Andy Burnham: Is “King in the North” trying to take Starmer’s throne?

0:00How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow. Coming up on The Daily, he's the mayor of Greater Manchester, who some predict could take over from Sir Keir Starmer. But does Andy Burnham really want to be Prime Minister?

0:40How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.

1:25that the Prime Minister is currently experiencing. Had I known then what I know now, I'd have never appointed him. Yeah, you can't have failed to notice that Sir Keir Starmer is under a wee bit of pressure right now. First, there was Angela Rayner, who he sacked, two days after declaring confidence in her. Then he binned Peter Mandelson, our ambassador in Washington, as Donald Trump prepares to come here for a state visit. Questions still flying thick and fast about how much the PM knew and when. Throw in poll ratings that would make a panto villain blush and little wonder that the knives are out.

2:01But who's actually wielding them? It's really important at this point that we get the culture inside Parliament and inside the wider party right. It's too factional and it needs to be more pluralistic, more inclusive. One name that keeps getting mentioned is Andy Burnham, formerly a Cabinet Minister in the last Labour government, now Mayor of Greater Manchester. Although thanks to his popularity and easy charm, Some are referring to him as the King of the North. He's been openly critical of the PM. Meanwhile, his allies have set up a campaign group, Mainstream, which could very well start making moves to prepare the way for a change in leadership.

2:38Labour's party conference is less than a fortnight away, with Andy Burnham due to speak. Liverpool may well run out of popcorn. Well, let's head north and find out what on earth is going on. Rob Ford is Professor of Political Science at the University of Manchester and senior fellow at UK in a changing Europe. Rob, look, I'm not being daft, am I? Andy Burnham is on manoeuvres, or at the very least, he doesn't mind people thinking that he's on manoeuvres. It's no accident, really. Even if Andy Burnham said nothing at all about the state of the Labour leadership, the fact that polling shows he's the most popular Labour figure in the country would ensure that that conversation would come to him.

3:19But he's done absolutely nothing to throw cold water on the idea that he could potentially throw his hat into the ring at some point. However, of course, he's not actually in a position to formally run for Labour leader right now because the only people who can stand as candidates are members of Parliament and Burnham is not currently a member of Parliament. So if he is going to take a tilt at the leadership, we will know a long way out because he will make a change of job first. The mood music would seem to suggest that something is in the offing. If nothing else, the fact that it has been made clear that allies of Andy Burnham are setting up this group mainstream.

4:02Rob, what do we know about mainstream? Do we know what they stand for, what they're calling for, who's behind it? Well, we know that there are kind of a coalescence of various groupings within the Labour Party that are associated with what, in sort of inside Labour soap opera politics is called the soft left. You know, not too right, not too left. Whereas others would say, well, you don't believe in anything tough at all then, hence soft, squishy. But they are the majority of the Labour Party in terms of MPs, the majority of the Labour Party in terms of members. So that's why they're marketing themselves as mainstream.

4:39But in the past, they've struggled to unite around a clear agenda. They're better at saying what they aren't than what they are. so it's interesting that they're now coalescing and that they seem to be coalescing behind Andy Burnham because that would be the first step towards having a coherent agenda is to have a kind of coherent leader in waiting. Does he have the support do you think within and without the parliamentary Labour Party? I think what we can say with a good deal of certainty is he would immediately be the front runner in any contest because he's the highest profile figure he's the most popular figure.

5:12And he's an established critic of an unpopular outgoing leader. So he'd be in a very strong position. In terms of MPs, the current rules, you'd have to get 80 MPs to sign up to your bid in order to get yourself on the ballot. You've got 399 currently signed up Labour MPs right now. Some of them have lost the whip since the election. I don't think he would struggle to hit that figure if he were to run. More MPs than that have voted against the government on, for example, the welfare changes. More MPs than that back to Lucy Powell's bid for the deputy leadership election. Lucy Powell is, of course, also a Manchester MP and is an ally of Burnham's, so that can be seen as an indicator of his potential support in the Commons as well.

