‘The Andy Burnham I do know is one among Labour’s greatest gamers – they want him on the pitch’
At an impromptu press conference outside Manchester Town Hall on October 15 2021, Andy Burnham delivered one of the defining speeches of his career.
Wearing his reading glasses, and dressed casually in a blue-grey shirt, no tie – and the city’s essential uniform, the cagoule – the Manchester Mayor’s anger and indignation were palpable. Greater Manchester, he said, would not be “the sacrificial lamb for an ill-thought-through Downing Street policy which doesn’t make sense in the real world”.
He added: “People are fed up of being treated in this way, the North is fed up of being pushed around. We aren’t going to be pushed around anymore.” Burnham was talking to then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, about flawed lockdown policy, but the thread holds through his political life.
This week, he finds himself once again in opposition to the mandarins of Downing Street after his ambition to become the Labour MP Gorton and Denton was crushed by a bureaucratic bulldozer. But then being locked out of politics by the centre is a metaphor for Andy Burnham’s entire political manifesto – a cry for a new, devolved, community-led Britain that distributes power and wealth fairly amongst its citizens.
In recent months, Burnham has clearly once again become fed up with the way the country is wired, and the apparent inability of Labour in power to rewire it. His views have much in common with how Reform voters experience the world – as fixed, unfair and bullying. And they have their echo in Zack Polanski’s Greens as they bite at Labour’s ankles from the left.
Last October, I chaired an ‘In Conversation’ event with Burnham and his great friend and political kindred spirit Steve Rotheram, the Mayor of Liverpool City Region, at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in London – to mark the ‘down south’ launch of their joint book ‘Head North’.
Half memoir, half manifesto, Head North rumbles with frustration with Westminster stitch ups and London-centric policy – and outlines the Mayors’ view of how Britain could do things differently. Leaning into the emotional as well as political qualities of both men, the book is really a love letter to the communities Burnham and Rotheram grew up in. It summarises not just what both men have learned from running big city regions differently to Westminster, but also their foundational experiences of the Hillsborough tragedy.
While Liverpool fan Rotheram was at the match, young Evertonian Burnham was a young football fan at the other semi-final that day. Both of their lives changed forever in one afternoon. The 2009 footage of Burnham – the sacrificial lamb for the New Labour government’s disastrous policy on a Hillsborough Inquiry – withstanding the roar of the Anfield crowd is central to who he is today as a politician.
Burnham’s politics are rooted in the understanding that the state is not benign but corrupted by a long-standing culture of cover-ups, and murderously rigged against working class people. Alongside the Mirror, he has been a champion not just for the Liverpool families, but for the Grenfell survivors and bereaved, those affected by the infected blood scandal and the nuclear test vets, and a critical part of winning a Hillsborough Law.
Burnham says ‘Head North’ is a mindset – a way of thinking about the whole country – and his book outlines ways the Mayors think life could be weighted more fairly for ordinary people. Among other things, they call for a federal UK with more power devolved from the centre and proportional representation.
Burnham joined Labour at 15, ‘radicalised’ by the miner’s strike. But his version of Labour politics is more than a faction – soft Left and ‘aspirational Socialist’. It’s a different vision of the country articulated by ‘Mainstream’, his new network within the Labour Party which sells itself as a home for “radical realists”.
This includes not just words but actions – for example donating 15 per cent of his annual £110,000 salary to tackling homelessness. A huge part of Burnham’s Talismanic appeal to the Labour faithful is that he is so obviously the player you would bring to a three-way fight where the other two players were Nigel Farage and Zack Polansky.
Part of this is his willingness to look at the electoral reform that could help lock out Reform and appeal to Green and Lib Dem voters. But there’s also something else. Living back up North has been good for Burnham. After struggling to fit in at Cambridge University and its extension Westminster, he has recovered his ease with himself.
He grew up in the very normal village of Culcheth in Cheshire, between Liverpool and Manchester, with parents who had normal jobs – his dad a telephone engineer, and his mum a receptionist. He speaks English the way normal people speak it. You could have a pint with him, and he wouldn’t even talk over you like Nigel Farage. He is comfortable in a cardigan, or a done-up polo shirt and his trademark gazelles.
Not just passionate about watching his beloved Everton, Burnham – like Starmer – still plays and was a striker in Labour’s famous ‘Demon Eyes’ football team. Sometimes criticised as a ‘goal hanger’, he says that as a centre-forward he’s always been one for taking opportunities – both political and in the six-yard box. Now, America is running hot like a nightmarish vision of our future, and it is clear we need every one of Labour’s best players on the pitch. Modern-day Labour leadership rivalry is often compared with Game of Thrones, the TV series which also had a troublesome ‘King In the North’. But the northern bard William Shakespeare also contains a fatal prophecy for King Macbeth that his reign will end “when Birnham Forest come to Dunsinane.”
Operation Burnham Wood was on the move this weekend, inching ever closer to 10 Downing Street’s Dunsinane, as the Manchester Mayor advances towards London. 2026 may yet see a re-run of the noble insurgent facing down a good man fallen foul of murderous advisors.
For those who dream of being Prime Minister, all the world’s a stage.
