From The Vault: Andy Burnham, MP for Makerfield and Mayor of Greater Manchester

0:02This is a global production. Hello, James here. I think the reasons for doing this are obvious, but I thought you might like to listen to either for the first time or again, the full disclosure that I did with Andy Burnham in 2022. I don't need to tell you why he is at the top of the news agenda this weekend, but it's probably a case to be argued for you not knowing quite as much about him as you might like to. I'm here to fix that. Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project designed to let me spend a lot more time with interesting people than I would ever get on my radio programme.

0:37And this week's guest, in many ways, I'm surprised you haven't been on before, Andy Burnham. I'd come on your radio programme if you invited me. But we wouldn't get an hour together, and I have invited you on the radio programme. But let's not start with controversy and conflict. Let's start instead at the very beginning, which is 52 years ago in Aintree in Lancashire. That's right. It was Lancashire then. Liverpool, Lancashire. That doesn't sit right, does it? I know. You had to read that. That's why I read it twice. Oh, no, no. That's my birth certificate says that. And it's a troubling fact when you're the mayor of Greater Manchester to be born in Liverpool.

1:17but I was, North Liverpool, Evertonian, all of that. So, yeah, I was born in a place called the Old Roan. My mum and dad both worked for what was called the Old Post Office, but they did the sort of telecom side of the Old Post Office. They met at Magul Telephone Exchange, not far off. But then when I was one, my dad got a job in Manchester. Right. And they moved halfway. So you've always had a foot in both. Definitely. I'll just be honest. To be honest, I spent more time in my youth in Manchester, given what was going on in the music scene in the 80s and the 90s. But I was always back to Liverpool for football reasons.

2:01But I love both cities, and there's no point saying anything else. You can't, can you? I do. It's like, what's your favourite child? It's a bit like that. I mean, I would go Manchester, just because, you know, I did spend more time there as a teenager. But, you know, the two places are great and, you know, they're so complimentary. They're almost the same place in many ways. A happy home, clearly. Oh, God, unbelievably so. I read one interview when I was getting ready for this when your mum and dad were as much a part of the interview as you were. And it was clear the banter and the... Oh, God, yeah.

2:35It's lovely, really lovely to read. Oh, yeah. I mean, they've just been the mainstay, my mum and dad, but also my brothers, Nick and John. the five of us have been as tight-knit always and all the travails I've been through we've always navigated them all together competitive were you? Oh god yeah absolutely didn't hold back on the sport football and cricket it wasn't football exclusively and I was I always remind them I wasn't the best footballer I was definitely the best cricketer I could batter both of them at cricket and yeah, had a modicum of success as a cricketer. Irish Catholic family or Irish Catholic background.

3:17Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I was Culture Secretary, Liverpool Library, they offered to do research my family tree, which I didn't know at the time, to be honest. We knew on my mum's side there was Irish heritage, but when it came back, it was amazing to see how much names, Irish names that I didn't know I was connected to. Kelly, Finnemore and all these Irish ancestors who came over to work on the docks in the late 19th century and church, was church part of childhood? I'm afraid, yeah it was I say I'm afraid, just because I was the altar, I noticed you went to two Catholic schools, both of you, your primary school yes, altar boy were you?

4:00yes everyone who's done that, they know what that, so I have as well yeah, well you know what that involves James and catechism days, those were. But, you know, I kind of look back on that as kind of being an era when the Catholic Church was a little different, actually. And we had Derek Warlock was our archbishop. And it was an era of Catholic social teaching. The emphasis was on the, let's say, the more economic side of things. And it changed to more the identity issues, if you like, later down the line. you know under uh telling like being forbidding rather than being yeah but you're trying to improving exactly definitely there was a big change my parliamentary years yeah i often found myself at odds with the church whereas in the you know the early part of my life you know i they often were kind of forming my future politics i was about to ask that because you you you put it like that and you think back to that sense of injustice almost that you get in in the sort of Catholic teachings that you're talking about, the eye of the needle, the old woman who put her last coin in the basket, they are politically formative, aren't they?

