Andy Burnham’s door-knock to Downing Street
Andy Burnham is having an unusually awkward encounter with a would-be constituent. Since he knocked on the door several minutes ago, the young man has barely said a word, simply looking at Burnham wide-eyed, bewildered. He nods occasionally as Burnham delivers his patter ve-rr-yyy sl-ow-ly, unsure if this potential supporter is following. Then the young man lights up. In broken English he says: “I know your name. Seen it on the news. Are you going to challenge to be the prime minister, right?!”
“Uh, possibly,” Burnham replies, and the man chuckles delightedly. Such is the nature of the by-election in Makerfield, where the stakes are high, the subtext is heavy and, every so often, a shellshocked man in shorts and a T-shirt will make the implicit explicit.
This is a campaign on several levels. Burnham has “a tough fight” against Reform, as I hear him say repeatedly while watching him door-knocking. But he’s also fighting two other implied contests: with a Labour selectorate of MPs and members, who soon may well have to decide whether to nominate or vote for him to replace Keir Starmer; and with the electorate at large, who soon could find themselves choosing between Burnham and Nigel Farage in a general election.
As Tony Blair warns his party not to replace the Prime Minister without having a clear policy direction, people are asking whether Burnham has a plan, and what on Earth it is. This is a tight by-election against Farage’s Reform, but Burnham is already being scrutinised as a prospective prime minister.
With three weeks to go until polling day, Burnham has allowed me to accompany him while campaigning in Makerfield, an invitation extended only to the New Statesman. The voters he is meeting are “genuine undecideds”, I am assured, not hand-picked to make him look good before the prying eyes of the media. This is Burnham’s mission for the rest of the campaign: getting out to meet undecided voters personally, one by one, door by door.
But the pitch is different from a usual by-election. “I’m not standing on these doorsteps saying, like normally, ‘Oh, we’re brilliant and all the other rubbish, and we’ve done this, this and this, breakfast clubs…’ You know the drill. I’m not doing that.” Instead, his message is: “We’re not good enough. We need to be better. You need to give me a mandate to do that.”
In London, Keir Starmer and his loyalists nervously await the by-election result and Burnham’s possible return to Westminster. The cabinet is split over the prospect: some are angered by what they see as the irresponsibility of what Burnham is doing; others make no secret of how much they are looking forward to welcoming their new leader. Starmer has vowed to fight on, and no one quite knows if he means it. The “coronation or contest” question remains. Yet the Labour machine has already, wordlessly, answered. The coup is being facilitated by the party itself. Labour staffers are now merrily creating and sharing Burnham’s posts about needing to change the party and what it is getting wrong. Labour MPs and ministers travel to kiss the ring of their likely new leader. When I meet Burnham he is with an MP whom I last saw a few weeks ago, sitting beside me on the Newsnight sofa, making a strident case for keeping Starmer.
For now, Labour’s seat of power isn’t 10 Downing Street, but Stubshaw Cross Community Club in Ashton-in-Makerfield, the working men’s club from which the Burnham campaign is run. This is where Labour staff and fixers are making plans and being tapped up for jobs, while around them the bingo, darts, salsa and exotic bird auctions (every Thursday night, £2 entry) continue as normal.
Burnham wears the pressure lightly. On a scorching day, he wears his classic black T-shirt and trousers, looking the same as he does on the news, only with a slightly sunburned nose. He has been spending his days walking around Makerfield, and jokes that the “belly I had at the start of the campaign”, when he was pictured out running in “my old Everton shorts” is “slightly reduced now”. We’re door-knocking on the neat semi-detached houses of a new development in Hindley, three miles from Wigan. He represented this area as the MP for Leigh from 2001 until 2017, and marvels at how these houses didn’t exist back then.
As Burnham tries to convert undecideds, one by one, I dig into what he would actually do as prime minister, whether he has a plan, and, if so, what it is. He flits between the two, plainly enjoying the door-knocking more than the chat with me.
