By Tom McTague
Copyright newstatesman
The last time Andy Burnham and I were in touch, I’d messaged him to apologise for changing the time of our interview because of childcare issues. “No worries at all, lad,” he replied. “The kids come first.” This was a couple of years ago, after he’d won his second term as Manchester mayor. I remember smiling: no one in politics had called me “lad” before.
In London, such Burnhamisms – like when he was asked by Mumsnet to name his favourite biscuit and replied “beer, chips and gravy” – tend to be greeted with a smirk, eyebrows raised. Burnham, of course, thinks such mockery only proves how foreign Westminster has become to the rest of the country. To succeed there, you are expected to become Westminster, to inhabit its mannerisms and unwritten rules; to drop your “lads” in favour of the confected formality and politeness of the political class. How wonderful to see you Tom, and all that.
Leaving Westminster for Manchester in 2017 seems to have freed Burnham to be the Andy he wants to be. Today, he doesn’t just sound more northern, he looks more northern. For the duration of the two days I spent with him this September, he was dressed in what might be described as smart-casual, though not in the beige chinos way favoured further south. Burnham is more “smart-Manc”, if there is such a thing: suede black moccasins with dark blue jeans and a dark blue suit jacket over a dark blue jumper – part Reiss, part Marks & Spencer. Even his walk has a gentle Mancunian lilt: ever so slightly stooped and duck-footed, heel first, trousers baggy. I cannot but think of Liam Gallagher.
Being with Burnham in Manchester, it is striking just how at home he seems. Not a figure of fun here, but a source of pride: the people’s lad. Everywhere we went, they stopped him in the street as if they knew him. “Do you like the new ground, Andy?” one man asks as we pass, referring to Everton’s new Hill Dickinson Stadium. Everyone knows Burnham is a fan of Everton, the people’s club of Merseyside. “I don’t just like it – I love it,” he replies. As we pass a group of lads sitting down to their jacket potatoes and beans, Burnham shouts over: “Oh, that looks good.” “It is!” they reply in chorus: “Do you want some?” “Yeah, go on then,” he shouts back, and pretends to run over. Cue laughter. The banter is soft and affectionate. Boy done good. Our Andy.
It is hard not to reflect on the contrast with Keir Starmer, the knighted fan of cosmopolitan Arsenal who many believe Burnham will replace as Labour leader and prime minister. Like Burnham, Starmer sees himself as an ordinary bloke from an ordinary family, doing right by his own kind. It is Starmer’s misfortune to have been born and raised in Surrey, that most nowhere of counties. Through no fault of his own, Starmer has no heartland, no power base – other than north London, which itself appears to be rejecting him. Starmer is nobody’s our Keir.
Burnham’s motto as mayor is “place before party” and he repeats it like a campaign slogan. Once again, the contrast with Starmer’s “country before party” jumps out. The “place” Burnham means, though, is not Manchester, but the wider north-west. This is because Burnham is not Mancunian, but from that ambiguous land between Manchester and Liverpool: “wool country”, as it is known. Laughing, he tells me the story of a recent trip to Goodison Park one weekend with his dad to watch Everton play Manchester City. Spotting Burnham, the City fans began singing “You. Scouse. Bastard,” to which the Everton fans responded in kind: “You. Manc. Bastard.” “The truth is, I am both,” he says.
Burnham was born in Aintree, in Merseyside, before moving east, to Culcheth, with his family when his dad got promoted to a new job in the Post Office and a new office in Manchester city centre. As such, Burnham spent most of his childhood in Manchester rather than Liverpool; dropped at the Arndale centre or Lancashire Cricket Club for the day while his dad worked in the city – “My dad’s idea of childcare,” as he put it to me, affectionately. Burnham still lives a few miles away from his old family home.
Burnham’s north-west identity runs alongside his insistence that he is British first rather than English. He sees the north-west as a melting pot of the British Isles, its real centre: a land of Welsh Streets and Scotland Roads, forever shaped by the coming together of England and its Irish hinterland over the water. Ironically, it is Burnham’s Irish roots that help explain his British identity.
