Andy Burnham (Photo: Oli Scarf/AFP)
Andy Burnham, the 56-year-old veteran of the centre-left Labor Party, succeeded Keir Starmer as prime minister on Monday, three days after he was elected leader of the ruling party on his third attempt.
Speaking outside 10 Downing Street, Burnham admitted that “people at home are fed up with politics”.
“We have to be better. We will be,” he pledged. He committed to “the biggest changes in the last 40 years” and to “bringing back hope”.
During a successful nine-year term as mayor of Manchester, Burnham went from former cabinet minister to political outsider – something that is probably best epitomized by his decision to swap his suit and tie for a T-shirt and casual jacket.
Burnham, who is considered a representative of the Labor Party’s “moderate left wing”, was a member of parliament between 2001 and 2017 and served as a senior minister under prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
He unsuccessfully contested the leadership of the Labor Party twice – in 2010 and 2015 – before leaving Westminster and establishing himself as one of Britain’s best-known regional leaders.
His well-rounded and somewhat playful videos on social media have further contributed to his growing popularity – unlike Starmer.
“Andy Burnham is better at communicating with the public … he doesn’t look and sound like someone obsessed with politics,” said Tony Travers, professor of politics at the London School of Economics.
Andrew Murray Burnham was born in 1970 into a working-class family in Aintree, near Liverpool, and grew up in the village of Culcheth.
He was raised Roman Catholic and served as an altar boy at school. He previously said that faith played a role in the formation of his cultural identity.
He is a loyal supporter of Everton Football Club and enjoyed the “Madchester” party music scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Burnham, who has a Dutch-born wife and three children, joined the Labor Party as a teenager before studying English at Cambridge University.
He said that as a student he often struggled with “impostor syndrome” due to his working-class background.
In 2009, when he was minister for culture and sport under Brown, he was confronted with a wave of raw emotion and anger during an event in Liverpool at the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough football tragedy.
It prompted him to campaign for a new inquiry into the deaths of 97 people in the devastating stampede at the stadium in Sheffield, after which the police tried to shift the blame for their own failings to the supporters.
As mayor, Burnham gained national notoriety during the covid-19 pandemic when he openly clashed with then prime minister Boris Johnson over funding for containment measures in the north of England.
The confrontation cemented his reputation as an outspoken defender of regional autonomy.
He even has a tattoo of a worker bee on his arm – the longstanding symbol of Manchester.
There he built on an agenda that had already been launched by local officials and was known as “Manchesterism”. It focuses on long-term planning and the promotion of investment, together with the prioritization of policy areas such as transport, housing and health.
Andy Burnham. (Photo: Henry Nicholls / AFP)
‘I’m ready’
Burnham described his political ideology as “business-friendly socialism” and emphasized that there must be a response to “the trap of high inequality and low growth” which he says has dominated Britain since the 1980s.
“I feel ready. I’ve come a long way to get to this point, but I’m ready to take the lead. I know what I want to do,” he said on Monday after visiting a homeless shelter and pledging to end street homelessness.
His move to the left, after years as a more centrist cabinet minister, led critics to label him a political chameleon.
In recent weeks, he has had to reverse several of his previous positions.
Burnham butted heads with Starmer last year and encouraged him to accept a more left-wing vision for the Labor Party. He also openly opposed cuts to social welfare.
Burnham now faces the task of winning back support from Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK party, which has been ahead of the Labor Party in opinion polls for around 18 months.
Burnham told reporters last week that he would seriously tackle the difficult issue of reforming England’s social care system. He said he has personal experience of this because his father has Alzheimer’s disease.
This means that his father is not even aware that he would become prime minister, Burnham said in an interview published on Sunday.