5:09Massively so. I've always said that, and some people react when you say that, but for me, no, it was the kind of, how do you enact what they're telling me in this thing called the catechism? Okay, well that is what Labour stands for. I mean, that's the way I always saw it. Yeah, me too, although I've never realised that before, actually. Yeah, no, honestly. You can't just throw a theorifer around, And I've got my early political opinions as well. Completely. And so, you know, I never... And to be honest, when I was at those Catholic schools, I mean, you know, the vast majority of the staff were kind of Labour-leaning people and encouraged me in that direction.

5:44What were you like at school? I'm just thinking, there's not much trickle-down economics in the Bible, is there? There's not a great deal. Not a great deal. So what was I like? I mean, I kind of always... You know, maybe this is, you know, something that some of your listeners will relate to. So I had to walk that line between being in with the lads and the in crowd, but getting your work done. Okay. Where did that come from? Where did that conscientiousness come from? Just my mum and dad, who hadn't been to university, said that they wanted me. Not at primary school. They weren't. I mean, really?

6:15But you were aware of it? They kind of started to say that you should stay in education, and we didn't, but you should. And so that was kind of, you know, and I always was quite good, you know, in terms of like parents' evenings and things. I was always getting good reports. But, you know, being in the Northwest in the 1980s, you know, you kind of had, you know, a lot of distractions and a lot of, you know, kind of peer pressure. And, you know, you wanted to be one of one of the lads as well. Let's focus on primary school a little bit first before we get on to the distractions that you encountered in your teenage years.

6:52So I'm thinking I'm seeing a kid who was conscientious in class. Teachers probably quite liked you, but you could hold your own in the playground, good at the football, good at the cricket. Did you excel? Were you a scholar? Were you near the top of the class, as it were? Yeah, yeah. I think I was always there or thereabouts. So you knew you were clever? Yeah, I knew I could cope with what was thrown at me from a work point of view. But I always wanted to, more than anything, excel on the football field. So if I'd met you at 11 and said, what do you want to be when you grow up? You'd have said, I want to play for Everton.

7:26Correct. Yeah. Yeah. When did you realise you weren't going to? Not long after. The cricket dream stayed alive for longer. Did it really? Yeah, it did. That would be Lancashire. Yeah, and I did play for Lancashire Schoolboys. I played three times at Old Trafford. So you're in Wisden probably, are you? Somewhere. Yeah, you are. You did that. Well, I was 12th man for Lancashire Schoolboys at under 15 level. And I think that was probably the highest I got to. But I did play across the kind of Lancashire, Cheshire leagues. And yeah, I was the Cheshire Association Young Player of the Year in 1985. And Everton were champions of all the best team in Europe at the time.

8:08They were halcyon days. And then secondary school. So you're kind of not an unduly serious child, but you've got a plan. I mean, or at least you've got a sense of direction in your life from your mum and dad. Sort of. I mean, I kind of was doing okay at secondary school, but my middle teenage years, I did kind of want to be in with the in crowd, and I kind of was going a bit astray middle-year secondary school. And I never forget a math teacher saying to me that I got in the O-level set, which we used to have in those days, by the skin of your teeth. So GCE as opposed to CSE. I did O-levels. I'm that old.

8:50Yeah, no, that is GCE. GCE as opposed to CSE which was the low O levels you had CSEs and GCEs and then they merged didn't they but I was one of the last years to do the old O levels and I just literally scraped in the O level set by a little bit of looking at other people's work in the exams so I luckily got in but I realised I'd come quite close to not getting in and I think that did have the effect of making me focus a bit more and yeah and then did better in my O levels than I expected to and it was at that point that I thought okay well I can go on to university That would be a first for your family or did your brother led the way?

9:37Nick had gone but he'd kind of not got his first choice and he'd got into Surrey University and yeah but he'd gone so he'd sort of trod the path but then I came after there's already a sense of of horizons and and not being brought up in a way to know your place or to think that you would just follow the same path that your parents would follow that that's politically formative as well that you talked about aspiration on one of the occasions you ran for yeah leader of the labor party it's a weird word politically aspiration isn't it because yeah i'm trusting the rest of them are using it a lot now as well i'm really comfortable with it always have been.