As we sit down to chat in a meeting room of the open-plan offices in Manchester where he runs his mayoralty, Burnham tells me of the letter he keeps from his great-grandfather, before the latter was captured and killed in the First World War. The letter was written shortly after he had returned to the front lines having visited his home city on leave, catching a match at Goodison before going dancing with his family. “They were doing Irish dancing with my gran and her sisters in the parlour they had on the Scotland Road,” Burnham says. Scotland Road was then home to what was, in effect, an Irish slum, represented by TP O’Connor, the only Irish Nationalist ever elected to parliament outside of Ireland. My grandfather was also born there. Burnham treasures the letter, the final one his great-grandfather sent before he was killed. “His last letter back was all about ‘never let it be said that the Irish aren’t doing their thing in this war’.”
Being British rather than English, Burnham tells me, allows him to keep all the “layers” of his identity intact: British first, north-west second, Liverpool third, and English fourth. He likes unions, he says, including the one the UK had until recently with the continent – a union he hopes is eventually restored.
The layers of Burnham’s identity, then, are deep-rooted and overlapping, and help explain his oft-mocked mannerisms. At home, he has found comfort in the wider, regional character of the north-west, which allows him to be neither exclusively Scouse nor Mancunian. Away from home, however, he has not always found the same acceptance. At Cambridge Burnham “struggled to feel part of things”, as he puts it in his book, Head North, which he wrote with his friend, the mayor of Liverpool, Steve Rotheram. “But my growing interest in Manchester music gave me an identity and an advantage.” Manchester was cool, and Burnham could be cool by proximity. It was not only the melting-pot centre of Britain, but its cultural capital: from the Buzzcocks and the Haçienda to the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and, in time, Oasis. “It gave me an instant edge,” Burnham writes.
It is exactly this that Burnham’s critics in London find annoying about his identity. Burnham, they believe, uses his northerness as a tool to give him an edge. It is what they call his “lame Phoenix Nights shtick”, in reference to the sitcom by Peter Kay. His opponents make the same charge about his political positions, too. The layers of his politics are just for show – clothes he can wear and remove for his own advantage. First, he was a Blairite when it suited him, they say; then a Brownite; and today increasingly left-leaning and populist. Burnham finds this caricature particularly annoying. “You don’t always like the manager but you play for the team,” he says. What irks him the most is the idea that he tried to reinvent himself. “I hate that Westminster makes you look false.” As he sees it, being mayor of Manchester is the first time he has been a leader in his own right and able to show his true colours.
Curiously, of course, the same charge of chameleonic reinvention is also made of Starmer. The one constant for both of them, their critics say, is their ambition to lead the Labour Party. How fair is this description of Burnham, I wonder? And perhaps more pertinently, after a few weeks in which the Prime Minister’s departure has become a source of fevered speculation, how real is his ambition to lead the Labour Party?
In Head North, Burnham tells the story of his time at school, where he tried to fit in while not falling behind with his studies. “It was hard to be both a good student and one of the lads,” he writes. For a while he says, he leaned too much towards the latter. And yet – as he admits almost bashfully – he achieved straight-As in his O-levels. Whether he was ever more lad than good boy, it is obvious he has always tried to be both.
Isn’t this description of the most relatable of school dilemmas also a description of his career so far: the story of a man constantly striving to be one of the lads without letting go of his ambition to rise through the ranks of British politics? “Um, yeah, it’s not far off,” he replies, laughing.
In Burnham’s telling, he has always found this balancing act hardest when he is away from the north-west. At university in Cambridge, he writes, he felt like an “imposter”. And then in Westminster, he found the culture stifling. He says it was only once he was back in Manchester that he was able to rediscover the old balance between acceptance and achievement. “This job has allowed me to be that without, you know, getting sort of ridiculed,” as he put it with a certain sadness. That the jokes are still being directed at him from London is a source of continued frustration. And yet he is clearly drawn back to the flame; back to the place that rejected him; the place where he tried to be a good student and one of the lads but couldn’t quite succeed.
