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“This is a last chance to change,” said Andy Burnham in his first speech as Labour leader on Friday. He was referring to his Party, but those who know him saw a delicious irony in that phrase.
Because change is a word that sums up Burnham’s attitude to his politics. His doubters see him as a political chameleon, changing his colours to fit the political mood.
He wants to be seen as an outsider, riding to the country’s rescue from his northern stronghold, yet most of his working life has been spent in Westminster.
Burnham has allied himself at various times with Sir Tony Blair, David Blunkett, Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn. His views on everything from Europe to ID cards to Israel have been kept in a state of flux, ready to be moulded around the most expedient policy of the time.
He literally changes his appearance to appeal to any given audience, ditching his Westminster uniform of designer suits for football-supporter chic as Manchester’s mayor (and now back again).
Even his sense of regional identity is a hybrid: he plays up both his Liverpudlian and his Mancunian credentials, meaning he can claim to be “from” both cities, as well as his new constituency which lies in between.
His detractors claim he has no real views, other than the view that he should be the prime minister.
After fulfilling his ultimate ambition, he will no longer be able to hitch himself to whichever views his leader espouses. He will need to tell the country what he believes in – and this time he will have to stick to it.
One former Labour minister who knows him well says: “Fundamentally, Andy Burnham is centre-Left in the broadest sense of the word. He’s going to have to come out and tell us who he is, politically.
“Everybody thinks they know who he is as a person, and that is that he’s this well-raised, nice boy who’s kind to old ladies and cares about people, and he’s good with people. That’s his actual personality.”
His “political persona”, however, is less clear cut, says the former minister, despite the fact that he’s replacing a Prime Minister guilty of the same charge.
“One of the main problems we’ve had with Keir Starmer is that people can paste anything onto him, whatever they like or dislike.
“He obviously made the people of Makerfield feel that he’s there for them, and he’s going to have to come out and do that for the country as well as the rest of the Labour Party very fast, because the vast majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party have never met the man.”
Burnham’s talent for reinvention emerged early in his life. Born in Liverpool (he likes to be seen jogging in his Everton FC shirt), Burnham went to St Aelred’s Roman Catholic high school in Newton-le-Willows. His father, Roy, was a telephone engineer and his mother, Eileen, a receptionist, which placed him on the borderline of working class and lower middle class. When Burnham was young his family moved to Culcheth, near Warrington, almost exactly halfway between Liverpool and Manchester.
He knew from an early age where his political sympathies lay, and joined the Labour Party when he was 15. As a teenager, he was “a mid-80s scally”, he said, though his entry to Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge to study English in 1988 suggests a rather more strait-laced, bookish child. By the time he left with a 2:1 he had a Dutch partner and later wife, Marie-France van Heel, with whom he has three children.
Rather than following the outsider’s route of returning to his northern home, Burnham headed to London to work for Baltic Publishing, which produced trade magazines for the transport industry, but his passion was for politics.
In 1994 the journalist Eleanor Mills, who worked with him at Baltic and went on to join The Sunday Times, recommended him to her stepmother Tessa Jowell, the then shadow women’s minister, to work as a researcher in her office. With a single bound, Burnham secured his foothold in Westminster. He had become, by any definition, an insider.
In 1998 he jumped on to the traditional conveyor belt for wannabe MPs by securing a job as a special adviser. At the age of 28 he was being paid to give the benefit of his wisdom to Chris Smith, now Lord Smith of Finsbury, the then culture secretary. When the 2001 general election came around he was handed the safe Labour seat of Leigh in Greater Manchester, having been encouraged by Blair’s political secretary, Sally Morgan, to stand for selection there.
In his maiden speech he identified his ambition as giving Parliament “an authentic voice from my home area in the years to come” and flexed his northern muscles by talking of the mills and mines that once powered the local economy in Leigh and of the success of Leigh Centurions rugby league club. But Burnham’s personal ambitions were always paramount. In 2003 he was appointed parliamentary private secretary to David Blunkett, the then home secretary, putting him on the first rung of the ladder towards a fully fledged government role.
