starmer’s team. For Burnham, it could be a case of back to the future – or the Golden Generation Redux. How this aligns with his mantra of “place before party” is unclear.

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Burnham is a vibes politician. His carefully cultivated public image is that of a political everyman, a “Radio 6 Dad”, a “normie”, and in private he is largely as he appears in public if slightly more reserved. He speaks with energy in a relaxed, conversational idiom. He has a hinterland – sports, especially football (Everton FC), rugby league (Leigh Leopards), and cricket (Lancashire CC), and 1980s indie music. As an English graduate, he is, unlike Starmer, a serious reader, and he is particularly fond of poetry, notably Tony Harrison and Philip Larkin.

Born in Aintree, he grew up in Culcheth, near Warrington, with two brothers (now both head teachers) in a Roman Catholic working-class family. His father was a BT engineer and his Irish mother a GP receptionist. He is deeply rooted in the north-west and what he inherited from his mother, Eileen, is a practical faith – he has called it an “unshowy Catholicism” - putting class solidarity before dogma and giving him an instinctive empathy for the “underdog”.

Burnham has often described himself as British rather than English, a subtle but significant distinction. In an interview with the New Statesman, he said his identity was layered: British first, north-west second, Liverpool third, and English fourth. He claims this reflects the urban north-west’s mixed heritage and his own family background. He and his wife, Marie-France (“Frankie”) Van Heel - they met at Cambridge University - have three adult children, all of whom were sixth formers at Winstanley College in the Makerfield constituency.

For all his roots in the north-west, how will Burnham’s progressivism and identitarian “code-switching” play out in Labour’s patriotic English northern heartlands, where people feel politically ghosted? And will he have the courage to confront the culture that produced the grooming gangs and the associated corruption and cover-ups that have tainted the Labour Party?

Haigh spoke to me of Burnham’s “Clintonesque” style of campaigning, emphasising his empathy and emotional intelligence. Another insider mentions his affability and humility. “He’s not one of those politicians who looks over your shoulder as he speaks to you. He seems to be listening. And yet, the flipside of his humility is self-doubt. He doesn’t think he has all the answers, which is a good thing for a politician, but does he really back himself to lead?”

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For many of his Labour colleagues, especially the 2024 intake, Burnham is a blank screen on to which they are projecting their political aspirations and dreams. Having once been a Blairite, he is now associated with the soft left, but his politics are more fluid and unpredictable than many Labour MPs realise as the return of Purnell has demonstrated.

The soft left is more of an instinct than a coherent politics and there are divisions between the northern and London factions. As one Burnham adviser put it to me, the northern soft left are socialists before they are liberals while the London soft left are liberals before they are socialists.

With considerable daring, Burnham believes he can unite all factions of the party, from liberal cosmopolitans to Blue Labour social conservatives, and it was significant that even John McDonnell, the de facto leader of the hard left in parliament, was in Makerfield campaigning for the man he would once have dismissed as an irredeemable Blairite. “If Andy believes in a politics of place he will be rooted in politics of this place,” Simons said about the voters of Makerfield, insisting Burnham shares his constituents’ concerns about uncontrolled mass immigration and fracturing social cohesion. If the Blue Labour-aligned Shabana Mahmoud remains as home secretary, it will be a key signifier.

One of Burnham’s great weaknesses, multiple insiders said, is that he “likes to be liked”. For now, the Labour Party is opportunistically uniting behind him, but that unity will last only until he starts making personnel and policy decisions and revealing his political priorities.

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Burnham has said he does not want to be “in hock to the bond markets”, yet he is committed to retaining Reeves’ fiscal rules. He has pledged to keep the pensions triple lock and honour the manifesto pledge not to raise income tax, VAT or employees’ national insurance. He wants defence spending to be raised to 3.5 per cent of GDP but has not said how that would be funded or what trade-offs would be required. At the same time, he is promising radical reform, a new political economy, public control of utilities like water, democratic renewal, and believes he offers “the left’s only viable answer to the radical right”.

“Burnhamism” is a mass of unresolved tensions, contradictions and rhetorical promises, and his allies are already speaking about an internal battle between “left and right Burnhamism, between continuity and disruption”.

Since becoming an MP in 2001, Andy Burnham has been on a long journey of political reinvention, which was accelerated after he became mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017. But do not be fooled by the affability and everyman persona. He is a ruthless and efficient operator as he has shown by taking control of the Labour Party.

For all his positioning as an outsider, Burnham is a career politician and Westminster insider who has successfully redefined himself as an anti-establishment populist insurgent, just as Farage, Corbyn, the SNP and the Brexiteers have done in different ways before him.

He is a man for all seasons and all factions: the “people’s Andy”. Even now, many of his MPs say they are unsure what kind of prime minister he will be. In this sense, he is a known unknown, and Labour is gambling everything on the desperate hope that he can beat Farage and hold back the radical right at a time of economic stagnation and extreme political fragmentation.