Burnham has since rationalised his experience of Westminster by breaking it into two halves of a “journey” that led him back home. The first was his early days when he was a loyal political insider, “sort of trying to do the Westminster thing… You know, be loyal and get on.” This half began to break down when he went to Anfield as culture secretary in 2009 and faced a Kop stand chanting for justice for the victims of the 1989 Hillsborough stadium disaster, a cause he continues to fight for. Burnham undoubtedly handled that tricky occasion in Liverpool well: showing dignity without weakness, while using the stage to try to force the government into a change of direction to meet the Hillsborough families’ demands. Gordon Brown rang him after the event to tell him he was proud of him – an endorsement that still means a lot. So much so, in fact, that Burnham cites Brown as one of his political heroes. That day at Anfield was the moment, Burnham believes, when he took his first steps out of Westminster and towards his position today: mayor of Manchester, King of the North, and even prince across the water for many of Labour’s discontented MPs and activists.
Once again, it is easy to find reasons to doubt Burnham’s post-rationalisation of his trajectory. Before Anfield, his rise in Westminster was meteoric: becoming a special adviser at 28; an MP at 31; and cabinet minister at 38. After Anfield, Burnham remained in Westminster and twice stood for the Labour leadership. His second defeat, in 2015, was particularly bruising; having started the contest as the favourite he struggled – and ultimately failed – to halt the party’s march to Corbynism. Two years later he left Westminster.
Since returning to Manchester in 2017, however, Burnham’s politics have taken a clear leftward turn to what we might call today’s “Burnhamism” or, as he prefers it, “Manchesterism”. Burnham’s phrase, “Manchesterism”, was once used as an insult by socialist theorists such as Karl Kautsky. It was used to describe the free-trade fundamentalism of those Victorian businessmen-cum-politicians – Richard Cobden, John Bright and the like – who believed the version of liberal capitalism they pioneered in the city would bring peace and prosperity to Britain. For the left, they were misguided ideologues who instead created a cottonopolis of smokestacks and slums. Something similar could be said of today’s Manchester, with its gleaming city centre surrounded by rings of decaying towns.
Friedrich Engels, likewise, was radicalised by the conditions he saw in the city. He later derided the “Manchesterianism” of British trade unions, which he thought were more interested in winning incrementally higher wages and shorter working days than they were in launching world revolution. Manchester, then, has had an enduring and largely ignominious place in the history of the left. Burnham is trying to wrestle back its reputation, take ownership of that old derogatory phrase, and make his new “Manchesterism” a model for the future of the Labour Party.
Burnham describes his “Manchesterism” as neither Blue Labour nor soft left, Blairite nor Brownite, but a form of consensual, business-friendly socialism that seeks to retake public control of all essential services, from housing to transport, in order to make life “doable” for those trapped in the insecure world of Britain’s outsourced Serco economy. Such radical change is necessary, Burnham argues, to bring back the kind of social mobility he and his generation once enjoyed, whose foundation, he believes, was the public provision of life’s essentials. This leftist vision is now winning admiring glances from erstwhile colleagues in London, particularly when coupled with Manchester’s booming economy.
To his critics, Burnham’s real agenda is less ideological than political, focused on his own advancement. Burnham rejects this characterisation and explains his leftist turn as one forged through experience, particularly his decision to bring Manchester’s bus network under public control. Suddenly, fares could be cut, costs controlled, routes expanded. “Public control is everything,” he tells me. And now he wants more: control of housing, energy, water, rail – “the basics of life” as he calls them. “I’ve described what we’ve been doing here as rolling back the 1980s.” This, then, is today’s Andy Burnham, the anti-Thatcher – the north’s revenge.
