In the second of a series looking at those who may follow Keir Starmer in No 10, our Advocacy and Health directors Larry Smith and Helen McKenna draw on research our experts developed earlier this year on Labour leadership’s crisis to assess what experiences would drive Andy Burnham’s attitude to business.
When speculation about Andy Burnham replacing Keir Starmer bubbled up at last year’s Labour conference, some of the Greater Manchester Mayor’s allies expressed bafflement at his desire to return to Westminster. Steve Rotheram – Burnham’s next-door neighbour in Merseyside – was openly quoted as saying he himself wouldn’t “do it for anything” and noted that Burnham’s experience in Manchester would give him an incentive to change the way things were done in Whitehall.
Much has since been made of Burnham’s time at the helm of Greater Manchester – especially his embrace of a new “Manchesterism”, with public ownership of local services at its heart. Since the late 2010s, the Manchester Mayor has never missed the chance to define himself in opposition to the Westminster model, deploring the whipping system that forces MPs from English regions to follow the national party line rather than vote as a bloc in the interests of their own areas.
Yet Burnham’s evolution since leaving Westminster is not merely stylistic. His time in Greater Manchester has deepened a belief that public services, economic growth and social outcomes cannot be treated separately. Programmes such as the Bee Network, A Bed Every Night and Manchester’s “Live Well” approach reflect a worldview in which transport, housing, employment and health are intertwined, and visible local public institutions are central to restoring public trust. Unlike some earlier New Labour modernisers, Burnham now talks less about markets and competition and more about prevention, resilience and the social fabric of place.
Still, no one would claim Burnham’s ambitions for No 10 stem solely from his time in Manchester. The bug was there as early as Labour’s 2010 leadership contest, when he laid down a marker as the party’s outgoing Health Secretary. He likely caught it well before then in the cauldron of several government jobs – having first gained a public profile in his then “dream job” of Culture Secretary, sat by Alistair Darling’s side as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and served as a Home Office minister in the shadow of the 7/7 terror attacks.
There are glimpses in all that of the kind of Prime Minister Burnham would be for business. More than Keir Starmer, he would be a very public dealmaker – witness the agreements he shepherded as Culture Secretary on both free-to-air sport and gambling. As Health Secretary, Burnham’s instinct was less ideological than transactional. While Labour increasingly emphasised the NHS as the preferred provider of care, he remained willing to strike pragmatic arrangements with the pharmaceutical sector where they supported broader system goals.
Burnham’s time in Westminster has also made him alert to the risks of a bad headline. Being booed by Liverpool supporters at the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster in 2009 was a searing experience, a humiliation he has been determined to avoid repeating. His U-turn on Clean Air Zones in Manchester copped criticism, but showed he had learnt the importance of nipping issues in the bud. It showed a greater sensitivity than Labour nationally later demonstrated over ULEZ to the political risks of environmental policies that voters perceive as unfairly distributing costs. He would be less likely to let a major issue impacting business linger in one part of Whitehall and more willing to call it in to No 10.
There is also a more subtle way in which Burnham embodies the Westminster consensus. For all his criticism of the attention lavished on London, as Mayor he has been a willing poster boy for an economic model that has long found favour in HMT – one that emphasises the role of Britain’s high tech cities, including Manchester, in solving the UK’s economic riddle. It is not hard to see the most influential figures in the Starmer-Reeves orbit – No 10 Chief Sec Darren Jones, HMT minister Torsten Bell and Reeves’s adviser Jonathan Van Reenen – sliding comfortably into Burnham’s new order.
For Labour MPs representing Britain’s high growth cities in the south, such continuity could be welcome. But others representing post-industrial areas where Reform is on the march may end up frustrated – leaving Burnham struggling to navigate the same clashing priorities which Starmer has failed to reconcile. Indeed, Burnham’s challenge in No 10 could be discovering that many of the compromises he criticises from Manchester are less products of bad politics than of the structural tensions involved in governing an economically uneven and fiscally constrained country.
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