The Andy Burnham I know

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0:08Today, the Andy Burnham I know.

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0:55It's August 2020 and Andy Burnham and I are sitting on a bench in a park near where he lives in Wigan, watching the ducks. We're deep in Covid, which is why we're meeting outside rather than in his office. It's sunny, he's wearing Birkenstocks. He's relaxed but frustrated. Would you swap places for Boris Johnson if somebody did say? there you go would you want to be Prime Minister of course even right now at this point in history I would think it would be awful no easy solutions there's no point me saying no because I've tried to lead a Labour Party in the past and therefore I've tried to want to be Prime Minister yeah but I wondered if you've changed your mind on that no although what I've changed my mind upon is you know the way in which power needs to be sort of distributed around this country.

1:47You know, it doesn't work. I mean, I think we've seen it again. The model of government doesn't work. The kind of overall structure of a top-down, we'll decide in Whitehall and we'll just throw stuff out at you all. It doesn't work. It never did, and it definitely doesn't work now. Back then, I was The Guardian's North of England editor, and Burnham was three years into his stint as the mayor of Greater Manchester. I think you can hear it in my voice that I was pretty surprised to hear that he still harboured ambitions to be the Prime Minister. I'm not too proud to admit that I thought back then, good luck with that.

2:22I thought he'd missed the boat, and that his path back to Westminster was too difficult. How wrong I was.

2:35On Monday, Andy Burnham will move into Downing Street. But what kind of Prime Minister will he be? To answer that question, I'm going to talk to the people who've worked closest with Andy Burnham, from his Cambridge professor to his new Labour mentor, all through the Corbyn years to his rebirth as the King of the North. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd. Today in Focus, Britain's next Prime Minister by the people who know him best.

3:10Andrew Murray Burnham was born in Liverpool in 1970. In the garden of number 10, conservative leader Edward Heath with his new cabinet. Chancellor of the Exchequer Ian McLeod... April 10th, 1970. Today, Beatle Paul McCartney announced that the Beatles are breaking up. Here's the news as reported. The middle of three boys born to Roy, a telephone engineer, and Eileen, a receptionist. The family lived in Colcheth, a village on the border between Merseyside, Cheshire and Greater Manchester. And they were sports mad. Burnham played cricket for Lancashire schoolboys and was a fanatic Everton supporter.

3:48But he was academic too, one of the brightest students at St Allred's Catholic High School in Newton-le-Willows in Merseyside. It was there, aged 15, that he joined the Labour Party. And it was where he was encouraged to apply to Cambridge. reluctantly, according to his old head teacher, who said that the young Burnham didn't think it was for people like him.

4:13I didn't think this guy's going to be Prime Minister. I guess somebody seeing David Cameron or Michael Heseltine as a student might have known where they were going. I did definitely think this guy's going to be OK in life. This is John Mullen, a professor of English at University College London. But over 32 years ago, he taught English literature to Andy Burnham at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. I interviewed him for entrance to Cambridge and I do remember, I believe, that he was quite smartly dressed. I mean, it's a generalisation, but I think it's only overconfident candidates from a certain kind of perhaps more privileged background who have the gall to dress casually.

4:58I'm pretty sure I remember him wearing a jacket and tie. He was quite earnest and serious about the whole thing, but obviously had a sense of humour. I mean, he was confident enough to laugh at things sometimes in the interview. And I do also remember that my colleague, Ruth, who was a medievalist, really took a shine to him. I think he was quite keen on Chaucer. I don't know if that came afterwards or if he said that in his interview, but that might have been a reason for her liking him. I remember him as a sort of, was a bit of a character around the college. He was a bit of a cheeky chappy, I would say.

5:37Very quick, very, very keen on football and actually would wear an Everton shirt round as casual wear. And I would say he was rather respectful, actually, of me as his teacher. I would say he took his academic studies seriously, you know, non-fanatico. But he'd obviously had to work hard and be a good student to get there. And he was going to go on doing that. Yeah. And he also met his future wife, Marie-France van Heel at Fitzwilliam College. Do you remember anything about her? Were they like the power couple on campus? I remember Frankie, as she was called. I didn't know her very well. I knew Andy, but she was a big character in the college and she was quite a kind of cool glamorous person.

6:27The pair had been dating for a while when Frankie went on one of the biggest TV shows of the early 90s.