We start with his record as mayor of Greater Manchester. By most measures, he has made a success of the job, and stayed popular doing it. His summary of his record is simple: “Highest growth, highest reduction in inner-city deprivation.” He has eye-catching projects to point to as well, such as the distinctive yellow “Bee” bus network, which he brought under public control, and the “bed every night” scheme, which has substantially reduced rough sleeping in the city. He is seen to have connected with people, met the moment and championed his part of the world, an intangible feeling backed up by the data: he won a third term with almost two-thirds of the vote and is, as it currently stands, the most popular politician in the UK.
Yet Burnham’s critics – including some of his Labour colleagues in Westminster – argue that he has been playing politics on “easy mode” in Greater Manchester. He has no official opposition, a relatively small budget of £3bn; all he has had to do is “spend money and say nice things about Manchester”, as one critical colleague puts it. Far from Burnham being a political messiah, his Labour critics warn, people are projecting onto him whatever they want to see. He just wants to be loved, others say, and will struggle to maintain his popularity if, or when, he actually has to make difficult decisions in No 10.
Burnham struggles not to be tetchy when I put these criticisms to him. “I’ve been in politics 25 years, you know, and the idea that I just do easy things…” he trails off and shakes his head. “I went to Hillsborough on the 20th anniversary.” There, he was heckled while speaking about the government’s response. “I’ve taken risks on various things, you know, infected blood. Most people would say if you want to be liked, you wouldn’t take on things like that.” Yet both these fights for justice were highly popular causes with voters, however difficult they were in Westminster.
He is keen to push back against the idea that being the mayor has been easy. “I’ve dealt with terrorism, wildfires, a pandemic, and through all of it we’ve had the highest growth in the country, with figures from the Centre for Cities recently showing we’ve reduced inner-city deprivation. We re-regulated the buses. I mean, yeah, I hear this now, ‘It’s all easy.’ Look at the range: I’m the police and crime commissioner, responsible for the fire service, I’ve got health responsibilities. The idea that it’s easy is mind-boggling.”
As the likelihood of Burnham becoming the prime minister in a few short weeks has grown, so has scrutiny of his record in Greater Manchester. In late May, a piece by Joshi Herrmann in the Manchester-based publication the Mill captured the conversation. Herrmann argued that Burnham has a remarkable ability to connect with people and understand the political moment, but is not a details person: vague on what lies behind Manchester’s success, even conflicted about associating himself with the strategy – attracting private-sector investment at any cost – that has underpinned the city’s growth.
I tell Burnham I want to put some of Herrmann’s criticisms to him, and am surprised to observe I strike a nerve. “I didn’t read it,” Burnham says, abruptly. “He’s not sympathetic, so let’s start with that.”
I say there is some confusion around “Manchesterism”, the economic model he says he wants to export to the rest of the country. He speaks about reindustrialisation and “ending neoliberalism” in his campaign video for Makerfield, but isn’t Manchesterism a service-led, city-driven model, about attracting private investment from all around the world? Is that not what Manchester’s growth has been predicated on?
“Not under me. I changed that… My first priority was homelessness and rough sleeping, because the city needed to focus again on those issues and inequality.” So, Manchesterism isn’t about attracting private sector investment? It’s more about redistribution? “No it is that,” he cuts in. “But it’s doing that by saying to them we’re very clear we want good growth.” He wants partners who focus on giving back – committing to the area long-term, acting as good employers, guaranteeing apprenticeship placements. “We’re very much about being clear that we want people who aren’t just here to siphon out, you know, they’re here to give back, because that’s the Greater Manchester sort of ethos.”
I remind him that much of the Manchester skyline is funded by the United Arab Emirates, and much of the wider development in the city by Saudi Arabia, and privately wonder how much emphasis these Middle East investors have placed on “giving back” to the region. “Yeah, I mean, some of that pre-dates me, but I’m not going to criticise the investment, certainly, that UAE have put into the city.”