10:16In fact I was pioneering aspirational socialism when I stood for Labour League in 2010 because that absolutely is what I was all about but it's what we were all about in the North West and it's actually what Manchester is about if you kind of take it to modern Manchester or the way Manchester's always been you know people there are ambitious, people want to get on and it's true of anyone really growing up in the North West, you want the best gear, you want to feel like you're going somewhere but you never walk on by on the other side and you want everyone to have the chance to be the best they can be and to be supported so it's kind of, I would say it's a very much a sort of a north-west cultural thing to believe in that.

11:02And also pushing against authority or unjustified authority as well, how conscious were you of that? I fell in love with Manchester a bit later in life, I'd been at school in Yorkshire and ended up when all my posh mates went to Goa and I ended up in Cholten-Cum-Hardy. I'm still not quite sure how that happened. But I fell in love with the history of Manchester, the Ellen Wilkinson, the Peterloo, all of that. Were you conscious of that growing up? Oh, I definitely was, yeah, absolutely. My mum and dad would talk about that kind of thing. And the history of Manchester is inspiring, isn't it, from that point of view?

11:36I mean, the story that I often relate now in my current role is the cotton workers of 1862 who voted to refuse to handle slave-picked cotton. Black Lives Matter, what, 160 years ago. And, you know, that is something that I kind of always pay a lot of attention to. You know, that commitment to equality is real and it's been passed down at people. And, you know, when you're the mayor of a city region with that kind of heritage, you know, you've got to take that very seriously. But for me, in terms of those formative years, I was going Everton home and away through the 1980s when we were having all of that success.

12:13But the biggest thing in my life in that period was Hillsborough, which then came on to be a defining thing for me in my professional life. But yeah, when I, well, how to put it, Toxteth and Mosside I was very conscious of in the early 80s, 11 years old, but I didn't know anybody involved. you go to the mid 80s the minor strike I got close to knowing people involved because people's dads who I was at school with were out on strike yeah and we used to go past parkside colliery every day on the way to school so I kind of had a kind of feel for that one but Hillsborough was about my friends you know my family yeah people I knew were at that match and then they came home to the pub where I was in that Saturday night you know and traumatized and so that and then when the thing started that it was, you know, Liverpool supporters to blame, I mean, that kind of radicalised me, I guess.

13:08I was 19, I was at Cambridge, I was at home in my first holidays, I'd been in the Easter holidays, you know, with friends, I'd been at the other semi-final and we'd all been through this trauma, and I go back to Cambridge for the summer term, it was like it hadn't happened. I was with people who, what, oh that, or was that hooligans? And the sense of this country being two worlds was really honestly you know for me i i feel all my life i've been struggling to relate one england to another that's i've been trying to walk between the two and often not doing it very successfully and early as well i mean to have that personal investment in hillsborough that personal involvement just drives that home for a lot of people it's possibly been quite a recent realization that there are two england's that there are two britain's that the divisions are not are not accidental when you use the word radicalized are we talking about some form of ruling class that you became or establishment that you became radicalized against are we talking about something subtler than that i just was to me it took me into into the political sphere you know i didn't do politics at university because that's like it was a class of people that i didn't feel i belong to no political ambition then i was a labor member but i i um i you know i i did to the extent i had any exposure with it it just looked like to me like people from the same class playing at being on both sides is how it looked like to me.

14:32Surely not. So I didn't kind of go back to the one or two meetings I went to. But it was the experience of going through that event when I was at university. Also, on graduation, my dad had said to me, I was on me now about going to Cambridge, and he said, oh, no, no, no, you've got to go, you've got to go, you can't turn it down. it will just open all of these doors for you and you'll just walk out of university and to any job you wanted and i always say tim you know it didn't happen because i graduated and waited for all these offers to land from the bbc and whoever and they didn't come and i was back at home um doing my first job as an unpaid reporter on the middleton guardian north manchester and i had friends i was at university with walking into the BBC, walking into the Observer.

