Who Is Andy Burnham, the man who could be Britain’s next prime minister?

LONDON – Andy Burnham has twice run unsuccessfully for the leadership of Britain’s governing Labour Party. Now his decisive victory in a special parliamentary election puts him within reach not just of that goal, but of entering Downing Street as prime minister.

A fluent communicator known for his bonhomie and charisma, Burnham has for nine years been mayor of Greater Manchester, where he cultivated an image of optimism, activism and the type of authentic plain speaking characteristic of northern England.

With a seat in Parliament representing Makerfield, in north-west England, Burnham will need the support of 80 fellow Labour lawmakers to mount a leadership challenge to the country’s unpopular Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Supporters see Burnham – who in Manchester won the nickname “king of the north” for his defence of the area during the Covid-19 pandemic – as Labour’s potential saviour against the populist right-wing Reform UK party, led by Nigel Farage.

Critics portray Burnham as a political chameleon who would face the same economic constraints that have stymied Starmer’s lacklustre government, and the same restless, impatient electorate.

Either way, he would be a different kind of leader from the one he wants to replace.

“He’s just optimistic and happy and seems to enjoy being a politician,” said John McTernan, an adviser to Tony Blair when he was prime minister and someone who has known Burnham since his days as a researcher for a lawmaker in south London.

“Leaders either inspire you, or they slightly depress you,” McTernan added, noting that there had been several recent prime ministers “who didn’t really seem to enjoy it” – Starmer included.

Burnham was born in Liverpool in 1970, to a father who was a phone engineer and a mother who was a doctor’s receptionist. He was raised in Culcheth, a village in Cheshire not far from Makerfield. Of Irish heritage, he attended Roman Catholic state schools and has spoken of his Catholicism, including meeting Pope Francis in 2023.

“My mum was with me, and even though I’m not a Catholic in that full sense of the word, I felt the magnetic pull of the Vatican,” he said, likening his faith to his lifelong devotion to Everton football club.

If you stop going to matches, he added, “you’re still an Evertonian; you can stop going to church but you’re still a Catholic”.

Burnham won a place to study English at the University of Cambridge and after graduating, took a familiar path to political prominence, first as a researcher for Tessa Jowell, a lawmaker in south London, then as an adviser to the then Culture Secretary Chris Smith.

While at Cambridge he met Marie-France Van Heel, who was born in the Netherlands, and they later married and had three children.

“When my wife got pregnant we actually hadn’t planned to have children at that time because I felt stability was important. We got married in October 2000 when Jimmy was eight months old and I was in a difficult battle to win the nomination,” Burnham told The Guardian in 2009, referring to his efforts to run for Parliament.

After he won election in 2001, representing Leigh, a northern district close to where he was raised, he became a junior minister in the New Labour government of Tony Blair.

He was promoted to the Cabinet under Gordon Brown and served as chief secretary to the Treasury, as secretary for culture, media and sport, and then as health secretary.

In 2009, Burnham was heckled at a memorial service on the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, which resulted in the deaths of 97 Liverpool fans in a stadium crush.

It made a deep impression, convincing him that the families deserved justice after police, investigators and the news media tried to depict the victims as hooligans and to blame them for the disaster. Pressure from Burnham helped secure a second inquiry.

After Labour lost the general election in 2010, Burnham ran for party leader, coming in fourth. In 2015 he tried again and was the early front runner, only to lose to left-winger Jeremy Corbyn, on whose team he later served.

In 2017, Burnham left Parliament after deciding his future lay outside Westminster, and he was elected as mayor of Greater Manchester.

Robert Ford, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester, said Burnham had presided over a thriving local economy there, and had showed his political skills by increasing control and regulation of the city’s buses – winning a fight with transportation companies in the process.

“He turned what could have been a rather bland technocratic bit of policy – believe me, if Keir Starmer had been there it would have been – into a David versus Goliath fight,” Ford said.

“His big strength is he is very effective communicator, a very effective storyteller; he’s good at giving voters a sense of who he is, who he’s for, and what he’s trying to do.”

“In all these respects, he is quite a contrast with the incumbent Labour Prime Minister.”

Burnham also led from the front during the pandemic, complaining that government lockdowns were penalising regions like his, and making a speech in central Manchester that became famous.

Perhaps the most consistent criticism levelled against Burnham, who served under three very different Labour leaders in Blair, Brown and Corbyn, is that he is politically malleable.

In 2022, after the last FIFA World Cup, Starmer himself poked fun at his former colleague. In a speech to reporters, Starmer joked that Burnham “got to see his boyhood team Argentina win the World Cup” but that “it was a mixed bag because he also got to see his boyhood team France lose the final and his boyhood teams Morocco and Croatia lose in the semis”.

McTernan acknowledged that Burnham’s reputation is of a politician who “likes people to like him” but said: “A people pleaser as a politician is much better than a people hater.”

One common thread through Burnham’s career has been the idea that British politics and the news media is too London-centric, and that regional inequality has damaged the country, a point he made in his first speech to Parliament in 2001. During one recent interview Burnham said Britain had been “on the wrong path for 40 years”.

How the skills he showed in Manchester would prepare him for the top job in British politics is hard to predict.

“It’s very different when you are sailing into the storm of 10 Downing St, where there will be 150 issues on your desk every day,” said Ford.

“You don’t really get that much control over which ones to pick fights over, and you have no time to think.” NYTIMES

• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.