This is another criticism that has emerged amid the scrutiny now facing Burnham: that he has benefited in Manchester from decisions that pre-dated him and that if he is to succeed in No 10, he will need the detail-oriented people that he inherited there – skilled operators such as Howard Bernstein and Richard Leese. Much the same was said of Boris Johnson in London, where Edward Lister – a veteran local government fixer – took on much of the burden of running the operation. When Johnson entered No 10, he found it impossible to replicate the model he had built at City Hall, burned through chiefs of staff and was forced from power after three years. Being a popular mayor is no guarantee of being a successful prime minister.
While Burnham rings another doorbell, I find I am still confused about where reindustrialisation and “ending neoliberalism” play into the success he has had in Manchester, or how it could be exported more widely. I take a different tack, asking about places on the outskirts of Manchester that, analysis shows, haven’t grown as quickly as the city itself – places like Hindley, where we are door-knocking. “Yeah, that’s a fairer criticism,” he reflects. “However, that’s more a question of the scale of what we’re doing, because the city had to start powering ahead before we could then really lift the towns around, but we’ve started to do that.”
So, it’s a kind of city-led growth, in that you need the cities to go first, and then you have the money for redistribution and investment? “I don’t think that’s unreasonable to put it that way.” He emphasises that his approach is “interventionist” too. “If we left it to the market, they would set a low ambition for our towns.” He cites Stockport as the best example of this: when the private sector pulled out of a major regeneration programme for the town in the aftermath of the pandemic, he decided to put in public money rather than abandon it.
Manchesterism, in the end, is a state of mind. “Manchester, in terms of the character of the people and the place, is entrepreneurial, but people giving back. So it’s never about just ‘take out, siphon out’. That is how people are. It’s how the place has always been. It’s been at the centre of the fight for civil rights, you know, the cotton workers who wouldn’t handle slave cotton. It’s ingrained, really, in the mentality of the place.”
Most importantly for Burnham, Manchester’s political culture is “absolutely, tangibly different” to that of Westminster, he adds: defined – as he sees it – by the public, private and voluntary sectors and the wider community working closely together, “setting big visions, but then getting everybody pulling in behind it”. He wants to see more of that in the political culture nationally. Burnham believes the introduction of proportional representation is the key to unlocking such a culture change. A quiet campaign is under way to persuade him to change the voting system before the next election – including from Tory malcontents who believe a Reform victory is inevitable if first past the post is not replaced. Burnham, however, has insisted any such change could only happen after the next general election.
Another door. A man in his forties or fifties says he is moving house the following day, so he won’t be voting in the by-election. Burnham gives his quick pitch, with a humble shrug: “I’m just trying to change Labour. Labour’s out of touch. That’s basically what I’m doing. So good luck with the move.”
We reach a main road, and people beep as they drive by, waving out of their car windows, giving Burnham a thumbs up. We meet three older voters who ask for hugs and selfies. A man runs inside his house and returns with an old-school digital camera, to capture his encounter with Burnham for posterity. While they pose, a van drives by and we hear an indistinguishable rant, followed by the words: “You prick.”
Burnham seems relaxed on the doorstep, and only mildly awkward when a voter or I mention him entering No 10 (“it’s a bit hypothetical, Ailbhe”). Yet there is a palpable anxiety among his campaign team about being seen to take anything for granted or to get ahead of themselves. And rightly so: Reform won 24 of the 25 seats that were up for election on Wigan council last month; the only reason Farage’s party hasn’t taken control of the council altogether is because it elects its councillors in thirds. “I know I’ve got a fight on my hands,” I hear Burnham say over and over again.
Yet many in the Labour Party and the wider country are already looking ahead to the contest Burnham’s team desperately doesn’t want him to talk about: the battle for the leadership of the Labour Party, and his plans for when he gets there. He has already been accused of making U-turns during the campaign: on rejoining the EU, on access to benefits for migrants, on trans rights and on Shabana Mahmood’s immigration reforms. Having signed up to Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules, with no exceptions for defence, it is hard to know what Burnham could really do differently beyond being a more capable, instinctive politician and a better salesman than Starmer. (His many supporters would say that in itself is huge, and fundamental to making government a success.)