15:25And that was class? It was purely that their parents were connected to people. They could make a phone call. They could knock on a door. We've jumped forward a bit, and obviously we're going to talk a lot about Hillsborough. But why were you... Well, first of all, tell me about when the teacher said to you, you should be aiming for Cambridge, Burnham. I mean, it came via a parents' night at first. My mum and dad came home for a parents night and they said that Mr Harrington the English teacher had mentioned Cambridge and he wanted to talk to me about it and I just said no no no no that wouldn't be me and that's when my dad started oh god it will open all these doors and why wouldn't it be you just because it was like Brideshead Revisited yeah my impressions of it were just I thought well I won't fit in there and I was kind of right to be honest with you because I really struggled my first year I was you know I've had that imposter syndrome all my life to some degree or other.

16:25And, you know, I had it massively in my first year at Cambridge. I was waiting for the, listen, we have made a mistake and we don't want you to feel, you know, here's the door. Even with your A-level results in your back pocket and all that sort of thing? Yes, it was just, you know, the way I always describe it was I just was exposed to sort of a kind of an environment that I, you know, nothing in my school had prepared me for it. Everything in my school would have prepared me for that. So I find this fascinating because our backgrounds aren't that different up until the point that I went to private school.

16:56My dad was on a Yorkshire regional newspaper when he was 15. But that's why parents do it, to give you that false confidence. And I think you clocked, if not false, you clocked that it was actually clothes that people put on, this confidence. It's not something that's innate or something that you're born with. Well, it took me two years to work that out. you know I say that when I first arrived in Cambridge I'd never seen confidence were you frightened I mean yeah it was intimidating for certain and you know in the world I was in you wouldn't have dreamt have said I want to go to Cambridge I want to be a member of parliament because you just get a slap you know you just so you wouldn't have ever spoken of your own your mission whereas all of a sudden I was confronted by people who would speak in the most confident way it took me a good two years to work out they were talking complete rubbish but it sounded so good yes it sounded and they would not think twice about telling you that they fully intended to be prime minister one day and i you know i you know that was quite hard to kind of come to terms with that but you know i i do think it's i i would you know always come back to that interview process that's the thing that um you know how can you go even now from a state school into that interview process I was offered a glass of sherry for god's sake at St Catherine's College I failed that interview no bloody wonder yeah I was in a kind of wood paneled book lined room being offered a glass of sherry and I in the first question of the interview was do you I can remember it now the the the tutor or director of study said to what extent do you think the Canterbury Tales is like a modern day package holiday and I just sat there with this sherry man and looked at him I'm not sure I spoke for I always say I was still pondering the question when the rejection letter landed on the door I just there was nothing in my life to that point had prepared me for that experience nothing not not one thing and so I I just you know when I got called back for a pool interview at Fitzwilliam College which was a more had more of a tradition of state school intake I was a bit you know you know I've got a bit of a sort of a street by side that I kind of right of that's the game, I'm coming back a bit better this time.

19:13So you brushed it up a bit? Yeah, and they weren't as intimidating, let's say. Sometimes it's performative, isn't it? They're almost trying to intimidate you, which means, again, if you went to a school like mine, you can rise to the challenge. But if you haven't had... We had lessons on how to do interviews for you. Mr. Harrington said it might be a bit challenging. So I was a bit... But no, I just had no... Did you ever then, when you got... Mr. Harrington must have been chuffed when you got in. There's, I think, 11 kids out of 200 went to university at all in your cohort from school. So to get into Cambridge, you mean...

19:44Yeah, I was the first one to get into Oxbridge for, I think there was one person who got in and he was using her example to say, look, the school got one person in about four or five years ago. You could do it. And it sounds like a real hard look story. It wasn't like that. It was a good school, really good family background. But it's about thinking that you can apply, isn't it? As much as anything else. It was that. And that's why that aspiration word comes back into my vernacular. And I think part of your finding a more comfortable space at Cambridge came with two realisations, not just that these people who went to schools like mine were largely putting it on, as I say, like we put on a suit of clothes, but also that the lads you'd been at school with and the girls you'd been at school with could easily thrive in a situation like this if they'd been dealt a slightly different hand of cards a few years earlier.

