LONDON (AP) — It took Andy Burnham a long time to get to the top. He won't have much time to prove he's up to the job.
A decade ago, Burnham abandoned a 20-year climb up the Labour Party ladder in London to head north and run for mayor of Greater Manchester. A month ago, he returned to Parliament by winning a risky special election. On Monday, he will become Britain’s 59th prime minister.
The sudden downfall of Prime Minister Keir Starmer after just
two years in office has swept the 56-year-old Burnham into office — largely untested and unknown to many people outside Manchester. He will enter No. 10 Downing St. carrying the heavy weight of expectation, and big questions about how he will shoulder it.
“A whole range of people across the Labour movement and in the country have projected onto Andy Burnham their hopes and their fantasies about how the country should be run and what Labour should stand for and what Andy Burnham stands for,” said Joshi Herrmann, founder of Manchester news site The Mill.
“He has got lots of people’s hopes up.”
Burnham has made his name in Manchester, but he was born in Liverpool, and grew up in a commuter village between the rival northwest English cities.
His father worked as a British Telecom engineer and his mother as a receptionist, and he was raised in a close-knit Catholic family. Burnham has said he’s “not particularly religious,” but Catholic teaching, along with the center-left Labour Party, helped forge his values and sense of social justice.
Burnham told the Times that he was sad that his father, who has Alzheimer’s, was unaware that he was becoming prime minister.
“The way I look at it, it’s his achievement as well,” Burnham said. “A whole family achievement, although he doesn’t know it.”
Burnham and his brothers were the first generation of their family to go to university. And not just any university — Burnham attended Cambridge, one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious institutions.
“He needed a lot of persuading to apply because he felt that as a working-class boy, going off to Cambridge wasn’t for him,” Stephen Harrington, Burnham’s former English teacher at St. Aelred’s Catholic High School, told the BBC. “He didn’t believe in himself. But he did it, and the rest is history.”
Burnham has said he felt out of place at Cambridge, where many of his classmates had gone to posh private schools in the more affluent south of England. But he got a degree in English and met his future wife, Dutch fellow student Marie-France van Heel, now a marketing executive. The couple married in 2000 and have a son and two daughters.
After graduating, Burnham worked as a journalist at trade magazines before becoming a researcher and adviser to Labour politicians.
Elected to Parliament for the Manchester-area district of Leigh in 2001, he rose through the government ranks under Labour Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He served in Brown’s Cabinet between 2007 and 2010 as chief secretary to the Treasury, culture secretary and health secretary.
A formative experience came in 2009, when he was heckled at a commemoration of the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster, when 97 Liverpool soccer fans were crushed to death. Bereaved families had fought for years to overturn a false narrative offered by police that unruly fans had been to blame.
Burnham became a champion for the families and helped push for a new inquest, an apology and a law that imposes a duty of candor on public officials to tell the truth about tragedies whatever the impact on their reputation.
After Labour lost power in 2010, Burnham ran for leadership of the party that year and in 2015, losing both times. He quit Parliament in 2017, a low ebb for Labour nationally, to run for mayor of Greater Manchester.
Being mayor played to his strengths: an ability to bring people together, a sharp eye for opportunities and a wide streak of pragmatism. His approach became known as “Manchesterism,” a brand of business-friendly socialism that aims to harness private and public money to invest in areas like transport, housing and infrastructure.
Manchester was a former manufacturing powerhouse — known as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution — that had been hollowed out as British industry crumbled. During his tenure the city boomed, with skyscrapers blooming on vacant post-industrial sites. Burnham won praise for taking a piecemeal public transport system under public control and improving it.
He shed suit and tie for jeans and dark T-shirts, spoke about his love for Oasis, The Smiths and New Order and spent spare time playing soccer or spinning 1990s tunes during DJ battles.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he harangued Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson over what he called a “London-centric” approach to the crisis that was punishing northern cities. That’s when he gained the nickname “King of the North,” a “Game of Thrones”-inspired nod both to his championing of his home region and his political ambition.
He has said he saw his work in central government as “unfinished business,” and got his chance when Starmer was pushed to resign by Labour colleagues alarmed at the party’s unpopularity.
But Burnham still needed a seat in Parliament. A Labour lawmaker agreed to resign, triggering a special election for the Manchester-area district of Makerfield. Burnham trounced the candidate from anti-immigration party Reform UK, cementing his credentials as a winner.
In the subsequent contest to replace Starmer as Labour leader, he was the only candidate.
Now he says he will deliver “a new politics based on unity and hope” and “an economy that works for everybody,” no matter where they live. A key plank is giving regional leaders more powers, and he plans to move part of the prime minister’s office to a “No. 10 North” in Manchester.
Herrmann said Burnham has clear strengths, especially an ability to tell a persuasive story and a sense of empathy that many politicians lack.
He added that the incoming prime minister has “a set of principles about trying to make the country fairer, trying to bring people out of poverty, that he really does believe in.”
Critics claim Burnham’s politics are vague on key points, such as where the money will come from to pay for his pledges. He will face many of the same political and economic challenges that stymied Starmer, including a sluggish economy, overstretched public services and a cost-of-living squeeze. He has little experience of foreign policy issues, from the Ukraine war to dealing with U.S. President Donald Trump.
But Sacha Lord, a Manchester music entrepreneur who served as Burnham’s nighttime economy adviser, said the politician has a steely side that will help him rise to the occasion.
“He’s not scared of locking horns with people,” Lord said. “Everybody thinks Andy’s this nice, cheeky-chappy guy. But trust me, when he wants something ... he tends to get it.”