He doesn’t give me much more sense of a plan during our conversation, or identify the genuinely tough decisions he intends to take, on defence, welfare, or anything else. But he does give his most convincing riposte to the idea that he only takes easy decisions. “I have raised taxes in Greater Manchester. If you look at my mayoral precept, it’s significantly higher than anyone else’s mayoral precept. But the way I’ve done it is I’ve said to people: ‘I will do it for a specific purpose to keep the £2 fare cap.’ So, you know, I think it’s about how you do things, isn’t it?”
Burnham says he believes very strongly in “how you do your politics”: put simply, “If you say you’re going to do something, do it. You know, when people say I like to be liked, I like to be recognised to do things the right way. I don’t just want to do the politically expedient thing. I stood for election as mayor and said: ‘I’ll regulate the buses.’ I have regulated the buses. I went to Anfield and said, ‘I’ll fight for justice.’ I did.”
So many of Labour’s hopes are pinned on the idea that he’s right; that the unpopularity that prime ministers have seemed doomed to experience in recent years can be defeated by a good communicator who carries people with him, even when facing difficult decisions. He says “landing things on people” with no forewarning or communication is “corrosive” at a time when trust in politics is low. It is a very obvious dig at the most disastrous moments of Starmer’s government: cutting winter fuel and the attempted welfare cuts.
“Obviously [the government has] done things I wouldn’t have done, the winter fuel payment being the most obvious one,” he explains. “I look back at the manifesto, and I wouldn’t have written it like that myself when it comes to tax. I think it was quite restrictive. I think people put a premium now on honesty rather than, you know, things that are crafted for political reasons.”
But a new leader would have to stick to those promises, he adds. “The manifesto has to be stuck to. That’s important.” A commitment like that makes you wonder if Burnham would seek his own mandate before long, to liberate him from the politically expedient promises Starmer made two years ago. Until recently, Burnham was giving serious consideration to calling an early election should he become prime minister, but has since reassured MPs that he would not do so.
He says the hardest thing a Labour administration (hint: probably led by him) will have to face in the coming months will be relieving cost-of-living pressures on people as the war in Iran bites. “How do you do that within the challenging climate that we’re in? That will be the hard thing, you know, how do you come up with the right thing that actually does give people respite, but at the same time doesn’t then create a massive backlash or a new sense of unfairness somewhere else.”
Where does he stand on the debate about North Sea oil and gas engulfing the top of the Labour government, I ask, giving him the opportunity to signal his closeness or otherwise to Ed Miliband, who is suggested as a possible pick for chancellor. “I’ve got something of an open mind, you know. I don’t have a sort of fixed position.” He certainly doesn’t take the bait, and I wonder whether this is a temporary, expedient approach ahead of the by-election or a more significant signal of distance with someone often presumed to be a key influence on his economic vision. “I was in Ed’s shadow cabinet,” Burnham says in response. “We were close when we were in the cabinet back in 2008, 2009, 2010. So we’ve always been close. You know, we’re friends, actually.” He doesn’t comment on Miliband’s economic vision or whether he agrees with it.
Big questions, such as whether Mahmood or Miliband would be setting the economic agenda for his government – one more reassuring for markets, one more radical – remain unanswered. It reminds me of the Labour general election campaign in 2024, when the line was, similarly, that they wouldn’t get into hypotheticals or take things for granted by talking about their plans for government, because there was an election to be won first.
I take another stab at identifying the key Labour figures who might hold sway in a Burnham administration. Who is he closest to among his Westminster colleagues?
“Ehm…” he takes the longest pause he has taken all day, cogs whirring as he tries not to offend anyone or accidentally name his fantasy cabinet in order of seniority. “I’ve got a lot of longstanding friends. Lucy [Powell], Debbie Abrahams, Harpreet [Uppal] who’s here campaigning today, Lisa [Nandy]. I could reel off a lot.” It’s an unpredictable selection of cabinet-level allies (Nandy and Powell), a leading welfare rebel (Abrahams) and a 2024 intake newbie. Back at campaign HQ, the subtle and not-so-subtle pitches for jobs in the Burnham government continue to pile in.