6:36Do you remember her going on Blind Date? I remember seeing it on the TV, yes. My interests were entirely honourable. I didn't have any interest at all. And in some ways it wasn't so surprising because she was super confident person. But for a Cambridge student to go on blind dates seemed a really cool thing to do. And I remember Scylla saying, you know, and so you're a student, Luffy. Where are you a student? And Frankie said, oh, at Cambridge University. And the whole audience went, woo. Ooh. And in terms of the course that he did at university, choosing to do English literature at somewhere like Cambridge, what skills do you think he learned in your tutorials and through the reading that has equipped him for everything?

7:28Oh, gosh, that's a good question, isn't it? I mean, first of all, his choosing to do English is itself quite striking, I think, because from his background, you know, his parents didn't go to university. Very often, of course, especially boys from that sort of background will choose to do something which is much more obviously careerist law economics medicine all that sort of stuff so choosing to do English shows I hope but he has a vein of imagination and idealism not just political idealism but actually sort of intellectual idealism but I don't want to stretch this this hope too far but you'd hope that somebody who said that they love Middlemarch, George Eliot's great novel, which is all about imagine what other people are thinking.

8:16I hope it's given him ability to sort of sometimes step outside himself and imagine what it would be like from somebody else's point of view. After graduating with a 2-1, Burnham headed back home to the North West and set about trying to become a journalist. He did work experience on the Middleton Guardian in Rochdale and once told me that he tried to get a job with us, the other Guardian, but we didn't write back. Sorry, Andy. But he didn't hold a grudge. He still read The Guardian and he used to wear a t-shirt with the classic 1980s Guardian logo, along with a book it had. In October 1991, he wrote into our letters page to complain that Philip Larkin had not made the newspapers league of great poets, proclaiming Larkin's love songs in age as the century's greatest poem.

9:07A few years later, he was down in London, working in the less glamorous end of the journalism industry. I first met Andy Burnham when he was my boss on Tank World magazine. This is Eleanor Mills, a journalist who went on to be the editorial director of the Sunday Times. This is back in 1993. Tank World is the world's, I don't know if it still exists, but back then it was the world's premier bulk liquid transportation publication. He was the editor of Tank World and I was his editorial assistant. And there were only two employees on Tank World. Me and Andy Burnham were Tank World. So it was high octane stuff.

9:47And what were your first impressions of him? Do you remember meeting him for the first time? I can remember Andy getting up from his computer and saying hello. And he had the most incredible eyelashes I've ever seen on a man. So that became a long running joke between us about how he applied his mascara that morning. And he was funny. We used to spend quite a lot of time in the nearby pub in Brentford. He liked a pint and crisps and very fat sandwiches. We both kind of graduated out of university into a bit of a recession. I wanted to be a, you know, big Fleet Street journalist. And Andy at that point was desperate to get into politics.

10:24He'd been a member of the Labour Party since he was 15. and he was very passionate about social mobility. We used to do a lot of putting the world to rights in the pub. My stepmother was Tessa Jow. She was MP for Dulwich. She'd always been a Labour Party kind of activist and Tessa was very much part of that kind of new Labour inner circle. So I grew up in a very kind of Labour political family. So we had a lot of discussions about the effects of Thatcherism and what had happened to the kids that Andy had been to school with. And he was really passionate then about how he was clever, academically clever.

11:00So he'd got out and gone to Cambridge. But he talked a lot about bright kids in his class for whom there was no route out. He felt very angry about the waste of talent and also about how the British establishment was very hard to get into. He'd been at Cambridge. He'd been a real political activist for quite a long time. And he couldn't break into Westminster, which is where he wanted to be. I used to think of it very much like a penguin huddle. and somebody needs to open the huddle to let you in. And I thought Andy really had what it took. And so one Sunday lunch, I was sitting around with my stepmother, Tessa, and Tessa said she needed a new parliamentary researcher.

11:39And I immediately said, I've got just the chat for you. Lo and behold, he went along for a few interviews and he got the job.

11:57I hadn't met Andy because my very long-standing friend, sadly deceased, Tessa Jowell, employed Andy as a researcher. And I realised when Andy came into Parliament in 2001 that he was going to go places. This is David Blunkett, who served as Tony Blair's Work and Pension Secretary, Education Secretary and Home Secretary. It was in the Home Office that Burnham came to work for him. And one of the starting points was to be a parliamentary private secretary. And the job of the PPS is to watch your back. It's to be there in the commons, picking up when people are unhappy, when there's going to be a rebellion against a particular policy, feedback when things are going well, alerting you and being your voice as well, standing up for you and making sure that people get the messages.

