I FIRST came across Andy Burnham in 2009 at Anfield, where he was addressing Liverpool fans on the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster. He was booed for two minutes solid as he was trying to address them on behalf of the New Labour government in which he was Secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport. The crowd in the Kop did not want expressions of sympathy. They drowned him out with the chant of “Justice for the 96”.
Five years later, he was back for the 25th anniversary. This time, he was met with a banner on the Kop which read “Thank You Andy Burnham.” He had not been cowed by the booing. He had been chastened — and galvanised into action, orchestrating the release of unpublished official documents relating to the tragedy.
I was unimpressed with Mr Burnham until that point. He had seemed a political weathervane: a Blairite, turned Brownite, turned Millibander, and, later, even a Corbynite. He displayed a lack of consistency in the two Labour leadership contests he fought and lost. But I learned to see his politics differently when, a decade ago, he became the Mayor of Greater Manchester, the place that has been my home for more than 20 years.
During the Burnham years, the Manchester economy has grown more than twice as fast as the rest of the UK. The boom was started under the previous local-authority regime of Richard Lees and Howard Bernstein, who revitalised the city centre, bringing people back to live there. Under Mr Burnham, the regeneration has continued apace, with massive incoming investment and improvements to the city infrastructure. The new Mayor ended the chaos in the privatised transport system, rationalising the bus network, opening new tram lines, and improving co-ordination with local railways. He built partnerships with private businesses and created incentives for investors.
And he has learned on the job. Take the tricky topic of welfare reform. Talking to ordinary people on benefits in Manchester, he discovered that the system was filled with disincentives to work. People very often needed support before sanctions, he found, and Sir Keir Starmer made the mistake of trying to be punitive first.
As Health Secretary, Mr Burnham wanted to find ways to integrate the NHS and social-care systems. The problem was that one was run by the national government and the other by local authorities. In Manchester, a £6-billion experiment brought together health and social care under a system known as Devo Manc, which has produced incremental gains. Life expectancy has increased in Greater Manchester at a time when it has declined throughout the rest of England.
Mr Burnham, who was brought up as a Roman Catholic, describes himself as “not particularly religious”, though he sent his three children to a Catholic school. But he says: “Catholic social teaching underpins my politics.” He uses moral rather than ideological language, framing politics in terms of fairness, dignity, and belonging.
His politics can be “adaptive”, in the words of Lord O’Neill of Gatley, an economic adviser to Conservative and Labour governments. But Mr Burnham has never wavered in his vision that there is “a different way of doing things than how they do them in Whitehall”.
His is a politics of place as much as party. He made common cause with the Conservative Chancellor George Osborne in promoting the idea of a Northern Powerhouse; but he took on the Tory government over the HS2 fiasco and the decision to impose harsher Covid restrictions on Manchester than on London — a stand for which the media dubbed him the “King of the North”. His strategy of building a recognisable regional identity has gained him cross-party votes in successive mayoral elections.
Perhaps his biggest achievement has gone unheralded. Without fanfare, Mr Burnham has held together the ten very disparate local authorities that make up Greater Manchester, from boroughs of different needs and political persuasions, many resentful of the dominance of the city centre, all jockeying for position.
Where Labour leaders such as Sir Keir and Jeremy Corbyn surrounded themselves with loyalists and did not listen to those they disagreed with, Mr Burnham has been able to pull together people with differing interests into a coherent whole. He has done it not through coercion or whipping, but by listening and discovering enough common ground to get everyone behind a decision and then take action on it.
Were he to become Prime Minister, that is a skill that would serve him well — and his party and country, too.