20:32I could name some of them for you right now. An old friend of mine, John Hunt, you know, he could have easily gone to Oxbridge and came and visited me actually there. And, you know, it was quite frustrating to me that, you know, just to know the talent of some of the people I'd grown up with. But knowing that it just never got its chance to even get close. It's enraging. It's not just frustrating. Well, it's whatever you let it be. but it is that sense of, you know, doors being shut from birth almost that other people growing up in different parts of the same country don't even realise there are doors there.

21:07Well, I did have that line back in 2010, you know, why is it that the postcode of the bed you're born in still determines where you end up in life? And I think that remains the British condition still. There's a great book written recently by somebody called Darren McGarvey. I don't know if you're familiar with Darren's work, but I'd recommend it to your listeners, James, the social distance between us. You know, it's just so on the money for me. You know, it's about how this is baked in from the off and, you know, in the classroom where, you know, kids who are in kind of communities or homes where there is a threat of violence who learn to look after themselves a certain way, when they get spoken by a teacher and will react in a certain way because then immediately they've got that label on them, they're marked down, they're on the way out of the mainstream, aren't they?

21:58And it's just, yeah, it's kind of, it's deep in the sort of British condition, isn't it? And again, it's not a coincidence. So then you have this appalling experience of Hillsborough, which is, I mean, it's impossible to separate all these things. You're burgeoning class consciousness, your awareness of privilege delivering advantage in ways that you don't fully understand until your face is right up against the window, do you? Until you're seeing it. You're thinking of your mates back home, seeing some Herbert over there in a top coat and a waistcoat who thinks he's Sebastian Flight. And then Hillsborough happens.

22:37Yeah. And it's the, if I've understood correctly, there's two or three things going on. There's the inexpressible tragedy. There's the horror of it. Then there's the lethargy about the people you were at college with or the kind of just the blasé approach to it, which speaks of both a class and a geographical divide. But how quickly did the cover-up kick in for you? How quickly did you become aware that people were actively seeking to keep the truth from the people, to keep the facts in the darkness? It was within days. Was it? Because I'd been in this pub in the place where I grew up called Cultiv, the cherry tree.

23:23so I'd been in that pub on the Friday night and we were having the conversation with friends I was at college with who were then at different universities or done their own thing they were going to Hillsborough to watch Liverpool Roger Hunt lived in the place where I he was the uncle of the John Hunt I mentioned before so most people in that area had grown up sporting Liverpool because everyone had followed Roger we were the only Evertonians around we were going to Villa Park and I remember saying to my friend Stephen Turner they're not putting you in the Leppings lane again are they because the year before the same teams had played at Hillsborough and it had been a nightmare people had come home saying it was terrible we were stuck in the pens it was awful and I'd watched Everton play Sheffield Wednesday there 1988 and so we'd been in the pens and I'd been in that situation where I didn't watch the game I just watched the back of my dad's head and my brother's head because I was worried they were going to It was one of those experiences that you just don't have anymore, but it was awful.

24:25So, yeah, I mean, that conversation happened on the Friday. They came back to that same pub on the Saturday, traumatised, and I mean traumatised. And then, what was it? Was it the Tuesday or was it the Wednesday when the tabloid story began? It was that immediate. The cover-up was that brutal. But we knew the truth. I mean, I'd been in that ground. I'd felt my own safety at risk in that ground. So I knew the truth of that. And I remember, I think there was a commitment in 92, but even 97, Labour had a manifesto commitment to reopen Hillsborough. And I can remember the moment now in 1998 when they'd followed through the commitment, but they'd had this Stuart Smith inquiry and it was another stitch up.

