Anna Ridgway is National Coordinator for Students for Liberty UK.
I have lived in Manchester for the last two years. I do not need a YouGov poll to tell me how popular Andy Burnham is. I went out door knocking in Makerfield (for the Conservatives, don’t worry) and saw it on the doorstep. Voters who had drifted away from Labour years ago were coming back for him personally. He took the seat with over 50 per cent of the vote and a nine-thousand-vote cushion, well ahead of the narrow win polls had forecast. His YouGov net favourability is minus four, which in a landscape where every other major politician is deep in the negatives makes him the closest thing British politics has to popular. None of this is in dispute.
You already know the basics. He received 322 nominations on day one, 80 per cent of the PLP, no challenger, no members’ ballot, coronation of the King of the North on 17 July, in Downing Street by the 20th. You already know about the hypocrisy: Rayner in October 2022 saying the Tories had “crowned” Sunak without a mandate, Labour spending two years demanding a general election, and now doing exactly what it condemned. Polls suggest a majority of the public thinks Burnham should call an election. Practically every columnist in Britain has written that piece.
I am not going to write it again.
What nobody seems to be asking is what kind of leader this process actually produces. This is not a leadership election. It is a succession.
It has been a long time since Andy Burnham has held a job with meaningful accountability. The Mayor of London faces a directly elected Assembly, Mayor’s Question Time ten times a year, and a body with the statutory power to reject budgets. The Mayor of Greater Manchester faces none of that.
There is no elected assembly. Oversight is performed by an overview committee drawn from constituent councils, which the Institute for Government has described as poorly resourced and often not even quorate. Those who covered Burnham in Greater Manchester have noted his habit of agreeing with whoever is in the room and quietly reversing himself once they leave it. That is not a character flaw. It is what happens when you spend six years in a job where you never have to pick a side, defend a trade-off, or tell anyone something they do not want to hear.
His defenders will say he has faced voters and won three mayoral elections. But winning a regional popularity vote in Greater Manchester, a place where Labour has never seriously been challenged, is not the same as having a rival pick your positions apart on national television. He has gone from the least scrutinised major executive role in British politics straight to the door of Number 10. No contested leadership race. No despatch box. No national press gallery.
Six years of being popular, followed by a coronation fit for a king.
We have seen what this produces. In 2020, Keir Starmer won a leadership election that at least existed. He ran on ten pledges, signed on a card. He broke them one by one. His actual positions surfaced when in government, expensively. The winter fuel cut, announced three weeks into office and trailed in no manifesto, came to define a premiership that kept surprising its own party and voters.
That was the product of a contest that was technically real but hollow. The lesson should have been obvious: if even a contested leadership race fails to surface what a candidate actually believes, imagine what happens when you skip the contest altogether. Labour drew the opposite conclusion. They decided the problem was not the process but the person. The method was fine. Pick someone more popular this time. Do it faster. Skip the vote.
This is what happens when you campaign primarily on ‘hope’ and getting the other guy out. Starmer’s pitch in 2024 was that Labour were not the Tories. It worked. He rode it to a 170-seat majority. The honeymoon lasted weeks. Burnham is now running the same play. His pitch is that he is not Starmer. Same formula, different target, even less scrutiny. We are in the early, giddy days of Burnhammania. Nobody seems interested in asking what comes after.
Ipsos found in June that just 43 per cent of Brits think it is clear what Burnham stands for. The country is about to make a man Prime Minister when his own people cannot say what he believes. That is not the profile of a leader. It is the profile of a brand. Oasis, pints and the Bee Network are not a political philosophy or a plan for government. They are a vibe. You cannot run a country on vibes and brand image.
And the brand has a geographic problem nobody has made him answer for. “No. 10 North” is not devolution. It is the king moving his court. It might play well in Manchester and across some parts of the North. But deprivation in this country is not a northern monopoly.
Go to the poorer parts of outer London, or the deprived seaside towns along the coast, or the rural farming communities in the South West and the Home Counties, and explain to them that their new Prime Minister’s defining pledge is to pull power, attention and investment further away from them. Labour has done close to nothing for these communities in two years of government. Burnham is now promising to do less.
Jaywick, in Essex, has been rated by the government’s own Index of Multiple Deprivation as the most deprived neighbourhood in England for the fourth time running. These are not northern communities. They are not part of Burnham’s plan. And without a contested leadership race, nobody has been able to make him answer for it.
Even the policies he has announced do not survive close reading. He has pledged fiscal discipline while promising the biggest council house building programme since the post-war period. He has talked about “greater public control” of water and energy without specifying where the line falls between regulation and renationalisation. These are positions broad enough to sound good and vague enough to abandon. We have seen that before, too.
Burnham was last in Government under Gordon Brown. That was in 2010. Politics has changed. A king cannot ride in from a distant city, reminiscing about the Blair years, and assume the country is as he left it. Historically, the returning king at least has to rally the nobles, face down a rival, and win a battle. Burnham caught the Avanti West Coast to Euston, collected 322 signatures before lunch, and posted a thank-you on X. His path to the premiership has involved fewer obstacles than the average planning application.
