Andy Burnham has always liked to be liked. Studying at secondary school near Liverpool in the 1980s, he writes in his autobiography and manifesto, Head North, “involved me walking something of a tightrope. Because of my mum and dad’s insistence that I should aim for university, I would largely try to keep up to date with my work. But … I realised I could often make the class laugh and that won me credit with the in-crowd. It was hard to be both a good student and one of the lads.”
As the new leader of a divided country, he is still trying to appeal to opposing interests while establishing his own, upbeat brand. “Let’s build a new national sense of unity, of common purpose and positivity,” he said in his first speech outside 10 Downing Street. After a post-Brexit decade dominated by angry rightwing politics, Labour infighting, never-ending culture wars and online acrimony, Burnham’s affable, seemingly inclusive politics has a strong initial appeal. This week, for the first time in 18 months, Labour is ahead of Reform UK in the polls. It’s possible that some voters have finally had enough of divisive politics and would like to try something different.
As an insecure party, temperamentally and electorally, Labour is periodically drawn towards a politics of national unity. “New Labour is the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole,” claimed its general election manifesto in 1997, managing to sound both wildly over-confident and anxiously self-justifying. Lacking the Tories’ right to rule aura and association with deep Englishness – even though those politically priceless qualities depend on a deliberately partial reading of history – Labour tries to make its governments seem more legitimate by using patriotic, non-partisan language. Yet only its most articulate and assured leaders, such as Tony Blair, Harold Wilson and perhaps now Burnham, successfully pull this off.
Yet unlike Blair in 1997 and Wilson in 1964, Burnham is not launching a fresh Labour project in relatively benign economic and political times, and aiming to keep the status quo broadly intact. Instead, he is trying to rescue a two-year-old administration by promising “a new political model and a new economic model”, and “the biggest changes [in Britain] in the last 40 years”. None of these can be done, it seems reasonable to assume, without challenging many of the old order’s beneficiaries. So how is his politics of unity likely to fare once he starts making lots of enemies?
Those may include shareholders of privatised utilities, wealthy owners of under-taxed homes, people who like London’s national dominance, leaders of other parties who don’t want Burnham’s “more collaborative” politics, and journalists who prefer reporting on Westminster plots and rivalries rather than the progress of reforms in the rest of the country. The instantly hostile, sometimes hysterical reaction from much of the press and most other parties to his initial, relatively modest and non-partisan policy proposals gives a hint of the fury coming his way. As Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer all painfully learned, any Labour leadership even fractionally to the left of Blair’s in any policy area will be widely presented as a return to the supposedly bleak 1970s or the beginning of a socialist dictatorship – even though such comparisons are dependent on crude caricatures and huge exaggerations. Many voters, across multiple parties, from Labour to the Greens to Reform UK, have been saying for years that they want Britain to be governed in a new way; but heaven help any government that dares to try.
Yet Burnham’s positivity may be less naive than it seems. As mayor of Greater Manchester and a candidate in Makerfield, his can-do air attracted support far beyond Labour’s shrunken strongholds. Many voters don’t pay close attention to government policies, to all their practical implications and precisely how they will be funded. If they did, Starmer would have got more credit for the painstaking and important improvements his government made to employment rights, for instance.
But voters do notice politicians with zest. “I think this might be the best day of my life,” said Burnham at the opening of No 10 North in Manchester. The apparent unguardedness, and the risk that it will come back to haunt him, both break the cautious rules of British politics as they have accumulated since the 1990s. The opening paragraphs of future articles about the rise and fall of the Burnham administration already write themselves. Yet successful governments put an appealing emotional and rhetorical frame around their unavoidably diffuse and incomplete activities, which makes these activities resonate and seem part of a bigger story. These governments, in short, are greater than the sum of their parts.
Burnham saw some of the pervasive impact of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership as a politically conscious teenager. His school bus passed the entrance to a local colliery, where striking miners were slowly but surely being defeated. As a junior minister, he served in the equally pivotal Blair government. As mayor, Burnham spent nine years away from Westminster, watching from a distance as several of Blair and Thatcher’s successors quickly failed. So it’s not surprising that Burnham gives the impression of having thought quite a lot about how to be an effective prime minister. “I am under no illusions about how hard this is all going to be,” he wrote last week, “but I have a clear plan and I know how to get things done.”
We’ll see. So far, his plan includes several elements – a 10-year time span, tight immigration restrictions, increased defence spending and a focus on working class and non-metropolitan Britain – familiar from Starmer’s premiership and other failed governments since Brexit. Burnham also appears to believe that less-than-revolutionary figures such as his new chancellor, John Healey, can help achieve his ambitious goal of “ending neoliberalism” in Britain.
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Such appointments could be a cunning ploy: seeking radical ends by deceptively moderate, reassuring means. Or they could show that Burnham’s bolder ideas, developed relatively recently, are still outweighed by his instinct not to upset people. But as his year-long, often dismissed, but precisely executed leadership coup has just demonstrated, his capacity to surprise should not be underestimated.