12:50So it's a real foundation, a grounding in parliamentary politics. And are there any memories that really stick with you of your time working closely with him? He has a sense of humour, which is always very helpful. He could do the glad-handing very well indeed, because he's very comfortable, as they say, in his own skin and easy to get on with. So that made it very easy. He used to come to our team meetings and we were dealing with some of the really big issues at the time. There'd been the attack on the World Trade Centre and beyond. That led to enormous emphasis on security and intelligence.

13:32And of course, as the Secretary of State for the Home Office, I was in charge of MI5. So there was a lot of learning to be done by all of us. And Andy Burnham was part of that. After Gordon Brown replaced Tony Blair as Prime Minister in 2007, Burnham was rapidly promoted up the ranks. He served as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in the midst of the financial crash and then was promoted to Culture Secretary. Honorable Andy Burnham, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. It was in that job where he faced what he now says was a pivotal moment in his political career. Today, as the Prime Minister has asked me to do that...

14:10He turned up to an event to commemorate 20 years since the Hillsborough football disaster. that 96 fellow football supporters who died will never be forgotten. And was booed and heckled. And he asked us to think at this time. Prompting him to commission an inquiry into the deadly crush. I first had contact with Burnham in 2009, when he'd been promoted to health secretary. Ever the loyal Guardian reader, he'd read that I'd been investigating child abduction cases, and rang me up out of the blue to flag the case of one of his constituents, whose daughter had been abducted to Libya. He ended up flying to Tripoli to negotiate the little girl's return to Britain.

14:51In 2010, Labour lost the election and Gordon Brown stood down. Burnham threw his hat in the ring to replace him as leader. Andy Burnham, why does your campaign have all the hallmarks of a slow-motion car crash? Thanks very much. I think it's building very nicely. Thank you very much, Andrew. I've got CLPs around the country. He stood on a platform of aspirational socialism. A phrase you haven't heard bandied about much during the new Labour era I mean you launched your campaign, it was unnoticed when you launched it And it's been pretty unnoticed since Well I don't accept that, I mean I've put the biggest policy idea on the table in this He's often been accused of shape-shifting, being hard to pin down politically There's that joke which is often rolled out A Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walk into a bar and the barman says hello Andy Andy, when you worked with him 20 years ago, how would you have described his politics?

15:45And do you think that they've changed? I don't think he's a shifter. I've heard people say it, but they've often said it on the back of having met somebody who claimed that they'd once met Andy. By the way, the joke's a very funny one, but it's about the recognition of Andy Burnham as opposed to other politicians. So I think we should take that with a good pinch of salt. all of us reflect, all of us change our minds over a period of time. Burnham, of course, did not become leader in 2010. Ed Miliband did. But after Miliband lost the 2015 election, Burnham stood once again to replace him. And at the start, at least, he was seen as the left's choice.

16:28So I remember Andy was the left's preferred candidate from the start. We were all planning to swing behind Andy at that particular point in time. This is Rebecca Long-Bailey, a young socialist who had been newly elected as MP for Salford and Eccles. And then we had the infamous welfare vote in Parliament, where the party at the time had asked us to abstain on the vote, which was basically going to bring in terrible cuts, you know, that were going to impact our communities quite badly. And some of us decided to vote against. Andy at the time, you know, he followed the party line and abstained. And then eventually that Jeremy put himself forward, which resulted in a lot of the left then swinging in behind Jeremy.

17:11But I think had it not been for that welfare vote, we probably could have seen Andy being the leader far sooner. Did you get a sense when he was still in Parliament last time that he was fully signed up to the Corbyn vision of Britain? Yeah, I think Andy Burnham was always and still is Labour. You know, he'll work with whichever leaders in power. And I think that's because, like a lot of Labour politicians, he's always swung behind the leader of the time and had his own views about what they've got wrong and what they've got right and all of the rest of it. And that can be difficult as well, because then when you do that and you don't speak out vocally sometimes on key issues and you're always supportive of the leader, then it creates the impression that you're in support of what's being done as well.

18:02So it comes at a great cost sometimes to be that collaborative.

18:20When Burnham announced in 2016 that he planned to leave Westminster to run as Greater Manchester's first ever mayor, I was pretty suspicious. Some people might look at your candidacy as the ultimate proof that those in the highest echelon of Labour do not truly believe we're going to win the general election in 2020. And it's you thinking, right, OK, I don't want to be in opposition for another term. I'm going to go for this job instead. No, I mean, I would say, in fact, precisely the opposite. That interview was in April 2016, two months before the Brexit referendum. And he said something that seems quite prescient now.