5:56But as you say, there are a couple of hurdles, not least, you know, getting into Parliament. If he does stand in some form of by-election or another election to get into Parliament. What does that mean for the job as mayor of Manchester? He can't do both, can he? No, he's not allowed to do both under Labour Party rules. And I wasn't exactly sure what happens in this situation because there's no precedent for a combined authority mayor leaving the job halfway through a term. It seems under the current rules there would be a by-election contested over the entirety of Greater Manchester to elect a successor to Burnham.

6:35Now, that, I think, adds some important complications to this whole situation, because on the one hand, Burnham is not guaranteed to win a Westminster by-election in the current climate. Reform are 10 points ahead in the polls, and while Burnham's popular and Gorton looks like a pretty safe Labour seat, I don't think any seat can be considered 100 % safe right now. But secondly, let's imagine Burnham does win that by-election and then vacates the Greater Manchester mayoralty. That then becomes a major prize for critics both to Labour's left and Labour's right. Reform will contest it hard. The Greens will potentially contest it hard too.

7:16You lose Burnham's celebrity status as the mayoral incumbent, and you potentially get a situation where Greater Manchester falls to one of Labour's opponents. And that would be a big early albatross around Burnham's neck. I mean, how has his time as mayor of Manchester been received there and elsewhere? I should declare an interest at this point. As a Manchester professor, I live up here. He's very popular. All the polling shows it. His election results here have been consistently very strong. He's been winning in every single local authority across the combined authority. and he is regarded as somebody who has managed to get significant things done.

7:57So he is very popular, his approvals are very high, he's seen as getting visible results for voters who want to see visible results, all of which are things that should make him appealing nationally. And in national polling too, he tends to be one of the only, if not the only Labour Party politician who both everybody's heard of and secondly, everybody quite likes. But is that not in parts because he's not in Westminster? I mean, yes, he's known as variously King of the North, King in the North, if you're a Game of Thrones fan. But it's that separation from the Westminster political apparatus that is meant that he has remained so popular, isn't it?

8:34There are two ways in which Burnham benefits from being where he is now that he'll lose if he were to switch jobs. Firstly, as you mentioned, he's outside of the whole SW1 Game of Thrones machinations. He's not seen as part of an unpopular government, part of an out-of-touch London elite. But as soon as he's a backbencher in Westminster, he will become more closely tied with Westminster, with the Labour government in the eyes of voters. Secondly, he has a big job where he can get things done and then point at those things and say, look at what I've done for you. Once he's a backbencher, he's powerless.

9:12He can't get anything done. So that's the gamble, that's the risk, is that he would be trading a big job with an anti-Westminster profile for being just another member of the rank and file on the Westminster backbenches. That said, isn't it clear that Downing Street are aware that Andy Burnham does pose a threat? Oh, yeah. I mean, the people in Downing Street read the polls as obsessively as pretty much anybody. So they will know what all the polling data is saying about this. They will know, of course, that there are MPs openly talking about Burnham as a possible challenger or successor. But they're kind of constrained in terms of what they can do.

9:50I mean, what exactly can they offer Burnham to keep him in place? So it'll be interesting to see whether or not they offer anything that's kind of Burnham friendly. But the risk, of course, of doing that is it starts looking like Andy Burnham is already making the running and setting the agenda. Which of your potential contender is exactly what you want? It's no coincidence, is it, Rob, that this speculation is reaching fever pitch as we are in the run into Labour Party conference. It's funny when you follow politics for a while how history maybe doesn't repeat itself, but certainly rhymes. I can remember a few years ago during the dying, struggling days of Theresa May's premiership, the Conservative conference where all eyes were on Boris Johnson and everybody was attending his fringe events and largely ignoring the leader.

10:39And now here we are and we have the same kind of movie playing out potentially on the conference floor in Liverpool for Labour. And of course, we all know how the movie ended with May and Johnson. You said it yourself there, Rob, that, you know, the only reason that you and I are talking today, pleasant though it is, is because there is this speculation about the future of Keir Starmer. And we're hearing Labour MPs openly talking about Keir Starmer being gone in the aftermath of the elections next May. I think the reason for that is fairly obvious, which is the will of the electorate ultimately tends to exert itself on parties.

