Becoming Burnham: People Pleasing, The Shadow Years and Losing to Jeremy Corbyn

0:08Welcome to part two of the Restless Politics series on becoming Burnham. He always was Burnham, but he's become the Prime Minister and we've been very lucky to be able to talk to Steve Rotheram, his close friend, and Metro Mayor of Liverpool region, about his rise from the young man we talked about at the end of episode one, who was just coming out of Cambridge University. And now in episode two, we're going to be talking about his political career. Where did he get the ambition and the drive to become not just an assistant to a politician, but a politician himself? How did he cope with losing, losing his leadership defeats and also no Labour losing and him suddenly finding he was no longer in a winning environment and what was it that made him in the end say Westminster is no longer for me I'm heading north let's just go through where he went so we had his two leadership elections yeah we'll come back to when he goes off back to the north with you but do you think in either or both of those he thought he could win I think the first one was just a bit of a stab in the dark you know I want to put my name forward You've seen that subsequently where people have just associated themselves with a campaign so they can raise the profile.

1:25I think that was what that one was. So 2010, Ed v. David is the sort of main focus, and Andy was second to drop out, I think, after Diana. But then 2015, Ed Miliband goes, and I don't think even Jeremy Corbyn thought he was going to win when he started. Andy was almost, was he favourite with the bookies at one point? So in my office in Westminster, in the Palace of Westminster, I had this whiteboard up and with all the names that we had got we'd gone and gathered these names all going to support Andy This is 2015? 2015 yeah and You were running his campaign Yeah well You were managing his campaign Yeah managing but like you had Michael Dugan and all them you had like some people who understood how to win campaigns around him and he was so far ahead we'd run out of whiteboards and so we'd have to put stuff, pieces of paper with their names and then the left chose their candidate we thought it was going to be diane again so we weren't really fearful not because diane isn't a brilliant candidate but because she hadn't ignited the left and the appetite for a change of politics in the previous one so we thought you know if it's diane if it was john john yeah john's really canny as you know i've got a lot of respect for john mcdonald i think he's a brilliant political operator we thought more to it but anybody else We thought we'd wipe the floor.

2:47And then he'd come up with Jeremy Corbyn. We thought, no one's going to go for that. And one by one, I was rubbing or crossing off the names of people who were coming to me and saying, listen, I'm going to support Jeremy. And I was asking people why. And for loads of spurious reasons, people were coming up with, I'd say, excuses really rather than the rationale. And we were crossing them off. What was the sort of thing you were saying? Well, some people, because they'd sat by him in Parliament and stuff like that and had heard him, and he was a decent orator, so he could carry an argument. One who'd actually started their political career working in his office.

3:30And so there's loads and loads of different reasons why they gave, but I don't think any of them were politically concrete enough to justify why they weren't now supporting Andy. anyway he still got miles more than the numbers that he needed but I had somebody on the at the PLP when Jeremy was getting close to the final numbers I'm trying to think of exactly what it was a 30 something at the time well 38 I'll just say that and so he was on 35 or whatever and so this is when Margaret Beckett and Sadiq Khan and they came in and said we've got to get him on the ballot have a proper contest so even then people like Margot would be thinking it would be better for Andy if he's got Jeremy to fight yeah and they were thinking also that we needed to lance this boil which was that sort of dichotomy between the left of the party and the rump of the party and we thought the rump will obviously come out the top and it wasn't until we heard that he'd got over the line I phoned Andy and I said listen Andy he's got the required numbers and all that.

4:44And there was just a bit of a silence. And I knew and he knew that it was going to be a lot more problematic than we'd faced off. How did he deal with that sense of, so there he is, you've got your whiteboard and you've got your post-its and they're all going across a wall because you've got so many MPs backing you. And then suddenly they start falling off and then suddenly he realises, oh, I thought I was in with the shout, but this is probably going away. How did he deal with that? At first, not brilliantly in regard to, you know, you almost go through the stages, don't you? With disbelief and all that.

5:15We were quite clear that there was still a campaign to win. But there were some things that happened that you just think, oh, everything's conspired against us. There was once where he was doing a speech in a church and it was one of his better performances. because I actually said to him up on stage, Alison, and I bet you've said this to people that you've worked with and maybe to Tony Blair, but I said, you know what? I said, you're a very good Andy Burnham, but you're a shit phony politician. So don't try and be one. Try to be yourself and authentic and all that. And he did this speech and he was asked, he was allowed people to ask questions.

