Andy Burnham's Improbable Ascent to Prime Minister and Looming Challenges

It all sounded feasible but improbable. A few days after Labour’s disastrous performance in local and devolved elections in May, one of Andy Burnham’s allies confidently forecast for me the sequence of events that would convey the then mayor of Greater Manchester to No 10. A friendly MP would surrender a parliamentary seat. Keir Starmer would be persuaded to resign. Other leadership contenders would see the futility of resistance to the Burnham bandwagon. It would roll, unchallenged, up Downing Street. It was a plan with many moving parts, and a lot that could go wrong.

That it all worked as predicted took more than luck. The Makerfield byelection was winnable for Labour only with the right candidate and a strong campaign. The scale of Burnham’s victory generated momentum sufficient to push other obstacles aside. The “Andy” brand was stronger than his party’s logo.

Crucially for Labour MPs, Burnham was the author of his own success. Few said that of Starmer. He was the frontman for his 2024 general election triumph, not its mastermind. He didn’t like campaigning, wasn’t comfortable with it and outsourced the messy business of political organisation to others. He thought the size of his majority afforded him space to govern without having to keep explaining himself to the public or cluttering his schedule with party management. But he also seemed unsure of what he wanted to achieve with all that power.

The contrast with Burnham is clear. Labour MPs find it reassuring to be led by a man who knows how to plan and who actually likes politics. The new prime minister is a vocal disparager of Westminster and its dysfunctional ways, but he isn’t a stranger to party machination. Unlike his predecessor, he doesn’t abhor discussion of ideas. Starmer, as one of his more loyal ministers once told me, “could only ever speak politics as a second language”.

Burnham’s native fluency is an asset when it comes to navigating the labyrinth of Labour factions. It also makes him a better public communicator. The quality generally recognised as “authenticity” is not, as often construed, a gift that distinguishes natural leaders from “professional politicians”. It is professional performance at the highest level, so intuitive that personality fills the screen while calculation remains imperceptible.

Nigel Farage is famously good at this. Burnham isn’t bad, although the comparison is unfair. The new prime minister’s style has to be more ponderous because his words are freighted with governing responsibility and liable to be mangled in transmission by a mostly hostile press. The Reform UK leader enjoys the levity of style that flows from indifference to consequence – saying anything one day, denying it the next – and from confidence that his message will be amplified by indulgent media.

Or that is the service Farage has come to expect. He has hated the scrutiny of his personal and party finances in recent weeks. Questions about the probity of his donors and the legality of their munificence have turned his grinning bonhomie to a peevish snarl. The attempt to shut down the inquiry by calling a byelection in his Clacton constituency, framing it as a local plebiscite on his anti-establishment credentials, has backfired.

The refusal of mainstream parties to field candidates leaves Farage shooing away pantomime challengers in an empty arena. The spectacle is demeaning for a man whose outsized influence in British politics is derived from adeptness at commanding attention, especially on the campaign trail. He deployed his favourite weapon to get out of a jam, and it fired blanks.

The opportunity this presents to Burnham goes beyond the simple advantage of an opponent being distracted. The Clacton circus captures the raw cynicism of Reform UK’s political model. The party feeds on antagonism and dreads accountability.

Farage reached for the byelection lever because his career is sustained by keeping politics whipped into a perpetual campaign frenzy. The battery of a populist movement needs a steady supply of public rage to stay charged. It cannot allow government any pause in political combat, when seeds of workable policy might have a chance to bear fruit. It has to deny the necessary time lag between inception of a plan and its delivery, filling every moment with the clamour for instant gratification and bitter recrimination.

This is one reason why pragmatic incumbents struggle and ideological oppositions thrive in the digital age. There is no need to wait for an election to mobilise voter discontent when every day online is an angry referendum campaign with the question being whether things are better now than in an ideal world, or better today than they were in a misremembered, mythologised past. The answer is always no.

Burnham seems to understand these constraints. He knows he has to give people some “breathing space” on the cost of living straight away, and that this has to be seen as down payment on more profound improvements in collective wellbeing over time. He needs people to believe he is a man with a 10-year plan and that it is worth waiting to see if it can work.

That leaves a lot of room for things to go wrong. No one is forecasting a sudden economic bonanza. Without one, Burnham’s hints of tax relief and universal social care point to a painful exercise in zero-sum budgeting. Resources will be siphoned from one Whitehall department to another. John Healey, the new chancellor, will buy relief for voters in one area at a cost in fresh disappointment elsewhere. Pleasing one Labour caucus brings dismay to a rival faction.

Labour’s radical left is always on a hair trigger, poised to denounce compromise as betrayal of socialist principle. Now there is also a small but aggrieved band of Starmer loyalists in exile poised to highlight (or relish) missteps and vulnerabilities. Darren Jones, sacked from his role at the Cabinet Office, wasted no time before probing a budget hole in the prime minister’s announcement of a VAT cut on energy bills, supposedly funded by scrapping the digital ID scheme. The Burnham bandwagon will lose momentum quickly if that is a guide to the coming rate of backbench friction.

The new leader needs a united party if he is going to revive wilted confidence that Labour is capable of fulfilling people’s everyday aspirations. Harder still, he has to restore flagging faith in democratic politics as the method. He needs to generate patience in an intemperate age. He has to stretch his meagre ration of goodwill, the honeymoon portion granted to a new prime minister, and make it cover a long period when things will not feel much better. In the era of politics as relentless campaign mania, when attention spans are short and incumbents are an easy target, Burnham must somehow earn voters’ trust and hold their gaze while deferring their gratification. Does he have the rare political talent to pull that off? It sounds improbable, but at least feasible.