Andy Burnham, ‘King of the North’ eyeing UK premiership

LONDON: Labour mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham has emerged in the past decade as one of Britain’s most recognisable regional leaders, and a persistent thorn in Westminster’s side.

Now all eyes are on him as a potential usurper of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with a historic by-election looming on Thursday.

The vote in northwest Makerfield, in what has been a traditionally safe Labour seat, was called when the incumbent Josh Simons stepped down suddenly, gifting Burnham a potential pathway back to parliament.

Burnham, whose roots run deep in the area, has admitted the Makerfield by-election will be “tight” however, saying he is “making no assumptions” about winning.

If he does emerge victorious against a robust challenge from hard-right party Reform UK, then he has said he will join any leadership bid to oust Starmer — although stopped short of saying he would trigger a challenge himself.

Seen as representing the party’s “soft left”, Burnham became an MP in 2001.

As an MP he held senior cabinet posts under prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

But he has already lost two previous bids to be Labour leader to Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn.

He left parliament to run in the 2017 mayoral race in Greater Manchester in northwest England, where three successive election victories have earned him the nickname “King of the North”.

Andrew Murray Burnham was born in 1970 into a working-class family in Aintree, near Liverpool, and grew up in the village of Culcheth, not far from Ashton-in-Makerfield.

Now 56, the loyal Everton Football Club fan enjoyed the “Madchester” music scene of the 1990s.

“I was into it in every respect — the bucket hat, the flares, and the gear,” he told the Daily Telegraph in 2023.

He joined the Labour Party as a young teenager before studying English at the University of Cambridge, where he said he often struggled with “imposter syndrome” due to his working-class background.

He has openly opposed Starmer over welfare cuts and warned of a “climate of fear” in the party.

And in a sign of Labour’s internal divisions, in January the party’s ruling executive committee blocked Burnham from standing in a separate by-election, which was eventually won by a Green candidate.

Burnham, who has a Dutch-born wife and three children, told the Huffington Post he is “Catholic by upbringing” but “not particularly religious now”.

His most recent Manchester mayor re‑election, in May 2024, saw him resoundingly returned to helm the city‑region of some 2.8 million people, after winning nearly two-thirds of the vote.

He has pushed an agenda centred on public transport, housing and public health during his nine years in charge.

In 2009, as then culture and sport minister under prime minister Gordon Brown he was met by a wave of raw grief and anger at a ceremony in Liverpool on the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough football tragedy.

It prompted him to push for a fresh inquiry into the deaths of 97 people in the devastating Sheffield stadium crush.

But he leapt to national prominence during the Covid pandemic, clashing publicly as Manchester mayor with then‑prime minister Boris Johnson over lockdown funding for northern England.

The standoff cemented his reputation as an outspoken defender of regional autonomy.

He even has a worker bee tattooed on his arm, the long-standing symbol of Manchester.

He also wrangled with Starmer last year, calling on the UK leader to put forward a more leftist vision for Labour.

It is something he has termed “Manchesterism” as a response to “the high-inequality, low-growth trap” that he says dominated in the 1980s.

“It is about creating a new politics to plot our way out of that and develop a new economy,” he wrote in The Guardian in January.

He told BBC radio in May: “I think we need to bring what we’ve done in Greater Manchester to the national level”.

The latest polls give Burnham between a five to 10% lead over Reform’s debutant candidate plumber Robert Kenyon.

Burnham has insisted he wants to represent the people of Makerfield, where he is known as just Andy, but he is dogged by accusations that his real goal is the keys to Downing Street.

In his election manifesto in 2024, Burnham said: “Greater Manchester is a very different place today to the one I left in 1991 because I couldn’t find a decent job.

“30 years on, things couldn’t be more different. Our city-region is on the up… We are leading the way in so many ways. And yet we still struggle with that legacy of inequality.”