5:58And one of them said, Andy, I don't know whether it's sort of totemic but you've delivered a fantastic speech for the last 35 minutes behind a sign a big banner that says repent for JC is coming and we just went oh my god I can't believe you didn't spot that I cannot believe nobody spotted that wouldn't have happened in my day so you knew your luck was out We were just thinking, oh, dearie me. And then we went around some places, and it was almost as if a beetle had walked, a John Paul George or Ringo type beetle had walked into the room with the response for Jeremy. It was one of the most bizarre things that I've ever seen.

6:48And what did you learn from that? What did you learn from people saying that actually somebody was, who none of us really saw coming, let's be frank, what did he learn from thinking we've taken this for granted that somebody like me is going to become the next leader and this guy's come from left field and not only has he come from left field but he's genuinely exciting a lot of people in the Labour Party yeah and beyond absolutely so what did he learn from that well I think it was that taking the message to people is really potent because what Jeremy was saying, and by the way, I went to work for Jeremy, as you know, so I didn't just hear this during the leadership campaign.

7:29I heard the same thing for speech after speech after speech, a speech with Jeremy. And he basically had a little book and he had some, and none of it excited me in regard to, wow, this is, I've just seen the light. And, you know, it was like, what? But when he'd finished, I've never seen ovations like Jeremy got. And he really He did connect with people, whether you like that or not. He did connect. I did a thing in Liverpool when you and Tony Blair were in Liverpool and he was in the Devonshire and he gave the speech. And genuinely, even I was going, I'd vote for him just because he was able to connect at that level with people.

8:11And Jeremy was doing that with big chunks of Labour supporters. We were miles ahead and then we were marginally ahead And then you just think, oh, dear. And then he announced in the QE2 theatre in London who the winner was. And I was still hoping that if Jeremy got 47, 48, that nobody who supported the other candidates would singly transfer to Jeremy. And then Andy somehow would. And I think he got 60 % didn't he? We don't have to be unequal. It doesn't have to be unfair. poverty isn't inevitable things can and they will change thank you very much

8:59do you think the general public would choose jeremy corbyn as a prime minister well we'll have to see won't we but you know what they do want is politicians of conviction people who say what they mean they are sick to death of people coming on looking like they're reading off a script well that's clearly not jeremy corbyn so what do you think that did to him it's not just he's lost he's he's kind of lost to jeremy corbyn who as you say when he first his name first started to get thrown in the ring people thought this isn't going to be a problem so what sort of soul searching went on with andy after that for a lot of people outside of the westminster bubble and it genuinely is a bubble um it was jeremy who and then all of a sudden he loses badly to jeremy and i think there was a lot of soul searching from andy you know how has it gone from being so far ahead to losing so badly.

9:50And everybody does a bit of naval gaze in those moments. What did we do wrong? But it was literally a tsunami that we couldn't hold back. It started almost immediately that he got the required number of nominations for him to enter the contest. And we just found that it was overwhelming. So he loses 2010. He has this period where he's not very happy. He's also got this situation with his wife and her health challenges. And then we lose 2015 as well. And he loses that. And then we have Brexit. Yeah. Do you think you ever thought of packing it all in? It must have crossed everybody's mind at that time.

10:39Did you think of packing it all in? Yeah, I was thinking, well, what's the point in this? Because I've always believed in the European Union And I just think that, well, my belief was they shouldn't have asked that question. And they asked the wrong question anyway. If they had asked where people are more likely to withdraw from Westminster and Whitehall than Brussels or Strasbourg, I think you would have got an equally negative response from the country. But the way in which our party was positioning itself was fairly nuanced. and I wanted to just go out there and sing from the hilltops. Look, this is fantastic.

11:19A place like the Liverpool city region, we got objective one monies when we weren't getting anything because the Tory government at the time, we didn't get anything. And that objective one monies was a facilitator and a catalyst for massive regeneration in Liverpool. But the bit that I think the European Union did poorly was to communicate it. Remember, eventually, we started putting the stars around stuff. So we're getting a million pounds or a 10 million pounds project. And he had a little... I was like, get out there and tell people. It was too late. So I do think the whole European angle to this was a missed opportunity for us because there was certainly some light between the different parties.

12:06And you had the Tories and the Lib Dems then on either side. and we were trying to straddle two horses. Totally. It was difficult. To hear the rest of the episode and the whole series as it drops, just go to therestispolitics.com.