We arrive at another door, where a couple greet him with screams, hugs and exclamations of: “Oh my God!” Jill and Simon, it turns out, taught Burnham’s daughters cheerleading. “Jill was just reminding me of my launch for the Labour leadership in 2010,” he says to me. She organised a cheerleading performance to introduce him at it. “And everyone in Westminster said: ‘I’ve never seen cheerleaders at a Labour event.’”
Burnham, in his element, reminisces, laughs, take selfies. Two communications advisers, his campaign lead and I stand and wait. “This is par for the course if you’re out with him,” one campaign insider says. “There is no member of Labour Party staff who can change him.” During the previous day’s canvassing session he actually got into someone’s car and went to a barbecue, several campaign aides tell me later, in mock horror. Well over 15 minutes later, after more selfies, more reminiscing, enquiries after every extended family member, we start moving again. We go 100 metres and the granny from the same family opens her door. There are more hugs and selfies. He is energised, visibly so, by every interaction, his mood and energy improving the longer we are out campaigning.
The mention of his first Labour leadership campaign in 2010 is a reminder, as Burnham put it, of “how long this has been going”. He has harboured ambitions of leading the Labour Party for more than 16 years, and failed twice before. He is a very different politician today from the one he was as a cabinet minister – when he wore suits rather than bomber jackets – but he traces finding his voice as a politician back to his first leadership campaign: “I learned for the first time in 2010 how to be a politician when you’re speaking for yourself. I was just starting at that point to sort of get used to just being clear and confident about what I was about, and what I was trying to do.”
His political style – and fashion sense – has morphed since, as he has become the more experienced politician he is today. When the New Statesman’s creative editor was arranging the photoshoot to accompany this interview, Burnham’s team refused her request for him to wear a suit. It was when I mentioned him being in No 10, wearing a suit and taking tough decisions, that he told me I was getting “a bit hypothetical”. He says he is not remotely worried about the trap recent prime ministers have fallen into, of entering government and immediately becoming unpopular. “That side of it doesn’t, you know, doesn’t worry me in any way, shape or form.” He says he has built a connection with people in his community over 25 years in politics, and he has learned now “to get change and get things done”. We’ll have to wait and see whether he decides to wear a suit.
Reflecting on his past two Labour leadership bids, he says: “I think I was a bit more insurgent in 2010. In 2015 I carried the weight of the frontrunner and probably didn’t carry it very well.” Another question that hangs over this contest is how Burnham will carry the same weight of expectation should he return to Westminster, where a leadership contest against Starmer, Wes Streeting, or any number of other contenders could await him.
Jeremy Corbyn, of course, won that contest in 2015 and led the Labour Party through the Brexit referendum (ahead of which he was criticised for not helping the Remain campaign more) and then two unsuccessful general elections. Does Burnham look back and think about how differently things might have turned out if he had won the Labour leadership contest in 2015?
“I mean, this is gonna sound too much, and I kind of hesitate to say it, and maybe I shouldn’t, but I don’t know whether 2016 may have played out differently. I was always a voice inside, saying, look, I’m a Remainer, but we should be telling Cameron and Osborne, they’ve got to really get some serious changes. Would that have played out slightly differently if I was the sort of…” he trails off, leaving me to fill in “Labour leader” in my head. “My other half doesn’t give me credit for anything much in politics at all, she’s my fiercest – not critic, but, like, challenger – about things, and she thinks it might, yeah. She says, well, maybe it would’ve been different.”
One of Burnham’s Labour colleagues recently said to me they believe Burnham is haunted by a sense that he should have won the Labour leadership back in 2015 – almost of the course of history being derailed on to a more chaotic path because he, the front-runner, failed. It is certainly interesting to wonder whether so much of the chaos of British politics in recent years could have been prevented had he won that contest: maybe Brexit wouldn’t have happened; maybe Labour would have won an election years earlier than 2024. Evidently, the Burnham household thinks about it too.
