Andy Burnham, former mayor of Greater Manchester, was elected leader of Britain’s ruling Labour Party on Friday, completing the final step before becoming the country’s seventh prime minister in a decade.
Burnham will be invited to form a government on Monday. At a ‘special conference’ on Friday, Burnham said he was ready to take over the post and would work to offer hope to people in “forgotten places everywhere”, Reuters news agency reported.
Starmer had announced last month that he would resign as the Prime Minister of Britain after two years in office. He is expected to formally tender his resignation to King Charles III, following which the monarch will ask Burnham to form a government.
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Who is ‘King of the North’ Andy Burnham?
Born in 1970 into a working-class family in Aintree, near Liverpool, Burnham grew up in the village of Culceth. It was not far from Ashton-in-Makerfield, a town in Greater Manchester, the county that he was a mayor of from 2017 to 2026. He joined the Labour Party as a teenager, before going on to study English at the University of Cambridge, AFP reported
Now a Labour MP from Makerfield, 56-year-old Andy Burnham is seen as politically left-leaning, which has been a traditional Labour stance before Starmer came along and tried to position himself as centre-right to counter Reform UK’s growing popularity.
Burnham, who paid tribute to Starmer days before he replaces him, is seen as the latter’s biggest political rival, and had earned the moniker of ‘King of the North’ with reference to the popular Jon Snow character in “Game of Thrones”. This is seen as a sign of respect for his fierce backing for northern England, and for its working-class culture and heritage. It projects an image that he’s not part of the London political establishment.
Burnham has since 2017 witnessed three sizable mayoral victories. Before his mayoral stint, he was a part of the cabinet of Prime Minister Gordon Brown from 2007 to 2010, and thereafter ran twice for Labour Party leadership in 2010 and 2015. However, he lost on both occasions.
Burnham’s political reinvention
Burnham’s nine-year stint as the mayor of Greater Manchester has seen a transformation in him, not only in terms of his look but also his policies and standing. The ending of his 16-year tenure in Parliament yielded a more polished performer and a sleeker look, with suits and ties being replaced by a smart-casual look, often paired with sneakers.
Internally too, Burnham took himself from being a former government minister to political outsider, AFP reported. “I think that he is able to project himself as a normal bloke in a period in politics where a lot of politicians look very odd or very boring or very kind of systematised,” Joshi Herrmann, founder of Manchester-based start-up Mill Media said. Speaking of his religious beliefs, Burnham had told Huffington Post earlier that he was a “Catholic by upbringing” but “not particularly religious now”.
