“I used to think that the day would never come…”
So begins the New Order synth-pop anthem, True Faith, to which Andy Burnham left the stage on Friday lunchtime.
As the new Labour leader took his final steps to becoming Britain’s 59th Prime Minister on Monday, many of his supporters smiled through tears. A day, long-awaited by some, that very nearly did not come.
Burnham ran for Labour’s leadership in 2010 and 2015, coming fourth and second. Now, third time lucky, he has gone from Coronation Street to coronation – and from King of the North, to “leader for the north, the south, the east and the west, for Scotland, Wales and for Northern Ireland”.
Labour’s new leader does so promising to bring a different kind of politics to Westminster and the country, after a decade as the Mayor of Greater Manchester. He even had a new version of the old gag about the Blairite, the Brownite and the Corbynite walking into a bar (‘Hello, Mr Burnham,’ says the barman).
He said: “When a Burnhamite walks into a bar – as many Burnhamites are known to do – I want the barman to say, ‘Great to see you, we don’t like factional politics in here’.”
That joke, as his favourite band, The Smiths, once said, isn’t funny any more. But there were plenty more. Introducing him, Labour Deputy Leader, and fellow North-West MP Lucy Powell, described the event in a July-sun-drenched London as feeling like the last day of term – non-uniform day. “But not for you Andy,” she added, hastily.
The King of the Casuals later said: “We won’t try to out-Green the Greens or out-Reform Reform or doing what we’ve done in the past – wearing too many Tory clothes… Let me tell you, I’m quite happy that Kemi doesn’t approve of my wardrobe choices because I’m not keen on theirs either.”
Between the jokes, came the start of a plan, that included a pledge ‘to fix the big things that politics has neglected, like social care’, to end ‘cover-up culture’, and to take power back from Whitehall. He has a plan, he says, that will lead to the biggest change in British politics in 40 years.
But there was also a notable change in style. After the stilted Starmer years, when the Prime Minister often struggled to connect, the entire event was like a pledge to Make Britain Emotional Again.
As Burnham named the Labour grandees who had shaped him – Lord Blunkett, who he served as PPS, the legendary Dame Margaret Beckett, and the former party leader he perhaps most resembles, Lord Kinnock – many in the audience again wiped away tears.
Neil Kinnock, he said, “is the man that fired up a young Andy Burnham in the north-west of England in the mid-1980s with rhetoric of the kind that remains unmatched…
“I would say, in modern politics, it has always been something that I treasure to get a message from him, with his advice and the care and the thought he puts in to those messages. They they mean everything to me. I would not be standing here, I would have not have joined this great party of ours in 1985, had it not been for the legend that is Neil Kinnock.”
And there were thanks to so many others too. “Thank you,” he said to the people within the Labour Party who have carried him to coronation, “for knocking me into shape.”
Burnham’s promises to the British people were summed up in a moving line he has used before – taken from the Anfield anthem ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ – to put “hope in every heart”.
The New Order begins in Downing Street next week. Even for true blue Andy Burnham, it will not be a Blue Monday.