Burnham accepts that taking public utilities back into public ownership will be expensive but insists there are ways to fund it, even raising the prospect that there might be ways to reclaim some of the money he says has been “siphoned out” in dividends. “I don’t believe it can be the case that that’s gone and there’s nothing you can [get].” Most important, in Burnham’s view, is reclaiming public control of housing. “If you’ve not got control of housing, you’ve not got control of the costs the country is facing.” This is another core tenet of his emerging ideology. Not only is public control of the essentials necessary to drive down costs for ordinary people, it is also necessary to drive down costs for the state. “The break up of the essentials, to me, is a big reason why the country is in the mess that it’s in,” he says. “Because when you’ve lost control of housing, energy, water, rail, buses, you’ve lost control of the basics of life, but you’ve also then lost control of costs and public spending.”
Burnham has deliberately chosen to limit his appearances at this year’s Labour Party Conference, attending just two or three events. He wants Starmer and the cabinet to be given a chance to reset the government without stepping on any toes, Boris Johnson-style. But he is not shy about his agenda either. One of the events he will attend in Liverpool this year will be a “Labour for PR” rally on Sunday evening, in favour of proportional representation. “The idea of a government elected on a minority of the vote is untenable,” he tells me. But he also believes such minority support has become a core part of Britain’s economic problems. Burnham wants to see electoral reform in Westminster so that parties are forced to collaborate on a long-term economic agenda involving “maximum devolution” to England’s regions, which he is convinced will allow the state to control the amount it is spending on welfare and social housing. This, he argues, is the only way to end the market instability hanging over British politics. The alternative – “firing up London and the south-east and hoping everything will be fine,” as he put it – is not working. “We’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets,” he says. As such, he is open to working with the Liberal Democrats and even, in future, Jeremy Corbyn.
Alongside this, Burnham wants to see a complete overhaul of asylum policy: not leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, but ending the system in which asylum seekers are settled around the country by the Home Office, which he describes as “atrocious” and worse: “dangerous”. He would like to see a more assertive foreign policy, and was uncomfortable watching the government’s courting of Donald Trump on his recent state visit to the UK. Burnham wants Labour to make “a stronger argument about Brexit having been a mistake”.
In theory, then, Burnham’s policies are as radical a departure from the prevailing consensus in British politics as Corbynism appeared to be in 2017, and as Reform’s are, in a very different direction, today. Burnham is raising the possibility of a completely different political economy. Regime change.
The awkward reality for Andy Burnham – and Keir Starmer – is that “Manchesterism” is not merely a plan for the north-west, but for the country at large. Put simply, Burnham’s policies are not deliverable under the current devolution settlement, but require powers currently held in Westminster. I put that to him. “We are trying to fix things here,” he says. “But, you know, if you look at it more broadly, it doesn’t feel like there are… the political system doesn’t feel like it works for people, does it?”
Burnham tells me that changing this system needs to be the core focus of this year’s Labour Party Conference, rather than speculation about his future or that of the Prime Minister. “To me, the issue of the conference is not who is the deputy leader of the party, who is the leader of the Labour Party. The issue for the conference is: where is our plan to turn the country around?” Still, it is impossible to avoid the implicit point here. Burnham does not believe the current government’s plan is anywhere near good enough.
Once again, the contrast between Burnham and Starmer is revealing. Both frame the next four years in almost existential terms: Labour against the prospect of “a government of the like we’ve never seen before in the shape of Reform”, as Burnham puts it. But where Starmer has pleaded for patience and adopted Blue Labour language and Treasury economics, Burnham is calling for radical change.
The Manchester mayor insists none of this means he is plotting an immediate return to Westminster to unseat Starmer, and he is angry about the “hostile briefing aimed in my direction” coming from people close to No 10. He was particularly incensed by a recent article in the Daily Telegraph that reported he was behind a new Labour campaign group called Mainstream, had spoken to MPs about standing down to allow him to return to Westminster, and was preparing to criticise Starmer at the party conference. Burnham rejects all three claims and says much of the week he was supposed to be plotting – while No 10 was in full crisis mode after the resignation of Angela Rayner and sacking of Peter Mandelson – he was actually locked in discussions with the Hillsborough families trying to negotiate a package they would find acceptable. He was, he says, helping the government avoid the public relations calamity of a row with the bereaved relatives at a conference being held in their home city of Liverpool.