25:14And I remember, you know, hearing on the radio and pulling over in the car and crying in a layback in Sheffield because that was the that in that moment was the first biggest moment of political disillusionment I've ever felt in my life. I thought we were going to come into government and tell the truth about Hillsborough. And so it kind of was. Yeah, that was a very big, big moment for me. How do you process it at the time? I mean, whichever one of those chapters or episodes you want to focus on, the shock of seeing a country you'd always thought, although it might be unequal, there's a fundamental fairness or the truth will out.

25:59I presume you believed that. I did. I think the shock was that my own party almost wanted to be the establishment and wasn't actually at the end of the day prepared to confront it when there was so palpable injustice in front of it. And that was a moment that I really struggled with then and now. But also, going back to what I was saying before, I was making my way in politics at that time. And there was clearly, I'm not going to claim I was perfect anyway. There was an ambitious side to me. I wanted to get on. But then I was kind of feeling the disillusionment for the first time. and I remember that being a really disorientating experience.

26:47So where did the shift come from, from unpaid Middleton Guardian journalist to aspiring politician? I mean, because you come out of Cambridge and you're thinking the world's your oyster, and it isn't, and you're watching other kids you've been at university with, as you said, waltzing into positions that you knew you were qualified for, imposter syndrome or not, deep down. You knew you could do what they would do. I did. I always felt I wanted to prove myself that I could do it, given the chance. And they didn't. And did you apply? Did you knock on doors? Oh, God. I had hundreds and hundreds of CDs.

27:21Oh, God, yeah. It was the days of the Media Guardian. I remember that. I used to write constant letters, hundreds and hundreds. And, yeah, I was, obviously, how can you stay in an unpaid? This role I had was, you know, a journalist had been made redundant. I'd just gone in and his desk and computer were there and I was just doing it unpaid and eventually, you know, couldn't do it. The editor also chose to make me his sort of, you know, office scapegoat. So I got, you know, and so I just, I actually walked out of that. I gave him a mouthful and I walked out. I told him where to stick his job. And I then realised I had to get one, you know, a paid job.

28:06Yeah. And I did, so this is where Cambridge did open a door. Right. I saw an opportunity to work for a transport publishing company called Baltic Publishing, based under the M4 flyover in Brentford. But to me, that was quite glamorous at the time when I moved down to London. And, yeah, I applied and I got that job. So in some ways, my dad was right to a degree. I got a job through the Cambridge University careers. And in the end, that set me on my way. And what was that way? So then, having a pint in the Globe in Brentford, and someone said to you, what do you want to be doing in five years' time, what would you have said then?

28:54Well, someone did say that to me. And that person was somebody who I recruited to work on container management, which was one of our amazing titles. And maybe this shows that I've got a good eye for people and a good eye for talent. I recruited through interview Eleanor Mills to work on container management. And for those who don't know, Eleanor would go on to edit the Sunday Times magazine. But she said that to me. We used to go to a different pub, actually. We used to, the days when we'd have sneaky pint at lunchtime. And we used to go to the, Eleanor and I would go to the new inn, actually, which was closest to our office in Brentford, near where the old Griffin Park was, but it's obviously gone now.

29:36But she said to me, well what actually because i was always moaning i'd rather do i want to do this i want to be this i want to be that you know no world's not fair and she said well what do you actually want to do i said well and i wouldn't open up to many people but i'd got to really really like her and then we were quite close i said i'd actually want to be an mp and she said well you should apply to work with my stepmother then i said what she said well she just got elected in dulwich this was just after the 92 general election because i've been crushed by that defeat you know i was working in london at I was thinking, oh, Labour's coming in and it's going to be brilliant.

30:11But she's, but my stepmother has just been elected. Why don't you apply? I said, well, who's your stepmother? Tessa Jowell. I said, well, I've never heard of Tessa Jowell, but what would, would, would she give me an interview, do you think? And yeah, there you go. That's how I always say, when I do go into a lot of schools and colleges around Greater Manchester, I always say to the young people, you know, you will get given opportunities that you could never predict, you know, and you've got to be good at sort of knowing when they're there right in front of you and that was mine and I did. You jumped?