Becoming Burnham: Thatcher, Hillsborough, and the Anger that Shaped Him | Part 1

0:08Andrew Murray Burnham, known to most of you by now as Andy, our seventh Prime Minister in just over a decade. King of the North to some, all vibes to others. But what kind of leader will he be? What drives him? What does he actually want this country to do and to be? And how did he go from being a parliamentary assistant to Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in around a quarter of a century? I've known Andy Burnham for around 30 years. He crops up a fair bit in my diaries, often talking about his anxieties, his fears, his frustrations, also about his ideas and his ambition. So I do know some of the story.

0:52I know quite a lot of the story. But today I've been sitting down talking to somebody who probably knows Andy Burnham better than anybody outside his family. That's Steve Rotherham. Steve, former MP, left Westminster with Andy Burnham to go off and become mayors. Andy in Manchester, Steve in Liverpool's city region. So they've worked together. They've navigated Westminster together. They've left Westminster together. They've become mayors together. They fought for the Hillsborough families and victims together. together and now they're probably as close as you can get as friends in politics. So here is what you're going to hear about in this series.

1:30You're going to hear from Steve about Andy Burnham's imposter syndrome. You're going to hear about his Catholic guilt complex. You're going to hear about Andy the family man, the DJ, the footballer and all that stuff. You're going to hear about the humiliation, that's Steve's word, the humiliation he felt on losing those two leadership elections, in particular the one to Jeremy Corbyn. You're going to hear a really deep-rooted dislike of Margaret Thatcher radicalised by her. You're going to hear how he responded to the Manchester Arena bombing and a truly extraordinary story about how he found out that it had happened.

2:04You're going to hear why he went absolutely ballistic with Boris Johnson during the COVID pandemic. We're going to talk about Manchesterism, what it is and maybe more importantly how it can be applied to the whole country and you're going to get Steve Rotherham's pretty well informed predictions about what a Burnham government wants to do and will be like that's all coming up on Becoming Burnham so Steve thank you for being here great pleasure listen let's start with his his childhood you you were one of eight yeah right so also a catholic I'm guessing no we wouldn't no we have no religion whatsoever but you've got eight kids yeah yeah and you're growing up in a pretty, very well, an absolute working class part of Liverpool.

2:45Would you say your childhood was very different to Andy's? I'd say it was similar in many ways, but they had their own home, whereas we had a council house, which actually was my mum's home, believe me. It wasn't a council's. My mum used to decorate that. My mum decorated, not my dad. He was at the Labour Club having a few drinks, of course, and enjoying himself. But I think the similarities of most people are that when you're brought up in that sort of a community that neighborhood you don't know what other people are living like because all you can see is the people around you and they're all living a very similar standard of life and so his his dad was uh an engineer it was a telephone engineer his mum eileen was a gp receptionist they're now in their mid-80s his dad of course has dementia which is really sad to think he doesn't know just how far and he's gone or doesn't understand how far he's gone still And family.

3:39Tell me whatever you feel comfortable saying about Andy's family, parents, wife, kids. He's a real family man. I'm not just saying that because we can all say we're family men, can't we? Or, you know, people who love our families, who doesn't love the family, Boris Johnson. But no, there's some formative things, I think, in his childhood, you know, such as that moving from the first house in Aintry and then going to Kulchuth and then moving again and then going to the schools there rather than to a school in Liverpool. So I think all of that was formative. And he's got two brothers who he really is close to and two great lads.

4:22And if you think about the family from that background, two of them teachers, head teachers in all that in schools, and Andy, who became a politician, obviously, but has done all right for himself as well. I think that's from his mum and dad. I think you get your values from your mum and dad. And Eileen, who's his mum, is just such a lovely woman. And before his dad got dementia, obviously, I used to have chats to his dad. His dad's a big Evertonian and, again, formed that sort of you must follow in the family tradition of support in Everton. but he has carried that forward to his own family and the closeness of him and his lad and the two girls who he's immensely close to.

5:12And you can see that with the shows of affection, but behind all of that, just the way that they act as a family, it shows it that that is the basis of who he has become. It's that strong bond. And then Marie France, who's Andy's wife, who, by the way, if anybody out there is somebody who liked the tweet, which was critical of her dress, I think shame on you. This is a woman who fought breast cancer, a woman who, again, is just from an ordinary background. Okay, she's from another country, she's from Holland. But she came over as well to the UK and did very well for herself and ended up in Cambridge.

6:00So it's not like she had all of the trappings of wealth. They've created that by their intelligence and their determination. and a really, really good unit, a solid unit. And that's why I think Andy's been able to do some of these things. I can remember actually having dinner with him. This is when he was shadow education, I think. And Marie France was having the operation and I can remember him feeling guilt. Yeah. That he was, yes, he was there as much as he could be, but both for her and for the kids, this sense of I've got to be in Westminster to sort of, take on Michael Gove over some stupid new idea he's got when I've got all that going at home.