11:17But when you're a party leader who's presided over a decline in the polls from the mid-40s in the early months of last year, so roughly a year and a half, it has taken Keir Starmer to halve his party's polling. His personal ratings are now as bad as Jeremy Corbyn's were in his worst polling, as Rishi Sunak's were just before he lost the election last year, as Boris Johnson's were before he faced his challenge for the leadership a few years ago. So you have a leader who's unpopular, who's presiding over a massive polling deficit, and most Labour MPs can point to a series of what they regard as significant blunders, missteps, policy own goals that they trace back to Starmer.

12:01So he can't even say he's a victim of circumstance. The unpopularity of the Labour Party seems to be down to things that Downing Street itself are doing that Labour MPs regard as a mistake. But it is nonetheless remarkable that only 14 or 15 months after winning a Commons landslide, we are talking about the end of this Prime Minister's time in Downing Street. I don't think anybody on the 5th of July 2024 would have predicted such a rapid decline and fall. Is it necessarily fatal for Keir Starmer? I mean, already there is speculation that there could be some bloodletting in the Downing Street operation.

12:39Morgan McSweeney, Chief of Staff, is a name that keeps getting mentioned. But I just don't know if that is enough of a sacrifice. Well, leaders are hard to dislodge in Labour. The Conservatives, both by inclination and institutionally, are quite regicidal, as we saw in the last Parliament. But it's harder in Labour. It's harder to challenge. You can only challenge once a year, right before party conference, and you need to have 80 MPs backing you in order to challenge. You can't just have a confidence vote. Jeremy Corbyn had a confidence vote against him and just carried on and led the party for three more years after that.

13:14So it's possible that Starmer could limp on despite being wounded for quite a long time. And another reason that could be true is that it's one thing not to be happy with your current leader. It's another thing to agree upon an alternative. So the fact that we're at the point of talking about a possible leadership contest doesn't mean that we're anywhere near an actual leadership contest actually happening. That could still be some way off. I mean, I know it was said by a big Corbynite MP, Richard Bergen, but the idea that Sir Keir Starmer could be gone as soon as, well, after the May elections next year.

13:46I mean, how much credence do you give that? Do you see that happening? Do you see that as a likelihood? I think May next year is a critical turning point. Firstly, unless there's a really big turnaround in the polls, those are going to be a very, very bloody set of local, and it's local and devolved elections, let's not forget. They could fall into third or even fourth in Scotland. They could lose control of dozens of councils where they've been in charge for a very long time. They could lose hundreds and hundreds of councillors. These are all perfectly feasible outcomes on current polling. So it will be bloody.

14:22But then also, I don't think MPs ever really seem to internalise just how bad things might look for them in bad local elections until the results come in. And so every May, when it's bad for a party, you see this kind of shock reaction from a lot of their MPs, as if they can't quite believe what the polling has been telling them for a long time until the ballot boxes are open. So I do think it will be a moment of very high peril, maximum peril. And if there are groups, Burnham-aligned or otherwise aligned, organising for a contest, one would imagine that they would be wanting to prepare for that moment when the great herd of Labour MPs is particularly restive and perhaps prone to stampede.

15:08We've talked, obviously, about Sir Keir Sturmer's skills or lack thereof as a politician. Would Andy Burnham make a good prime minister, do you think? I mean, we know that Burnham is an effective communicator in a way that I think we can see Starmerism. We can compare them on that metric because we see them both on the TV. We can see them both in the radio. If you cast your mind back to Burnham's performances during the COVID pandemic, which is when he acquired that moniker of King of the North, they were very assured, very clear, cut through very effectively to voters. Starmer has essentially at no point in his leadership ever achieved that kind of positive cut through.

15:46So in terms of communications, I think we can say Burnham would be a very strong performer, but communications is only one small part of a very big job. How would he do at the other parts? Policy, party management, dealing with ministers, dealing with breaking issues that rise on the agenda, dealing with Donald Trump? Well, that's harder to say. We have nothing to go on in terms of how he would manage those kinds of things. Rob, thank you. For the very latest on what is going on in Westminster and whether or not Sir Keir Starmer has remained as Prime Minister, just head to SkyNews.com. That's your lot for The Daily.

16:19We'll see you again tomorrow.

16:25How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.