Yet, the ambition is clearly there and so is the criticism of Starmer’s record. Burnham believes the Prime Minister is running an overly centralised government of the right. “This kind of challenge we’ve got in front of us cannot be met by a very factional and quite divisive running of the Labour Party,” he says. To Burnham’s supporters, talk that he will not be able to return to parliament because of Morgan McSweeney’s control of Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee, which supervises candidate selection, is only further proof of this point. Burnham believes a victory for Lucy Powell in the deputy leadership contest now under way would be crucial to loosening No 10’s grip on the party. Left unsaid is that it would also be crucial for his own return to parliament – the necessary condition of any future tilt at the leadership.
This is why there has been speculation in recent weeks about different MPs stepping down to give Burnham his chance. However, both Andrew Gwynne and Graham Stringer have ruled out forcing by-elections for him. When I challenged Burnham about his possible route back to parliament, he would not be drawn. But it is clear there are many other Labour MPs, not yet mentioned in media gossip, who might be attracted by a departure from the House of Commons. The prospect of running to replace Burnham as mayor adds a further note of intrigue.
Surely his ambition to lead the Labour Party remains, I ask. “Well… I love this job here, I love what I’ve been able to be part of here,” he says. “I think people don’t realise what a wrench it would be for me to leave here.” He lives where he was born and where he is liked. He is chauffeured from office to home and from visit to visit, as if he is prime minister of the north. He is home in the evenings to walk the dog with his wife and watch the football. And unlike the Prime Minister, he can still go to football games without the indignity of being forced into a corporate box. He has a good life, a balanced life. “I mean it when I say that the life I have here matters greatly to me,” he says. Aged 55, Burnham has found the perfect balance between being a good student and one of the lads. Yet he is clearly ready for more.
“It’s the plan that matters most, rather than me,” he insists. “Can we agree on a plan to turn this country around by retaking control of those essentials and being bold about it, and then helping to reduce the cost of living for people and helping control public spending as a result?” That sounds rather more like his plan than any plan likely to be agreed by this government. The point, Burnham says, is that “it can’t be just a changing of the guard: you have got to change the whole culture and… are people up for that?” Burnham, then, is offering something far more radical than a change of leadership. He wants a change in direction and a wholesale change in personnel: a northern takeover.
The challenge, as Burnham puts it, is not simply whether he wants the leadership, but whether the Labour Party wants him. “I’m going to put the question back,” he says. “I’m going to put the question back to people at Labour conference: are we up for that wholesale change? Because I think that’s what the country needs.” In other words: are they up for Burnhamism? But what of its corollary: the man himself? “If you’re asking me, am I attracted to going back into my old world and the old way of doing things in Westminster with minimal change, well no, I wouldn’t find that attractive. [But] am I ready to work with anybody who wants to sort of put in place a plan to turn the country around? I’m happy to play any role. I am ready to play any role in that. Yes. Because the threat we’re facing is increasingly an existential one.”
The message is clear, then: Burnham needs to know the party is “up for” what he is offering. “If people think I can play a role, [and] if that’s communicated really clearly, then that’s a different thing,” he says. “But I think people are kind of constantly trying to write me up as [if] I spend every waking minute of my life thinking about how I, you know, take over and that’s just not true.”
It is not the first time Burnham has headed into party conference facing rumours he might mount a leadership challenge. At the start of the 2022 Labour Party Conference, he complained to delegates on its fringe that Labour needed to “get on the front foot” in relation to the Truss government’s tax plans, questioning his own party’s political strategy. “Where is the fight?” he demanded. During the days that followed, Starmer was handed a gift in the form of the mini-Budget crash. The day after conference, Burnham complained to BBC Radio Manchester that it was an “annoyance” to be asked constantly about his leadership desires.
This time it is different, though: the stakes higher, the crisis deeper. Across the party, from the soft left to the Blue Labour right, there is a sense that its leadership is failing, throwing away the opportunity it was afforded to remake the country, opening the door to Nigel Farage to tear down whatever is left of liberal Britain, much as the party’s failures in the late 1970s enabled Margaret Thatcher.