“I was a reluctant Remainer, if I’m honest, just because of representing here. I had difficult issues to deal with in relation to primary schools all of a sudden being full and people not being able to get places, particularly Catholic primary schools, you know, with Polish workers coming over. Obviously people were dead welcoming, but it created issues.” He mentions workers being displaced and wages being undercut in local factories.
“I was shadow home secretary instead of leader in 2016 and I made a speech on the patriotic case… for Remain, and I remember I tried to persuade the then Remain campaign to say ‘this is what you should be fighting on’, not this sort of cold, financial, ‘you’ll be better off by this amount of money’ thing that they were doing. I remember at the time Alan Johnson and others said, ‘Oh no, we’re not interested, that’s not what we’re doing.’” He gave a speech about his great-grandfather in the First World War, about the people who fought to protect Europe from right-wing politics and fascism: “You know, ‘This was us, and this is what we did.’”
Burnham said to another interviewer that when he told his wife, the Dutch-born Marie-France Van Heel, about his plan to return to Westminster, she replied with “two words”. He laughs when I bring it up. “Oh, we obviously talk about all these things. She doesn’t welcome the intrusion… It’s just never been her thing,” he sighs. “She’s kind of never been a massive fan of my general world. She generally supports what I’m trying to do, I guess, but in a slightly challenging way sometimes.”
Does he feel at all conflicted about potentially being back in Westminster, having seemed so happy in Manchester? “That I do feel a little bit conflicted about, because you know, I’ve loved being mayor. I mean, that’s no secret, and I think everyone can see that, can’t they? But I’ve always said, though, I would want to go back at some point. I just have an unfinished-business feeling. It needs so much change. And I know the club down there won’t like me saying that, but I just think it does.”
We have reached the end of the canvassing session and are strolling back to his car. He stops, reflecting on the conversations he’s been having, not just today but throughout the campaign. Burnham freely admits that many of the interactions he’s been having have been “challenging”. “What you kind of pick up is, in some of the people that you see me speak to, there’s a sadness about everything, about politics. People feel a bit disorientated about the way things are.”
He is worried that this is the last chance for Labour to stop Reform’s onward march. “I am concerned that if a certain brand of politics is dripped into the streets, then it’s a sort of irreversible thing, or it could be with us for a long time. Look at the US and just how kind of far gone it is.” He never mentions Farage by name, or Reform, but on doorsteps I hear his simple message: “I’m fighting against quite divisive politics that are trying to divide people. It’s between me and the other party, and so it’s a straight fight, really.”
He says this by-election is the last chance to stop Reform. “If I just put it in the terms of Greater Manchester, I feel we’re on the cusp. If we don’t pull it back now, I think something changes.” On Wigan Council, Labour lost all of the seats it was defending to Reform in May. “That’s a very big statement. You can’t just see that and minimise it.” When people ask him “Why this moment?” results like that are why.
“This by-election is right on that cusp. I hate to over-aggrandise it or myself, I’m not doing that. I just do feel it’s a big moment.” It’s a strange, risky, historic by-election – arguably entirely unnecessary. But he says it couldn’t be more essential. “Do I feel the pressure? Of course. But am I clear that what I’m doing is right? Definitely. And actually, that sense has only grown in the by-election.”
He turns to the MP Emma Foody, who has been running the canvassing session. “What would you say today, Emma? We’ve pulled a few people around, haven’t we? You know, people who were gone, I would say.” She nods. Door by door, voter by voter, Burnham is trying to win people back to Labour. “Otherwise, they would have just drifted away from us. It gives us a chance of getting a foothold back, and then fighting back.”
As one of Andy Burnham’s closest allies put it to me: “Whatever happens, this will be in the history books.”
[Further reading: Andy Burnham’s plan for Britain]
