Five years ago, I had a phone call with Andy Burnham, who had recently been re-elected for a second term as mayor of Greater Manchester. Burnham’s victory in the 2021 mayoral election was widely predicted, but the scale of it was staggering: he had won not just in every borough of the city region but in every council ward. The deep red electoral map proclaimed that Greater Manchester was now Burnhamland.
Our call wasn’t supposed to be about Burnham, per se. I was writing a profile for The Mill about Sir Richard Leese, the outgoing leader of Manchester City Council, who was stepping down after 25 years running the city, and Burnham had agreed to contribute his thoughts. I wondered if the call would be awkward. The two men had known each other for 20 years but had a difficult relationship.
“We’ve had our moments,” Burnham said, with what we both knew to be considerable understatement. After Burnham became mayor, he had asked Leese to be his deputy, but the region’s two most influential figures were odd bedfellows, and they regularly clashed.
“I am different in style, I guess,” Burnham said, when I asked him to explain what the difference was. Burnham admitted that as his first mayoral term wore on, Leese would accuse him of bringing in his “Westminster ways,” — like announcing things without getting proper sign off. “So, there was a bit of a culture clash.” Leese, he said, “Brings a rigour to what he does, which…” he paused. “I wouldn’t say I lack, but I am a more instinctive politician, in that I will have a feel for something.”
Who is Andy Burnham and what kind of prime minister would he be? I’ve been covering him up close in Manchester for six years now, a period during which few people south of Stockport have cared about the answer to that question. Now, Burnham is running in what might be the most consequential parliamentary by-election in British history, with the chance to grab the prize he’s coveted for his entire career, and suddenly every man and his dog wants to know.
The national media, which rarely covers Manchester in any depth, has this week produced a firehose of podcasts and essays about Burnham and ‘Manchesterism’, his supposed political programme. There are, broadly, two stories being told. In one telling, he’s the saviour Labour needs: a man with a radical analysis of what ails the country and a playbook for change that has been forged and perfected in Manchester. In another, he’s a cynical chameleon – a master communicator who lacks substance and will say anything to advance his career.
Both analyses, I think, miss what Burnham’s great strength really is. And neither deals with what may prove his fatal weakness.
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