18:58I think there is a concern that may even be kind of brought on by the European referendum that you know Labour is losing its its connection its grip with its traditional supporters you know if you do have a London-centric approach to politics it's not surprising that over time people just hear that that perspective through the national media and feel that people aren't really addressing the concerns that matter to them and I kind of I'm worried actually about where Labour stands now in the north. Burnham went on to become Greater Manchester's inaugural mayor in 2017. Therefore I declare that Andy Burnham is duly elected as the mayor of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.

19:37But he was not the favourite candidate of some local politicians when he first returned north. Richard Lees, who'd been the leader of Manchester City Council since 1996, was unimpressed and didn't vote for him to become Labour's candidate. There were three strong candidates. I thought the other candidates were better. He had not been very enthusiastic about some aspects of devolution a couple of years previously when we were looking at health devolution. But I think Andy had looked at what had happened in Greater Manchester since 2011 and I think I'd recognised that there's something a bit special going on here.

20:12And it did offer a really quite serious alternative to a life in Westminster that he perhaps wasn't enjoying very much. As I remember it, Leith didn't really hide his disdain for Burnham in the early days. So I was surprised when Burnham asked him to be his number two. He asked me fairly soon after the election if I was willing to be deputy mayor, if I'd keep the economic portfolio, which I'd held since 2012. And I said I would be happy to do that. And I take that as an indicator that Andy wasn't interested in old battles. He wanted to get things done. And what were your impressions of him in those early weeks?

20:52Did you get a sense of him thinking, oh God, what have I done? Why have I left Westminster? And now I'm going to sit through all these boring local authority meetings. Or did you get a sense of somebody who was finding renewed kind of vigour and enthusiasm for politics? Well, he certainly wasn't worried about sitting through lots of boring local authority meetings because he arranged more of them. Did he? He was very keen to work and engage with, particularly the leaders of local authorities, who were his cabinet. And one of the conversations I had with Andy very early on was that he had a cabinet that he didn't appoint, that he couldn't sack and he couldn't tell them what to do.

21:27What Lisa's referring to here is a system that he and the other nine Greater Manchester leaders had crowbarred into the devolution deal that they struck with George Osborne. then the Tory Chancellor, which meant that the mayor could do almost nothing without their approval. To be fair to him, he adopted that new way of consensual working, working in partnership. But very early on, Andy clearly stood for election with a manifesto. And it's absolutely clear that the manifesto was law, that he was going to do everything possible to deliver. I've come to the city centre to speak to people who've been here overnight sleeping rough.

22:09I promised to do something about it and that's why I'm here. And one of his big pledges in that first manifesto was to end rough sleeping in Greater Manchester. What did you make of that pledge when you made it? Even Andy came to accept that in the way it was framed within his manifesto, it was a laudable thing to want to do, but it was not deliverable. I would give Andy credit for this, that in accepting that, he didn't give up on doing something to reduce the need for rough sleeping. So he came to the conclusion, OK, if I can't end rough sleeping, I can create circumstances where nobody has to rough sleep.

22:49And that's where Bed Every Night came from. So he's stuck really with the commitment he made and delivered it to the extent it could be delivered. I think three weeks after he became mayor, there was the Manchester Arena attack. And eyewitnesses say that they heard a large bang, the sound of a bang. 22 people were killed, including lots of children, by a suicide bomber at an Ariana Grande concert. What do you remember about how Burnham responded in the immediate aftermath and in the days, weeks afterwards? I think, like all of us, he was devastated. We did a press conference together around 6am the next morning, and it was a difficult press conference to do.

23:38After our darkest of nights, Manchester is today waking up to the most difficult of dawns. But I think probably the biggest element of Andy's response, He demonstrated, I think, a remarkable level of empathy to the victims and the family of the victims. At some point on the morning after the bond, he and I were in a car going out to police headquarters. The city council had already started planning the vigil that took place later that day. And in the car, I turned to Andy and said, and we're not going to have any political speeches. You might think he's going to bridle against that. He just said, no, I think that's right.

24:21He was very sensitive that this was really about the victims. This wasn't about politicians exploiting it. I was at the vigil that night and I remember tears rolling down my face. You had people in Man United shirts hugging people in city shirts. And no politician spoke. Instead, there was a poem from Tony Walsh. This is the place in the north-west of England. It's ace, it's the best And the songs that we sing from the stands from our band Set the whole planet shaking Our inventions are legends There's nowt we can't make To say that was an emotional moment is a bit of an understatement really Always remember Never forget Forever Manchester Choose Love Manchester, thank you