6:43And everyone's got a bit of that, haven't they? I mean, again, anybody who's away with jobs in the armed forces or wherever he's away from family has got those contentions. He dealt with it really well, I think. And whilst he's doing all of that, trying also to have a bit of fun time, if you like, a bit of hymn time. So as you know, he's a lover of live music and we've been going to gigs probably for 15, 16, 17 years, whatever it is. And he's going to find that almost impossible now as the prime minister, isn't he, to go to a live music venue. Well, if he does go, he's got to do better than he did on his little dad dancer.

7:23Oh, is it the Paul and dancer? Is he? Oh, he's terrible. Should he just better not do it at all? Well, his taste in music sometimes is just depressing. so we do these DJ offs I don't know you know we have a DJ battle and I'll be playing you know something really upbeat and then he'll put on the smits you know heaven knows I'm miserable now or girlfriend in a coma and I'm like yeah that keeps the vibe going doesn't it well done that yeah so I'll put something else on then to get it going again a bit of Frankie or something and up it goes again yeah he genuinely believes that we've had these DJ battles and he's won some of them not a chance I mentioned Catholicism.

8:05Did you ever have a sense that Andy's religion was important to him? Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. He does have that sort of Catholic guilt complex, you know, that many people have. He's very similar to what we made to a Catholic as well in their attitude to life, their beliefs, their values, principles. So what does the guilt complex mean? That he sort of feels if somebody's not doing as well as he should, he's got a responsibility? He's always got that sort of, you know, the Catholicism looms large. If he is believing that he should do something, then I think he'd be steered away from it because of his beliefs.

8:39He once said, he read the Catechism, and he felt that the enfranchisement of it on earth was the Labour Party. Do you kind of feel that? Do you feel there's a moral, you know, it's either a moral mission or it's nothing? Yeah, I do. I think it's a crusade, yeah. I think that the Labour Party is the greatest organ for social change in this country since its inception. And religion, of course, can be often compared to that because if you truly believe in the teachings of the church, then it's about being good to other people and all that. That's what socialism is to me. I mentioned in the introduction, Liverpool back then.

9:17And I mean, you obviously lived it much more than Andy, who's, you know, just outside and he's, but he's looking on in. Give us a sense of it. You know, we did the stats there, but also the politics of it were brutal as well, weren't they? Oh, dear me, yeah. So the thing that he talks about is Boys from the Black Stuff. And actually, that's through a conversation that we had that I teased out of him how fundamental that was to his belief that the North wasn't getting a decent enough deal from that particular government, the Thatcher government. But we all knew that it was writ large, wasn't it?

9:55Nearly 100 ,000 jobs gone. And those people, you know, left with no alternative. So it was a seminal piece of television for lots of reasons, but also I think quite clearly formed that important instinct within him, which was about injustice. And he could see that the things that were happening to Liverpool were wrong in so many ways, but also the damage that it was doing to people's lives was something worth fighting for. How do you think that whole Liverpool, demise of Liverpool, joblessness in Liverpool, social unrest in Liverpool, what lasting effect do you think that had on him in the way he thinks about politics?

10:36A lot of the stuff that happened in the earlier years sometimes still comes out, you know, if we're having a conversation about something. So it very much forms part of the politician he's become and has been very formative in some of the bitterness that he feels against the way in which the state has conspired against certain areas. I do believe that this is why when I was trying to persuade him to be the Metro Mayor or stand as the Metro Mayor for Greater Manchester, I think this is why devolution became really important. so it's no good having a moan about things not going brilliantly well in Westminster if that's all you do you're just there and not trying to change it he looked from the outside at the mechanisms by which we can start to use devolution to change politics and I think that's why he wants to go back in because he can do that on a national scale now and he has spoken openly about using devolution as a way in which every area in the country can start to benefit from growth.

11:50And Thatcher was, how do we put it? Anatomy. Hate figure? Yeah. I'd say another thing that you get taught off your parents, my mum said never, ever say hate because it's a useless emotion. It doesn't actually do anything. So it was difficult for me to actually say that I hated Thatcher, but I disliked her immensely. And she did so much damage to our area, both to the economy and the way which we operated, but also to the reputation. And would you say, so when she won, I think particularly the second election, 83, and then meanwhile, Liverpool is electing a really, really far left council. Yeah.

12:38Do you think to some extent that was a product of her, a response to her, or was it just that Liverpool's always been more left wing than the rest of the country? No, I think it's an absolute response to Thatcherism and to what was happening. There were people who joined Labour Party politics there who wouldn't have been associated with our party. You know, there was a broad church of everybody from Communists and Socialist Workers Party and everything all joined in with militants, of course. And then some people who were just mainstream Labour. You know, they had the sort of the same values and principles that historically people would join our party with.

13:17but it became really really toxic of course because that injustice burns brightly and i believe that at that time the politicians in liverpool wanted to take on the role of the aggressor against the government that they believe the whole country should follow them with and he said during the recent violation he said this i saw what thatcher's government did to places like this deindustrialization draining away of economic social and political power it left places like makerfield behind and britain has been on that path for the last 40 years look i like andy and i've known him for a long long time i get a bit knocked by this 40 years thing yeah it doesn't surprise me and but you know the neoliberal like and it feels to me like okay thatcher's this terrible as you say even though your mom doesn't like it hate figure who comes along damages places like Liverpool.