Under Blair, Burnham endorsed the merits of the free-market economy (summed up by Lord Mandelson’s famous comment that Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes”) but he now claims he was never in favour of Blairism. Responding to Sir Tony’s 6,000-word essay on the future of Labour last month, he suggested that the Blair government had failed to address inequality and “people don’t think the centre has delivered for them”.
Lord Blunkett was more of an interventionist than Blair, and those who know Burnham say that, in private at least, his views aligned more with his new master.
Blunkett was also an advocate for identity cards and in 2005, Burnham got his first job in government as the minister responsible for implementing the Identity Cards Act 2006, which had been Blunkett’s baby. ID cards were a Tory concept, conceived by Sir John Major, yet Burnham described them as “a tool [that] will help create a more secure society”. As recently as last year he admitted “I was very pro, actually, I thought there was a real case for it,” but he changed his mind again when Sir Keir Starmer planned his own digital ID scheme. Reform UK is opposed to digital ID, which chimed with voters in Makerfield, so Burnham has now decided the “opportunity cost” of trying to introduce them is too high. With the first act of his premiership, the scheme has been cancelled, the government claiming the savings will pay for the scrapping of VAT on domestic electricity bills from October 1.
Blair reshuffled him to health, as a junior minister, in 2006, and when Gordon Brown became prime minister in 2007 he made Burnham his chief secretary to the Treasury, his first Cabinet post. Burnham the Blairite was now Burnham the Brownite.
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Under Brown he served as culture secretary and then health secretary, pivoting further away from the Blairite free-market policies of allowing private healthcare providers to treat NHS patients and favouring in-house NHS services. “Far too much change is imposed or handed down” leading to a “disempowerment” of local staff, Burnham declared soon after Blair’s departure.
It was while arguing for the merits of NHS provision that he resisted demands for a public inquiry into excess deaths at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust, preferring to order a less extensive independent inquiry instead.
His opponents, perhaps unfairly, like to contrast his reluctance to launch a public inquiry into the ongoing Mid Staffs scandal with his zeal for a fresh inquiry into the Hillsborough disaster, which had happened 20 years earlier when 97 Liverpool fans were crushed to death, and which was effectively apolitical.
When Labour lost the 2010 election and Brown resigned, Burnham stood in the resulting leadership election, coming fourth behind Ed Miliband, David Miliband and Ed Balls, and only marginally outperforming Diane Abbott. Uniquely among the five candidates, and rather oddly for a man who claims to be “soft left”, he failed to win the backing of a single trade union.
He said at the time that: “We can never again have the People’s Party run by the London Dinner Party circuit,” which raised eyebrows among some who had worked with him in Westminster for 16 years, though his insistence that “it’s time for some of the voices of the past to clear the stage” has aged even less well, given his eagerness to return to centre stage now.
The former Labour minister said: “He has successfully played the outsider role in every government he has served under. But really, he’s not [an outsider]. Maybe you can be two things, he can feel all those things about Westminster not serving the people, and acting like an outsider, but he is very much a Westminster operator.
“I’m as intrigued as you to get to know him in this current guise.”
Under Ed Miliband he became shadow education secretary, then after Labour’s disastrous 2015 general election defeat he stood for the leadership again, arguing in favour of a 50p tax rate and renationalising the railways – seen at the time as a desperate bit of shape-shifting to win back party members attracted to the more radical offering of his opponent, Jeremy Corbyn. During the campaign he publicly admonished himself for some of his New Labour sins, saying: “At times we did get too close to big business ... I fully sign up to the New Labour message of the early years that we need to be pro-business to support our aspirations for equality and public services, but there is a danger that if you become too close you are unable to disentangle what are vested interests from the national interest.”
His campaign took a hit when it emerged that the man of the people was claiming £17,000 a year from the taxpayer to rent a London flat despite owning another flat within walking distance of Parliament (although he didn’t break any rules). He was annihilated by Corbyn in the ballot of Labour Party members, winning just 19 per cent of the vote compared with Corbyn’s 59 per cent.
Once again, it was time for Burnham to morph into a new version of himself – this time as a Corbynista. He accepted the role of shadow home secretary on Corbyn’s front bench, lending valuable experience to the hopeless Corbyn project.
