The Manchester years: how Burnham’s rebirth as ‘king of the north’ set him on road to No 10
Andy Burnham was a broken man.
Andy Burnham was a broken man. In a pub a short walk from parliament, which he had taken to calling “the madhouse”, he plotted his escape over beers with three trusted colleagues.
It was late March in 2016. Burnham, the MP for Leigh in Greater Manchester, had been in Westminster for 15 years but here, in a politico-free pub on Horseferry Road, his mood was dark.
“He was pissed off,” said Steve Rotheram, his close friend and then the MP for Liverpool Walton. In the space of seven months, Burnham had lost his second Labour leadership bid and felt aggrieved at what he saw as the “aloof” campaign to remain in the EU.
He had served in the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown but was now in the crossfire of an internecine war raging under the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and his confidence was draining faster than the midweek pints.
It was this night at the pub that would lead Burnham to Downing Street a decade later. He agreed, after some convincing, to leave Westminster and run for the newly created role of Greater Manchester mayor, with his “bezzie mate” Rotheram heading for Liverpool.
On Monday, the day after the World Cup final, the football-mad former altar boy who once described himself as “one of the lads” will become Britain’s seventh prime minister in 10 years.
His inner circle can scarcely believe he has made it to No 10, a feeling Burnham himself probably shares. “I thought when we left [Westminster] it was done,” Rotheram said of his friend’s leadership ambitions. Did Burnham think that too? “Yeah, I think he probably did.”
In the early summer of 2016, Burnham had announced his intention to leave parliament and chaos was unfolding all around him. He was in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and colleagues were resigning en masse over the leadership. “We were all in a private world of pain,” recalled Gloria De Piero, a fellow shadow minister.
At one point, virtually the only shadow ministers left were Corbyn’s closest allies, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Jon Trickett – and, curiously, Burnham, not a natural political soulmate of the firebrand leftwinger.
Cannily, the Leigh MP cast himself as a mediator between Labour’s warring factions and publicly refused to join the revolt. Colleagues recall him turning up to an “unbelievably fractious and very hostile” meeting of Labour’s ruling body, the national executive committee, and imploring all sides to find common ground. “He is a party loyalist but he never agreed with Jeremy’s politics,” said De Piero.
Yet some viewed Burnham’s refusal to resign – leaving him oddly stranded – as an example of his political opportunism: if he was to be Greater Manchester mayor, he needed the support of the thousands of Corbynistas who had joined the party under the new leader.
“He didn’t want to alienate his allies and he didn’t want to be seen to be opposing Jeremy. It doesn’t take a political genius to see why that was the case,” said one close Corbyn ally during his leadership.
On 26 June that year, Burnham publicly distanced himself from the growing rebellion, tweeting: “I have never taken part in a coup against any leader of the Labour party and I am not going to start now.”
He was involved in a plot of sorts, however. Just four days after that tweet, according to newly unearthed documents seen by the Guardian, those close to him helped draft what became known as the “Corbyn declaration” – a commitment to the Labour leader that his policies would continue if he stepped aside.
It never took off – and it is not clear if Corbyn ever got wind of Burnham’s role in the plan – yet those around the leader already viewed him with an air of caution. Burnham had, after all, recently lost a leadership contest against Corbyn and then, according to those in the room, privately insisted on bringing his campaign manager, the Labour MP Michael Dugher, into the shadow cabinet. Dugher was no fan of Corbyn and was soon sacked for “poisonous” briefing against the Labour leader.
“He was definitely not the most difficult of the non-Corbynite members of shadow cabinet,” said a senior Corbyn ally. “Trust is possibly putting it too strong, but he was definitely more amenable.”
To some, Burnham’s studied neutrality was an example of his tendency to follow “what he thinks is expedient and by political calculation rather than following his own lights”. He would no doubt believe the infighting betrayed the worst instincts of Labour, a party he felt had left him and millions more. It did, though, show a flash of his political ruthlessness, a trait he would display again years later. But for now he was heading north.
Nearly a year later, on the morning of 6 May 2017, came Burnham’s second act. He became the first directly elected mayor of Greater Manchester, heralding the “dawn of a new era” in a victory speech at Manchester Central convention centre. Politics had been “too London-centric for too long”, he told supporters.
In Manchester’s Grade II-listed Tootal Buildings the following Monday morning, Burnham was given a hero’s welcome by about 200 staff at the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.
The reception from the region’s 10 council leaders was less rapturous, however. None of them had backed him for the role, with most supporting the veteran Labour MP and interim mayor Tony Lloyd. Richard Leese, the leader of Manchester city council, was a political heavyweight in Greater Manchester and his endorsement mattered. He backed two candidates: Lloyd and the Labour minister Ivan Lewis.
“Quite a lot of people had a cynical view that he had run for leader twice and lost and that he needs to go do something else,” said one of the council leaders. Burnham put their noses out of joint during the mayoral campaign by saying it was a “cabinet-level job that needed cabinet-level experience”, seen as an insult to the town hall lifers. To some, it smacked of arrogance. The Stone Roses anthem This Is the One was played during his manifesto launch.
“People would say: he doesn’t understand the job he applied for, he doesn’t understand what local government was,” a former council leader said. “It was a cynical view that people had developed at a distance and I don’t think it was fair.”
As a show of magnanimity, Burnham asked Leese to be his deputy mayor, keeping the most powerful of his council leaders firmly on side. “I don’t think he would have asked me to be deputy mayor if he had been holding a grudge,” said Leese. “I take that as a real indicator that Andy wasn’t interested in old battles, he wanted to get things done.”