14:11But it always feels to me from this that Andy's saying, and then you have this long period of a Labour government and they did NAFOL as well. Yeah, but I think you'll admit this. What Labour tried to do is to repair the damage of the Thatcher years, but it didn't do it in a structured way. Often we had pilot schemes. So I remember the top-down approach to this, that we'll tell you what's good for your area and we'll give you some money to do it. And I don't think they really worked. But most of the time, that money wasn't spent in an appropriate way that you would expect. You talk about things like the New Deal for communities.

14:45Yeah, well, there was a load of it, wasn't there? There was all the stuff that they did on housing and that was really good. But of course, it wasn't looking at the peculiarities or the individual needs of an area. It was a policy at a national level foisted on everybody. And so it was a one size fits all. So you had the Troy Neglect of Liverpool. We then had the Miner Strike. Yeah. We've had all the hatred of Thatcher. you've got social unrest in Liverpool, and then he's off to Cambridge, and then life and his anger about what's happening in the world gets even deeper. 93 soccer fans died in today's FA Cup disaster, Europe's worst ever sporting tragedy.

15:24Most of them were teenagers and children. They were crushed to death at the Liverpool-Nottingham Forest semi-final held at Hillsborough in Sheffield. 200 more were injured. It happened when ticketless Liverpool fans surged onto terraces packed with genuine ticket holders. They'd been let in by police hoping to ease congestion outside the ground. No crowd trouble had taken place. So this is 15th of April 1989. I was a journalist on the Sunday Mirror watching this unfold. It was a Saturday. 97 football fans crushed to death, 766 injured. And there's a deliberate strategy by the government, by the police, essentially to say this is a bunch of pissed scouse football fans that essentially have brought this upon themselves and you and andy would be part of what became a 27 year long campaign andy wasn't there you were at at hillsborough so and and i guess it's for both of you in different ways been an utterly defining event so just you know say as much as or as little as you want to about that the likes of the establishment found it easier to scapegoat fans who'd already been blamed for one disaster.

16:38It must be their fault, mustn't it? Things like in a locked room, videotapes went missing. And so this is not allegations. This all came out subsequently in the court proceedings and the second inquest. The police and the police federation were straight in there to blame fans. And there's an old saying, isn't it? I think it was Harold Wilson who said that a light can be halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. I'm trying to work out when a bit of iron entered Andy's soul, because I've always felt, I've known him for a long time, and I've been saying recently, I've never seen that much steel in him.

17:23If you'd have said to me back then, oh, one day he'll be, he won't just be prime minister, but he'll become Prime Minister by defenestrating a guy who's got a three-figure majority to his name and he'll arrange a by-election he'll manage to get a by-election and he'll come in and he won't even have a contest and suddenly he's going to be their Prime Minister because that requires a level of politics and ruthlessness you know and come from me this is not I'm not saying this is an insult at all there is you know I never quite imagined was there and I just wondered whether that was when a bit of iron entered his soul or whether actually it was later when we had the famous booing and heckling when he was a minister I do think that when he uh I asked him we were at a funeral for another um lad who was um killed in Spain and he wouldn't repatriate his body and the family had to buy his body back and all this sort of stuff a horrendous story.

18:23Anyway, we were both at this funeral and I leant over to him and said, listen, you know, I'm going to get you an invite into the 20th anniversary of Hillsborough. And he just looked at me, he was like, what do you want me there for? And I said - He's now Culture Minister, Culture Secretary. Yeah, he's Culture Secretary, yeah. And I said, because we need somebody at the heart of government who will take this fight forward. Because at that stage, the year before, we probably had, you know, five or 6 ,000 at the 19th anniversary because all the doors had been slammed in the face and it looked as if that was the end of it.

18:55And I said, we need something. We need this catalyst so that we can get to truth and justice. Anyway, he did, as you know, speak at the 20th anniversary. But the thing that I watched, because I was the Lord Mayor then, the one with the chain on, I'm sitting at the front waiting to go on after Andy and I'm looking at the crowd and I could see that there was real anger because he wasn't Andy Burnham. He was a representative of the government. And the government hadn't done enough at that stage. Today, I represent the prime minister and the government. 20 years ago.

19:33And he talked about Gordon Brown had sent him with a message. And it was a one lone voice. And I don't know whether you'll get it on the tape, but it just shouts justice. And then it rippled through the crowd. and there were 37 ,000 people there and the four sides of Anfield all started singing justice for the 96 as it was then. But today, as the Prime Minister has asked me to convey, we can at least pledge that 96 fellow football supporters who died will never be forgotten. And he asks us to think at this time.

20:38What were you thinking about his position at that time, standing there. He's somebody who likes to be liked. He's somebody who loves Merseyside, even though he's an Evertonian. He's somebody who feels responsibility quite deeply. And there he is representing the government and he's got 30 ,000 people shouting at him. And you guys put him there. What were you thinking about him then? And what effect did you think that would have on him? The first thing I was thinking is... To hear the rest of the episode and the whole series as it drops, just go to therestouspolitics.com.