The Labour Party is approaching the choice that will define the rest of this decade rapidly: a choice between its current leader and Prime Minister, and an alternative represented by Burnham and his brand of Manchesterism. “Politics BAU – business as usual – Westminster politics, ain’t gonna do it,” Burnham tells me. “The plan has to change quite radically.” The challenge has been laid.
We meet again the following morning. I am to join him on a tour of his kingdom. The conversation quickly turns to the football. After our interview the previous day, Burnham settled in to watch Swansea City overturn a 2-0 deficit to win 3-2 against Nottingham Forest in the League Cup. We joke about poor Ange Postecoglou, Forest’s comically grumpy manager after yet another defeat. This is how Burnham relaxes after a long day in the office. I am struck again by the similarity with Starmer, who does much the same.
We are in Manchester’s “Media City”, the shiny new(ish) home of the BBC in the north, where every Thursday Burnham takes an hour of questions on the popular Mike Sweeney show. Sweeney, Burnham says, “is a legend in these parts”. He says he can appear on national television shows and no one will mention it to him. But every Thursday someone will approach him to say: “I heard you on Sweeney.” This week, Burnham faces a few questions from the presenter about his political ambitions, but for almost every caller, the main issues are much more prosaic: closed bus routes and disabled parking, new train stations and Right to Buy. I picture a medieval king receiving petitions from his people. One man laments the closing of the 191 bus route – “a fantastic route, a cracking route” – that handily stopped outside a nice pub. “Do you know the Boar’s Head, Andy?” he asks. Burnham smiles. “Yes, I think I do.” Burnham handles the questions comfortably, promising to look into the listeners’ concerns. He gets most animated when given the chance to sock it to Westminster, whether it be the decision to scrap the northern route of HS2, the high-speed railway that was originally meant to go from London to Manchester, or its failure to build enough social housing.
After the show, we jump in a people carrier and begin our journey to Trafford Hospital, the very first NHS hospital, the keys to which were formally handed over to Aneurin Bevan in a ceremony in 1948. I ask whether he’s more of a Bevan or (Ernest) Bevin man. Bevan is an icon of the left; Bevin, of the Labour right. “Bevan,” Burnham shoots back, quickly. He tells me he still reads for inspiration Bevan’s speech to the House of Commons introducing the second reading of the postwar Labour government’s Housing Bill in 1949.
Bevan, at the time, was health and housing secretary, and declared his intention to provide “a separate home for every family in the country”. This aspiration, Bevan declared, might seem modest, but would, in fact, be “the first time that any nation has done it in the recorded history of mankind”. It was central to Labour’s mission. “It is a matter, I should have thought, for universal gratification that we are now within sight of providing for every separate family the comfort and privacy of a separate household.” Burnham is not faking his admiration for this speech and is able to quote from memory Bevan’s assertion that “one of the reasons why modern nations have not been able to solve their housing problems is that they have looked upon houses as commodities to be bought and sold and not as a social service to be provided”. This, Burnham believes, is the ideal we must return to.
Conversation turns back to our interview the previous night. Burnham wants to clarify some of his answers. He had been thinking about my questions about “Burnhamism”. The most succinct way of explaining his politics is “aspirational socialism”, he says. “It’s the Manchester way.” In Burnham’s telling, this means giving people back the foundations they need to grow: the secure housing and affordable services once provided by the state. “That’s what Britain had in the postwar period,” he says. “We’ve got to get back to speaking to working-class ambition.” Like making America great again and taking back control, Burnhamism offers a vision of the future that is based on the promise of a resurrected past; a form of nostalgic futurism.
It is striking that Burnham avoids Starmer’s “working people” formulation in favour of the more everyday “working class”. I ask whether he considers himself working class. He nods, then offers a careful qualification: “I consider myself from a working-class background.” He knows his means and achievements no longer place him in that bracket, but insists his lifestyle and sensibilities remain what they have always been. It is another irony that Starmer, too, feels much the same.
