Andy Burnham is just Starmer in northern drag

Labour’s prince over the water is the embodiment of the very political class that voters are desperate to eject. Spiked 12/05/26 Are there two other words that better capture just how lost the Labour Party is than ‘Andy Burnham’?

Yes, that Andy Burnham – the long-lashed, Blair-era frontbencher who crashed and burned in two successive Labour leadership contests (in 2010 and 2015), before decamping from parliament to become mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017. At the time, he described life in Westminster as ‘poisonous’ and a ‘living nightmare’. As incredible as it may seem, a party that once roundly rejected Burnham as its leader is now touting him as Britain’s next prime minister. Inside the Labour Party and among its media sympathisers, this hitherto unremarkable career politician is being presented as the answer to their party’s and the nation’s woes. It doesn’t even matter that he is not actually an MP at the moment. With the Parliamentary Labour Party finally set to evict Keir Starmer from his Downing Street squat, Burnham remains the clear favourite to replace him. As one Labour MP told the Guardian last month, ‘It’s Andy or bust – nothing else works’. The ambitious Burnham clearly agrees. While he spent much of last autumn publicly flirting with the possibility of launching a leadership challenge – something Starmer himself tried to prevent when he and his supporters on Labour’s National Executive Committee effectively blocked Burnham from standing in February’s Gorton and Denton by-election. That seems to have only stalled rather than floored Burnham. According to reports, he has been quietly preparing some sort of manifesto, and has identified several possible seats in Greater Manchester and Merseyside where a possible by-election could allow him a route back to parliament. The Labourite calls for the so-called King of the North to head south have only intensified since Labour’s disastrous showing in Thursday’s local elections. Indeed, just hours after Starmer delivered his AI-generated ‘reset’ speech on Monday, former deputy PM Angela Rayner was busy backing Burnham, telling the Communications Workers Union that her north-west comrade should be allowed to stand as an MP. It’s desperate stuff. Burnham may well be more likeable than his rivals for Starmer’s crown, from the smarmy, Mandelson-lite charms of Wes Streeting to the achingly self-righteous gobster Rayner herself. But what, beyond the vibes, does Burnham offer? This is not a fresh-face, fresh-ideas candidate. The 56-year-old, Aintree-born Burnham is very much a product of the New Labour years. Having started working as a researcher for the Labour Party not long after graduating from Cambridge, he became MP for Leigh in 2001, aged just 31. He then rose from a junior health minister in 2005, via the Treasury, to become secretary of state for culture, media and sport in 2008. While he now poses to some extent as a political outsider, ostentatiously playing on his northern roots, he was the very embodiment of the professional political class – a character forged in the lifeless, technocratic New Labour machine. He was managerialist in ethos, gently ‘progressive’ in posture and bled a centrist pink. He put his name forward for the Labour leadership in 2010, but scored a meagre eight per cent of the vote in the first round and was promptly eliminated in the second. He tried again in 2015, but amid criticism from the unions for his New Labour-ish trappings, he was easily outflanked by the then the insurgent middle-class left and its poster-OAP, Jeremy Corbyn. That was Burnham then. And there’s little that’s different about Burnham now. Yes, he was re-elected as Greater Manchester mayor with a healthy 63 per cent of the vote in 2024. Polls suggest his personal approval ratings are higher than Labour’s other contenders. But what about the substance? As mayor, he has, to his credit, taken parts of Manchester’s bus network back under local control, keeping ticket prices low, and has made a decent fist of tackling homelessness. But there’s not much more to Burnham. Politically, he is associated with a left-of-centre, Corbyn-lite Labour faction called, tellingly enough, Mainstream, which seems to be advocating little more than tax-and-spend wealth redistribution. He’s woke-adjacent when it suits, and wouldn’t resist the culture-warring tendencies of the political and cultural establishment. There is nothing to indicate that this soft-technocrat, shot through with the prejudices and worldview of a political class now in its twilight years, is capable of rising to the profound challenges we as a nation and a society face today. The productivity crisis that has crippled the economy since the 2008 financial crash is deepening. Over 20 per cent (or 9.12million) of people aged 16 to 64 are economically inactive. Wages and living standards continue to fall. A well-founded sense of decline, hopelessness and real peril now haunts the lives of millions of people. Meanwhile, the public realm continues to degrade. Infrastructure, be it energy or transport, is dilapidated and expensive. Housing is in painfully short supply. Deeper still, the social contract is being torn apart by high levels of immigration, multicultural ideology, and a British state that reveals its incapacity on a daily basis. So what are Burnham’s answers? A slow-motion effort to rejoin the EU, some sort of wealth tax, a vague plan to re-nationalise some public utilities and to expand the welfare state. And of course, a staunch commitment to Net Zero. This, in practice, is no different to what we’ve got in power at the moment. A technocratic state, happy to immiserate many in the name of climate change, and willing to decommission vast swathes of the working class under the guise of welfare. All the while, Britain will cleave ever closer to the dysfunctional, anti-democratic EU in a marriage of unhappy, unblissful decline. This is Starmer’s government in northern drag, the same hopeless managerialist band, but with a more genial frontman. His soft ‘progressive’ poses and his welfarist gestures may well warm the cockles of Labour’s public-sector and middle-class support base, keen as they are to reassure themselves that they’re the Good People. It may even entice back some of the affluent progressives currently expressing their ‘virtue’ by voting Green. But it will do nothing to improve the lives or address the demands of millions of working-class Brits who want more control over their lives and communities, and who voted for Brexit, and now largely back Reform UK. This is not just an Andy Burnham problem, of course. This is a Labour problem, too. It’s the problem of a party whose historical roots in Britain’s working-class communities have long since withered. A party that speaks not for the majority of people, but against them, in tones alternately patronising and contemptuous. A party that, like the orthodoxies of the managerialist era to which it’s wedded, is now passing away before our eyes. Burnham will no more solve Labour’s problems than a fresh coat of polish can burnish a turd.