During the worst of the covid-19 pandemic, London-based journalists referred semi-jokingly to Andy Burnham as “king of the north”. But the north of England is a bigger and more diverse place than it appears from the capital. The man who is trying to become a Labour mp by winning a difficult by-election in Makerfield and (if he manages that) to dislodge Sir Keir Starmer as prime minister is not simply a northerner. It is better to think of him as the offspring of two great northern metropolises, which are fairly close in distance but very different in culture. Mr Burnham, who grew up between the two places, carries both in him.
Photograph: Mirrorpix (Photograph: Mirrorpix)
The more obvious metropolis is Greater Manchester, where Mr Burnham was an mp between 2001 and 2017, and which he now oversees as mayor of the combined authority. The lingering and not wholly inaccurate stereotype of Manchester is that its people are pragmatic and business-minded. “If the English are held to be a nation entirely of shopkeepers,” wrote the Manchester Guardian in 1857, “Manchester is supposed to be always behind the counter.”
By the time Mr Burnham became mayor in 2017, Manchester’s leaders had perfected the arts of compromise and business hustle. Three men—Graham Stringer, who led Manchester City Council and is now an mp; Sir Richard Leese, who succeeded him as council leader; and Sir Howard Bernstein, the council’s chief executive—had begun to meld the entire metropolis into an economic and political unit. Although just one in five of Greater Manchester’s 2.9m inhabitants lives in the city of Manchester, politicians in the other nine cities and boroughs that make up the metropolis were persuaded to subsume local identities and demands and get behind the Manchester brand. They accepted that what was good for Manchester was good for them.
The leaders of this Labour-dominated metropolis were happy to work with anyone who could benefit them. In the 2010s they got on swimmingly with a Conservative chancellor, George Osborne. “Every time any city council came forward with a smart idea for the budget, it was Manchester,” he said in 2016. Mr Burnham was schooled in this approach. When Boris Johnson, Conservative prime minister from 2019 to 2022, began chuntering vaguely about “levelling up” the poorer regions of Britain, the mayor spotted another opportunity.
Manchester’s bus network had been deregulated and privatised in the 1980s, along with others outside London. If the metropolis were given more power and money, Mr Burnham explained, it could take control of buses and build a London-style integrated transport system. The metropolis should grow richer as a result. It is, the mayor shamelessly argued in 2021, “the most credible plan for levelling up that has yet been presented”. What was good for Manchester was good for the country and for Mr Johnson. Surely the prime minister could not resist such an entreaty. Indeed, he did not.
This pragmatic, somewhat cynical approach has paid off. Greater Manchester has many deep problems, from poverty to poor school-exam results. But gdp per person in the metropolis has grown faster since 2000 than it has in Britain as a whole. Bus franchising seems to have worked: in its first year the number of journeys climbed by 12%. Greater Manchester has fared markedly better than the metropolis around Birmingham, known as the West Midlands Combined Authority. It has also fared better than the other great northern metropolis that seems to feed into Mr Burnham’s approach to politics: Merseyside.
That metropolis has the unbiddable, raucous atmosphere of a port town. If an unkind description of Mancunians is that they are always looking for an angle, an unkind description of Merseysiders is that they are always ready for a fight. In the 1980s Liverpool City Council, which was dominated by extreme left-wingers, set itself squarely against the Conservative government in Westminster. It tried to set an illegal budget, in which spending exceeded receipts, and threatened to sack the city workforce if the government did not bail it out. The rebellion ended in defeat and humiliation.
Mr Burnham is linked to Merseyside by family and football. He supports a Liverpool team (Everton) and has campaigned for the victims of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, in which poor policing at a game led to a crush of Liverpool Football Club supporters and 97 deaths. Although Mr Burnham is nowhere near as foolish or irresponsible as the militant city councillors in the 1980s, he has occasionally shown an appetite for confrontation with more powerful adversaries.
In October 2020, as the national government forced cities including Greater Manchester into strict “tier 3” lockdowns to retard the spread of covid-19, Mr Burnham insisted that the metropolis needed extra money to cope. When it was not forthcoming, he revolted. “This is no way to run the country,” he declared on television. The government was “grinding people down” and acting in a “disgraceful” manner. He lost, inevitably, but won his subjects’ hearts. In the mayoral election the following year, Mr Burnham won all of Greater Manchester’s ten cities and boroughs and 67% of the overall vote. He remains hugely popular in the region.
Man of the people
For a metropolitan mayor, oscillating between compromise and noisy confrontation with Westminster is an excellent approach. England is extremely fiscally and politically centralised for a country of its size. Mayors succeed by raising their profiles, then begging or bullying as much money and power out of central government as they can. They must also keep all the local authorities in their fiefs in line. Much of the local consensus-building work had been done by others before Mr Burnham got the job. But it is to his credit that the authorities of Greater Manchester have not fallen out too badly.
Being prime minister is different. He or she runs a much bigger machine, and there is nobody to beg for money (instead others beg you for it). Policies that make some people worse off must be created and convincingly argued for, against fierce opposition. Sir Keir has proved incapable of doing this. Mr Burnham is clearly superior to the incumbent in some ways: he is less wooden, more charming and conveys the impression of enjoying his work. But he has sometimes shied away from contentious measures, including a clean-air zone that would have charged drivers of highly polluting vehicles. He has not really been tested for the top job.
Britain might never discover what kind of prime minister Mr Burnham would be. If he is allowed to stand as the Labour candidate in Makerfield, as looks likely, he will be up against a populist-right Reform UK Party with the wind at its back, thanks to a stonking performance in local elections on May 7th. Whereas the Conservative Party will hardly compete with Reform for right-wing votes, the populist-left Green Party could split the left-wing one. It is a courageous, possibly doomed endeavour. Mr Burnham is following his Merseyside instincts.