Though Burnham’s politics are now clearly much further to the left than the Starmer government, he insists they are not anti-business or anti-entrepreneurial, and holds up Manchester’s recent economic growth as proof. As we travel through Trafford in the south-west of the city, the prosperity of the area is evident: rows of tidy 1930s homes, with expensive cars lining the pavements. Like Burnham, the city feels on the up: the high-rises now giving Manchester its own modern skyline; the streets alive with bars and restaurants; nightlife to make Londoners blush.
When we arrive at Trafford Hospital, the NHS manager who greets him knows him well. “Were you at the match?” she asks. She’s an older woman and fellow Evertonian. She looks at him like a proud mother. He is there to see the hospital’s new carbon-neutral boiler. Burnham has some amiable banter with the workers and inspects the site. Once again, it is hard not to think I’m shadowing the prime minister of Manchester, rather than its metro mayor.
Back in the car, the discussion turns to literature and poetry. He umms and ahhs when I ask whether he has a favourite book. Middlemarch, he says, eventually, though he admits this is probably a “classic English student answer”. He worries that studying English “kills your love of reading” because it can lead to over-analysing everything. He reads more poetry than novels now. Tony Harrison, the left-wing Yorkshire bard of the 1980s, is one of his inspirations. Listening to Harrison in the 1980s was the first time Burnham realised English poetry could have a northern voice. Philip Larkin is another favourite, though he thinks of him as he does of Morrissey, his teenage hero whose politics have veered in a darker direction than his own.
Burnham’s choices of Harrison and Larkin are revealing, and so too is the contrast with Starmer, who professes neither to read much nor dream. Burnham – this man of football and beer, chips and gravy – is more cultured and romantic that he lets on, drawn to the pensive, earthy reflections of two of England’s great northern poets. Harrison was an outspoken left-wing critic of Thatcher, most famous for “V”, which people now mainly remember because it was broadcast on Channel 4 during the miners’ strike, complete with its many four-letter profanities. “V” is a mournful reflection on life and mortality, telling the story of Harrison returning to the graveyard “on the brink of Beeston Hill” where his parents are buried and finding it untended, full of litter and graffiti.
Harrison ruminates on the “skins” who had scrawled “fuck”, “shit” and worse through the graveyard where his parents are laid, before reflecting on his own lack of care for their resting place. When Harrison was a child, he notes, he would help his father tend to his grandmother’s grave. “My dad who came each week to bring fresh flowers/Came home with clay stains on his trouser knees.” In contrast, he has spent two hours “made up of odd ten minutes such as these” looking after his own parents’ plot.
How many British graveyards now this Mayare strewn with rubbish and choked up with weedssince families and friends have gone awayfor work or fuller lives, like me from Leeds?
It is not hard to see why melancholy lines like these affect Burnham, this boy of the north-west constantly drawn away by the lure of “fuller lives” elsewhere. Burnham later sends me another of Harrison’s poems, “Book Ends”, which reflects on the relationship between a working-class father and his son who left for university. The poem, Burnham says, captures the “two worlds” he has always lived in.
Burnham is surely not alone in this. Harrison’s reflections speak to a whole generation, or generations, of children catapulted from obscure provincial towns into more glamorous postcodes throughout the 1980s, 1990s and beyond. Was this not, in fact, the defining social experience of postwar Britain? Most of us are, in some way, dislocated figures living deracinated lives. For a child of the north like myself, Burnham is painfully recognisable, like so many of the good boys I know who moved south but held tight to their homeliness. In some ways, Burnham is representative of modern Britain – mocked precisely because we know him so well.
Burnham’s love of Larkin reveals a different side of his character. I ask which of his poems is his favourite. He laughs because he and one of his daughters had been discussing this exact question just a few days earlier. “She persuaded me it was ‘Mr Bleaney’.”
In some ways, “Mr Bleaney” depicts an altogether different Britain to the one captured by Harrison: a Britain where working men do not move away for “fuller lives” but for far bleaker ones. Larkin’s poem tells the story of a man who moves into a cold, spartan room in a boarding house vacated by its previous occupant – Mr Bleaney – who, it seems, had recently moved away. The poem captures a time when single working men carved out lives for themselves in such places. The animating idea of the poem is that while the landlady was used to Mr Bleaney’s habits – “his preference for sauce to gravy” – it was never truly his home. The saddest lines come at the end, when Larkin raises the question of whether any of this matters for a single, childless man like Mr Bleaney – and, of course, himself. “How we live measures our own nature,” Larkin writes, painfully.
