Just under a week after he returned home from the Glastonbury festival, Andy Burnham is still brimming with enthusiasm. “I loved every single waking second of it,” he says. “I just soaked it up.”
Burnham’s ebullience is at least partly down to the fact that he was a Glastonbury virgin – as proved by a classic first-timer’s mistake. With his wife, Marie-France, he camped in the Left Field, the area of the festival looked after by the activist and singer Billy Bragg, where they tried to put up what they thought was a two-person tent. “She’ll blame me and I blame her,” he cringes. “But the upshot was, it came out of the packet, and it was a beach windbreak thing. Billy’s brother came to the rescue: he lent us his tent.”
He was at the Left Field to take part in a daytime debate session (which I chaired) titled Politics in Crisis – and he turned up with a mini-manifesto. Five years after becoming the mayor of Greater Manchester, he made the case for “rewiring” the UK, first by carrying out a thorough reinvention of how power and politics work: replacing our voting system with proportional representation, getting rid of the House of Lords and establishing a new “senate of the regions and nations” (an idea also floated last week by Labour’s leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar), and taking as much power as possible from Westminster and pushing it down to the regional and local level.
This transformation, he said, would only happen if Labour was prepared to abandon ingrained habits, and cooperate with other progressive parties – the Greens and Lib Dems, and Plaid Cymru and the SNP – and stake out common ground. He fell short, however, of proposing a progressive alliance: he says he is staunchly against any electoral pacts, but in favour of “open political agreement, particularly on big-picture things to do with the constitution”.
If we radically change our systems of power, Burnham says, it will pave the way for big social and economic policies that he has been thinking about during his time as mayor, not least during the pandemic. They include either a universal basic income or the kind of minimum-income guarantee introduced in Spain (whereby the country’s poorest households receive top-ups from the state), good housing as a legal right, the nationalisation of the railways and a huge upgrading of bus travel, and social care delivered on the same terms as treatment from the NHS – ie universal and free. “It’s about guaranteeing every citizen of this country the basics,” he says. “I don’t see how you can have a more equal country without those things.”
Would he like to see the Labour party standing on that kind of platform at the next election?
“I would love it,” he says.
But to state the blindingly obvious, the Labour party leadership’s ideas are nowhere near as ambitious as these. Burnham – who recently said it was “entirely right” for rail workers to go on strike, a very different position from Keir Starmer’s – tends to parry questions that allude to Starmer very carefully. “I don’t criticise them necessarily at this point for not having set it all out. But I think the moment is coming where they do have to set out the basic planks on which we fight the next election.”
But it’s highly unlikely to get anywhere near what you’re suggesting, I tell him.
“Business as usual isn’t going to get us where we need to get to. Not just from a political point of view, but in terms of where the country is. I think it’s in a really dangerous place. People are frightened, I think, about what the future holds: they’ve got the kind of fear that I don’t think we’ve ever had in our lifetimes. And there’s a growing feeling that politics hasn’t been equal to this stuff. Politics is trading in minor, minor things.
“That disconnect is dangerous if Labour doesn’t … well, Labour is the party that can deal with it. Some will say that’s easy for me to say. But I am, believe it or not, trying to help them from here.”
I meet Burnham in the unassuming offices of the Greater Manchester combined authority, housed in a beautifully restored late-Victorian office building on Oxford Street. As we talk about his past – he was born on Merseyside, and raised 17 or so miles from Manchester, in the Cheshire village of Culcheth – he occasionally highlights a streak of self-doubt, which seems to surface when he gets close to centres of power and influence. You can still detect the lingering traces of this: when he makes a point, he has a habit of ending it with a question – usually “isn’t it?” – as if he needs a final bit of validation. His general disposition is far from that of the archetypal political alpha male, suggesting a modicum of shyness. This may be part of why his two attempts (so far) to become the leader of the Labour party came to grief, but it also accounts for his instant likability, and why this job in his native north-west is such a snug fit. As mayor, standing outside the London-centred establishment is almost part of the job description.
Burnham began his political progress in 1994, as a researcher for the late Labour politician Tessa Jowell, before a fairly rapid rise that peaked with the three years he spent in Gordon Brown’s cabinet, seeing out Labour’s final year in power as the secretary of state for health. “I came into Westminster from here [ie the north of England], thinking: ‘Am I good enough?’” he tells me. He thinks for a moment. “That’s something that I’ve always had to sort of confront. Having that self-doubt is almost like a spur in the side of me all the time.”
This accounts for Burnham’s habit of questioning where he is and what he is doing, and the restlessness that defined a phase of his political career that began in 2009, and led to his election as mayor in 2017. Before that, he appeared to be a reasonably stereotypical New Labour politician, but inwardly, he says, he began to feel very unsettled by aspects of his party’s political direction (its encouragement of private involvement in the NHS, for example), and its increasing sense of distance from the public.
In April 2009, in his capacity as the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, Burnham spoke at the event held at Liverpool FC’s Anfield stadium to mark the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, which caused the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans. The two decades that had followed had seen no end of official obstacles placed in the way of families seeking justice, and calls for action that reached an inescapable crescendo that day.