One former Brownite who worked with Burnham said: “There’s nothing wrong with switching allegiance from Blair to Brown, lots of people did, but Burnham tries to make a virtue out of the fact that he has been loyal to every Labour leader he has served under, and when that includes Jeremy Corbyn it’s not something to be proud of.”
An ally of Corbyn is also unconvinced by him, saying: “I see him as Keir Starmer 2.0, making a lot of the same mistakes Labour made in the run up to 2024, but more comfortable in casual clothes and his own skin.
“I expect it’ll take a little longer than Starmer for him to be seen the same way, but fundamentally, you can’t deal with contradictions that are generating squeezed living standards for tens of millions of people with vibes alone.”
In 2017 Burnham gave up his seat to stand for, and win, the mayoralty of Greater Manchester, a position he has held ever since, and it was time for another reinvention.
In 2015, when he was running for the Labour leadership, he told GQ that he liked to wear suits by Armani and Jaeger (aware of how that might affect people’s perception of him as a self-proclaimed “aspirational socialist”, he quickly spluttered that he bought them off the peg and in the sales).
But after his election as Manchester mayor, the “King of the North” – now selling himself as an outsider – ditched the suits and swapped them for jeans, bomber jackets and Paul Smith T-shirts, usually in black.
He even donated one of his worker jackets to the People’s History Museum in Manchester, leaving in the pocket a ripped-up copy of a speech he delivered in 2020 telling the Government that Manchester would not accept any more Covid restrictions. There could hardly be a more calculated attempt to curate self-image.
He coined the term Manchesterism for his brand of politics as mayor, which he described as using economic growth to benefit communities and rejecting the idea of trickle-down economics. Yet he used a £1bn fund of taxpayers’ money to help property developers build skyscraper apartment blocks that delivered almost no affordable housing. The use of the funds is currently the subject of a court case brought by a rival developer.
More shifts were to come. When he stood for re-election in 2021 his manifesto promised a Clean Air Zone in Manchester, with the most polluting vehicles charged £60 per day to enter it. Unsurprisingly, it proved to be wildly unpopular, so Burnham ditched the policy (after reportedly spending £104m on infrastructure, which he denies), and blamed it on Boris Johnson.
His views on foreign affairs are also fluid. When he ran for leader in 2015 he praised Israel as “a democracy that has a long history of protecting minorities and promoting civil rights” but by 2024 he had decided the Government should recognise Palestinian statehood “without further delay or equivocation”.
More recently, his views on the EU have squirmed from one direction to the other. At last year’s Labour Party conference he said: “I want to rejoin the EU.” This was not the message the voters of Makerfield (who backed Reform in droves in May’s local elections) wanted to hear, so all of a sudden his position was that: “I am not proposing that the UK considers rejoining the EU.”
“The problem he has got is that he has over-promised, he has massively raised expectations, and he is not going to be able to fulfil them,” says the former Brownite minister. “I think people will be even angrier with him than they have been with Starmer when they realise he can’t deliver.”
When the Makerfield by-election came around, Burnham avoided mentioning which party he was standing for, relying on the slogan “Andy For Us”. What did that mean? Lord O’Neill, the crossbench peer now acting as an economic adviser to Burnham, seemed as baffled as everyone else, when he told BBC Radio 4 that the Makerfield result “looks to me a pretty big endorsement of whatever it is that Andy stands for”.
The people of Manchester will think that “whatever it is that Andy stands for” includes more money and power being devolved to the regions, but will he change his mind if he enters No 10 and has to find money for defence, the NHS, public-sector pay rises and the rest?
In his first speech as Labour leader on Friday, he said he would fix social care and return water, energy, housing and transport to “public control”, having previously suggested he will spend more money on defence too. These are all big ticket items that must be dealt with in Whitehall.
At the same time he has promised to shift power away from Westminster and give it to the regions, showering what will presumably be billions of pounds on Labour mayors to spend as they wish.
Burnham cannot simultaneously be a northern rebel and a head of government. As prime minister he will have to choose and, finally, the real Andy Burnham will be forced to show himself.
This article was first published on 20 June 2026 and has since been updated.
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