In many ways there is nothing of “Mr Bleaney” about Andy Burnham. Back in Manchester, he has it all, it seems. Married to the girl he met at university and living a stone’s throw from where he grew up, his three grown-up children close by. “Marie-France [his wife], Jimmy, Rosie, Annie and I are as tight a five-strong family unit as mine was before us,” he writes in Head North. In Westminster, though, he had “no more to show” for his presence. As Larkin puts it: did he warrant no better?
Our conversation about poetry is cut short when we arrive in Stockport. Burnham has asked the driver to drop us off at a new bus interchange, built while he has been mayor. The area is a vision of Burnhamism if ever there was one. A new transport hub for his “Bee Line” bus network has been built, filled with new electric buses and linked to cycle lanes designed by the former professional cyclist Chris Boardman, and with the West Coast Main Line running south to London. The tram is due to connect the town to Manchester too, and eventually he wants to see an underground network built across the whole of Greater Manchester. The town already feels on the up. New blocks of flats have been built and, unlike many such developments in London, feel in keeping with their surroundings, framed by the Victorian viaduct that cuts across the valley. New shops are beginning to pop up. “We’re dead proud of it,” Burnham tells me. It is clear he means it.
As we enter Stockport town centre, it feels busy – not plush, but also not weighed down with the depressing atmosphere so endemic to small-town Britain today. Burnham sees towns like this in Greater Manchester as the solution to Britain’s north-south divide. The area is growing at a faster rate than at any time since the Victorian era, he says. Manchester will swell, like London, taking in the surrounding towns and villages. He thinks Westminster still does not understand Manchester’s potential. “This country’s failure to support one of its major cities [to grow] at this scale is mind-boggling.” He wants Manchester Airport to expand further, before a third runway at Heathrow is given the go-ahead. The decision to expand Gatwick, taken in mid September, is another indication of the government’s southern bias, Burnham believes. It is clear which part of the country would have most to gain from his premiership.
As we walk through the town towards Burnham’s next engagement – a “Work Well” hub, which helps people back into work – we pass a woman on the stairs, who double-takes, and then says that she’s just heard him on “Sweeney”. “Good for you,” she says, smiling. Burnham greets everyone in much the same way: “How you doing, alright?” “Hiya, good thanks, you?”
He arrives at the event in good spirits. “Welcome to Stockport,” says the woman who greets him. “It’s great, isn’t it,” he replies. A cup of tea is ordered – “strong, no sugar” – and then we’re into the presentation. It is Burnham’s home turf and he tells them what they want to hear. The work they are doing needs to be recognised in Whitehall. The savings they make getting people off benefits and into work should be reinvested in what they are doing and not simply pocketed by the Treasury. There are plenty of agreeing nods. Being prime minister will demand many more difficult conversations than this, with many more enemies. Prime ministers can no longer be one of the lads.
Before we go, we hear from Paul, who fell out of work when his teenage daughter suddenly became seriously ill and had to be sectioned. He became a full-time carer. Since then, he has retrained as an estate agent and set up his own business. In every sense, Paul was one of the lads: proud, down-to-earth, funny. “I’ve been stitched right up,” Paul begins, to laughter, having been asked to speak with the mayor of Manchester watching on. After telling his story, he pulls a business card from his jacket. “I hear you might be relocating,” he says to giggles in the room. “Somewhere down south. I’m not sure what number.”
Burnham laughs along. “Love it, Paul,” he says and puts the card in his back pocket. When the event draws to a close, Paul is waiting by the entrance. The mayor and his constituent embrace. “Go for it,” Paul says, now serious, almost fatherly. Burnham smiles softly, and without reproach.
[Further reading: What Keir Starmer can’t say]