You can watch what happened on YouTube: a visibly nervous Burnham, reading out his speech to a crowd gathered on the Kop stand, before he is interrupted – first by a lone shout of “We want justice!” and then by a massed chant of “Justice for the 96!” In the run-up to the event, he had made the case for full disclosure of any relevant documents that had not been made public, a small step that led to the 2016 inquest verdicts that those who died had been unlawfully killed (although their families have yet to see anyone actually made accountable). But that day, he was overwhelmed by the disconnection between his party and the people it was meant to serve.
“Here was an entire English city crying injustice,” he says. “The government I was in had not been capable of hearing it or doing anything about it. I’d got to the point where I couldn’t cope with that any more. When I walked out that day to address the Kop, basically I was walking to the edge of the abyss between the government I was in and the people I grew up with. And I knew that. I knew that they were not buying in any more.”
This was not just about Hillsborough. When he has spoken about the occasion in the past, he has described a fierce sense of across-the-board political estrangement.
“That’s right,” he says. “It was like: who is Labour?”
In 2010, Burnham made his first run for the Labour leadership, sounding sceptical about “the elitist feel” of the New Labour project, but refraining from extensive criticisms of its record. Five years later, he had another go, starting out as the favourite before Jeremy Corbyn’s entry into the contest turned everything upside down. To some extent, Corbyn’s success was a righteous reaction to how poorly the three supposedly mainstream candidates had performed, and Burnham was no exception. The tone of his campaign was arguably set at the start, when one of the first events was a speech at the City of London HQ of the auditing firm Ernst & Young, where he said that some voters associated his party with “giving people who don’t want to help themselves an easy ride”, and promised that “the entrepreneur will be as much our hero as the nurse”.
“I listened to people that I shouldn’t have really,” he says. “Looking back, for a Labour leadership election, it was tone-deaf. It’s not easy for me to look back at that … it wasn’t me. It wasn’t authentic.”
Later, he says, “I kept saying: ‘I understand why Jeremy won.’ Because you had what looked like a bland, overly centrist sort of offer that people couldn’t relate to. They’d maybe gone with it while Labour was in government, but when Labour was in opposition, they were like: ‘Hang on a minute. This isn’t working for us.’ I understand why what I said jarred in that moment.”
In 2017, only weeks after he was elected as Greater Manchester’s first mayor, Burnham was providing leadership in the collective grieving that followed the bombing of an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena. Three years later, he was in the national media spotlight again when he took on the government over its localised Covid restrictions and the amount of financial help it was offering. His self-branding as a different kind of politician has been encapsulated in his decision to stop wearing suits. But there is much more to his recent history: not least, his admirable record on homelessness and rough sleeping, and his successful quest to reregulate Greater Manchester’s buses, starting to create the region’s new Bee Network of public transport, and introducing a maximum single bus fare of £2 for adults and £1 for kids.
Much of his approach, he has said, boils down to “rolling back the 1980s”. What does he mean? “That’s all about the mentality – the mantra – that the market solves everything,” he says. “That’s what people were sold: ‘Things get better the more you let the market in.’ I think experience suggests the precise opposite of that.”
Part of his job as mayor is being the commissioner of Greater Manchester police (GMP) – which, with echoes of what has recently happened to the Met, is still in special measures. In 2020, it was revealed that in a single year, GMP had failed to record 80,000 crimes. Dark clouds still hang over its handling of grooming gang cases in Rochdale and Oldham – where, the day after his return from Glastonbury, Burnham was booed at a public meeting held a week after the release of a damning report about the force’s handling of child sexual exploitation (CSE) between 2011 and 2014, some of the most awful details of which went back as far as 2005.
“We’re working through the CSE issues, and that’s hard,” he says. But his general position on the GMP is optimistic. “Pretty much on every front now, GMP is moving in the right direction. Internally, it’s a totally different entity. I think if you talk to officers, the morale is definitely higher, but it’s not fully where it needs to be.”
One last, entirely predictable, question remains. Burnham has a stock answer to enquiries about him, once again, running to be Labour leader: he’s still open to the idea, but not right now. So I try a different tack: the next time the job is up for grabs, will he be one of the runners?
He reminds me of a basic truth: he might not be able to run, given that he is not currently an MP. But there is another point. “I keep saying this. I’m not sitting here plotting away, as some people might want to think. I’m getting a huge sense of reward from the way we’re doing things [in Manchester]. That’s the thing about Westminster: why do they think that I would just give up the role I have here? That’s part of the problem: the people down there who just think what we’ve built here is literally meaningless. It’s not. What we’re building here, we would argue, is actually more important for the party.”
Soon after, he sums up one big thing he has learned: “Place is a unifying force.” A pause. “Do you know I’ve got a tattoo?”
After a bit of gentle persuasion, he rolls up his right sleeve to reveal Manchester’s civic emblem of a bee, etched on to his arm in 2019, when he saw Ariana Grande play at the city’s Pride festival. Here, it seems, is the political foundation Burnham couldn’t find in parliament, and that turned out to be closer to home. Westminster was no fun. Glastonbury turned out to be “phenomenal”. But right now, Manchester is a huge part of who he is – and what he wants.
