So Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade will be Andy Burnham. A veteran of the New Labour administrations turned feel-good mayor, Mr. Burnham was the only candidate nominated by Labour lawmakers, who were panicked by dire local election results in May. He is now tasked with reviving the government’s popularity, which cratered under his grim-faced predecessor, Keir Starmer.
With his northern accent, casual attire and everyman persona, Mr. Burnham trades on his outsider status, a precious commodity in these antipolitical times. Extraordinarily, he returned to Parliament — where he started his political career — only last month. For nearly the past decade he served as mayor of Manchester, acquiring the moniker “King of the North.” Suggestive of fantasy TV more than insurgent regionalism, the title captures much of what Mr. Burnham offers the country: a chimera of upended London-centrism and the dispersal of power and prosperity.
Yet the King of the North has long been a creature of Westminster. Despite what Mr. Burnham calls “bad doses of impostor syndrome,” he positively glided into the corridors of power. This duality, at once regular guy and state functionary, is part of a pattern in which Mr. Burnham promises to break with orthodoxy only to cleave to it. The early signs suggest his premiership will be similar. But Britain is mired in economic stagnation and marinated in social distemper. It will take more than a Labour reset to fix its longstanding problems.
Born and raised in northwest England, the son of a receptionist and a telephone engineer, Mr. Burnham studied English literature at Cambridge University. At the age of 24 he became a parliamentary researcher for a prominent Labour lawmaker. After the 1997 landslide that brought New Labour to power, Mr. Burnham worked as a special adviser for a cabinet minister; Tony Blair then fast-tracked him to a safe seat in Greater Manchester. At 31, his political career was up and running.
In Parliament, Mr. Burnham’s record was strikingly loyalist. He voted for the Iraq war and, as a junior Home Office minister, took a tough approach to law and order. At the time, he was known in Westminster as Flog ’em and Burnham. Promoted to the cabinet under Gordon Brown, he pushed along New Labour’s ruinously expensive program to rebuild hospitals with private financing.
His ambitions, however, were bigger. When Labour was ejected from office in 2010, Mr. Burnham stood for party leader on a word salad of “aspirational socialism” and finished fourth. He ran again in 2015 as the bookmakers’ favorite, only to lose after the surprise surge of support for Jeremy Corbyn. Two years later, he found an election he could win closer to home, becoming the inaugural mayor of Greater Manchester.
The mayoralty comes with few powers. Its chief functions, according to the Oxford Economics consultancy, are “to argue for the region” and provide “a point of contact for private investors.” Mr. Burnham had found his level. The wider city-region, which has a population of 2.9 million, has recorded stronger growth than Britain’s other conurbations. Disposable incomes haven’t grown by much, though, and house-price inflation has left many residents behind. Still, there’s enough construction activity and service-sector buzz to call it a success story.
Mr. Burnham claims to have found a secret economic sauce, “business-friendly socialism,” or just plain “Manchesterism.” Yet his mayoralty will be chiefly remembered for two things: taking buses back under public control, which he had to be talked into, and his furious off-the-cuff reaction in 2020 to tougher lockdown restrictions imposed by the Boris Johnson government. Mr. Burnham thundered at how Westminster was “grinding people down.” For his impromptu defiance, the media gave him that “King of the North” epithet.
Yet the appellation wasn’t so much plucked from the ether as lab-grown by the man himself. Speaking at an event earlier that year, Mr. Burnham had daydreamed about “sitting in my ‘Game of Thrones’-type castle at the heart of the dominant Northern Powerhouse, opening my birthday telegram from the monarch of the south of England.” A Labour ally took his cue, joking that “Andy’s going be on the Iron Throne and King of the North.” The Manchester Evening News duly ran the headline.
Mr. Burnham’s fiery talk helped him to get comfortably re-elected as mayor, twice. But his eyes were increasingly trained elsewhere. As Mr. Starmer flailed in Downing Street, the Manchester man inserted himself into the conversation about who might replace him. Importantly, he was the only recognizable party figure whose popularity ratings weren’t sub-zero. But for a third tilt at the leadership, Mr. Burnham needed to be in Parliament. Eventually, a route back to Westminster — in the form of a special election for the Makerfield constituency, 20 miles west of Manchester — opened up.
Mr. Burnham’s campaign culminated in a leadership pitch that this was the “last chance” to “lay out a new path for Britain.” His victory offered proof of concept that — for now at least — his personal political brand can shore up Labour’s regional heartlands menaced by Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform U.K. Seeing the writing on the wall, Mr. Starmer announced his resignation. Mr. Burnham’s first move was to announce a branch office of 10 Downing Street in Manchester, as part of a broader suite of devolution.
Otherwise, Mr. Burnham’s rushed preparations for government have pointed to a broad continuity with the world of Mr. Starmer — and indeed that of Mr. Blair. He has recruited his New Labour contemporary James Purnell as chief of staff and retained Jonathan Powell, once a key plank of Mr. Blair’s Downing Street operation, as national security adviser. In policy terms, he’s committed to the previous administration’s stifling fiscal rules and harsh asylum-rule changes designed to make it harder for refugees to settle in the country, along with vague promises of economic growth.
Mr. Burnham’s shtick is decidedly provincial. But when pressed on foreign affairs during his previous run for the Labour leadership, he said he’d resign from frontbench politics if Mr. Corbyn withdrew Britain from NATO. In an article timed to coincide with the NATO summit in Turkey last week, he reaffirmed his attachment to Atlanticism, Britain’s nuclear deterrent, ramping up defense spending and underwriting Ukraine’s long-term security. While he has reiterated that Mr. Starmer had been “too slow” to call for a cease-fire in Gaza, his policy on Israel is impeccably conformist.
Labour wanted a bounce after Mr. Starmer. They’ve opted, in the absence of anything better, for a career Blairite with a northern soul and Whitehall brain. For the country, it looks a lot like more of the same.
Tom Hazeldine is the author of “The Northern Question: A History of a Divided Country.”
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