This is, remember, a government that won its majority on less than 34 per cent of the vote, the lowest for any majority government since records began. Its democratic authority was already historically thin. Now it is transferring what remains to a man who has not been required, this time round, to explain what he would do for the parts of Britain that are not Manchester. A contested leadership race might have forced those answers. Without one, they go unasked.
To be clear, this is not an attack on Burnham the man. He may be a capable Prime Minister. He may even be a formidable one. But nobody, not the public, not a single Labour member, not even a rival candidate, has been allowed to ask him what he intends to do with the job. Somebody must remind him of the fate of his predecessor.
Anna Ridgway is National Coordinator for Students for Liberty UK.
I have lived in Manchester for the last two years. I do not need a YouGov poll to tell me how popular Andy Burnham is. I went out door knocking in Makerfield (for the Conservatives, don’t worry) and saw it on the doorstep. Voters who had drifted away from Labour years ago were coming back for him personally. He took the seat with over 50 per cent of the vote and a nine-thousand-vote cushion, well ahead of the narrow win polls had forecast. His YouGov net favourability is minus four, which in a landscape where every other major politician is deep in the negatives makes him the closest thing British politics has to popular. None of this is in dispute.
You already know the basics. He received 322 nominations on day one, 80 per cent of the PLP, no challenger, no members’ ballot, coronation of the King of the North on 17 July, in Downing Street by the 20th. You already know about the hypocrisy: Rayner in October 2022 saying the Tories had “crowned” Sunak without a mandate, Labour spending two years demanding a general election, and now doing exactly what it condemned. Polls suggest a majority of the public thinks Burnham should call an election. Practically every columnist in Britain has written that piece.
I am not going to write it again.
What nobody seems to be asking is what kind of leader this process actually produces. This is not a leadership election. It is a succession.
It has been a long time since Andy Burnham has held a job with meaningful accountability. The Mayor of London faces a directly elected Assembly, Mayor’s Question Time ten times a year, and a body with the statutory power to reject budgets. The Mayor of Greater Manchester faces none of that.
There is no elected assembly. Oversight is performed by an overview committee drawn from constituent councils, which the Institute for Government has described as poorly resourced and often not even quorate. Those who covered Burnham in Greater Manchester have noted his habit of agreeing with whoever is in the room and quietly reversing himself once they leave it. That is not a character flaw. It is what happens when you spend six years in a job where you never have to pick a side, defend a trade-off, or tell anyone something they do not want to hear.
His defenders will say he has faced voters and won three mayoral elections. But winning a regional popularity vote in Greater Manchester, a place where Labour has never seriously been challenged, is not the same as having a rival pick your positions apart on national television. He has gone from the least scrutinised major executive role in British politics straight to the door of Number 10. No contested leadership race. No despatch box. No national press gallery.
Six years of being popular, followed by a coronation fit for a king.
We have seen what this produces. In 2020, Keir Starmer won a leadership election that at least existed. He ran on ten pledges, signed on a card. He broke them one by one. His actual positions surfaced when in government, expensively. The winter fuel cut, announced three weeks into office and trailed in no manifesto, came to define a premiership that kept surprising its own party and voters.
That was the product of a contest that was technically real but hollow. The lesson should have been obvious: if even a contested leadership race fails to surface what a candidate actually believes, imagine what happens when you skip the contest altogether. Labour drew the opposite conclusion. They decided the problem was not the process but the person. The method was fine. Pick someone more popular this time. Do it faster. Skip the vote.
This is what happens when you campaign primarily on ‘hope’ and getting the other guy out. Starmer’s pitch in 2024 was that Labour were not the Tories. It worked. He rode it to a 170-seat majority. The honeymoon lasted weeks. Burnham is now running the same play. His pitch is that he is not Starmer. Same formula, different target, even less scrutiny. We are in the early, giddy days of Burnhammania. Nobody seems interested in asking what comes after.
Ipsos found in June that just 43 per cent of Brits think it is clear what Burnham stands for. The country is about to make a man Prime Minister when his own people cannot say what he believes. That is not the profile of a leader. It is the profile of a brand. Oasis, pints and the Bee Network are not a political philosophy or a plan for government. They are a vibe. You cannot run a country on vibes and brand image.
And the brand has a geographic problem nobody has made him answer for. “No. 10 North” is not devolution. It is the king moving his court. It might play well in Manchester and across some parts of the North. But deprivation in this country is not a northern monopoly.
Go to the poorer parts of outer London, or the deprived seaside towns along the coast, or the rural farming communities in the South West and the Home Counties, and explain to them that their new Prime Minister’s defining pledge is to pull power, attention and investment further away from them. Labour has done close to nothing for these communities in two years of government. Burnham is now promising to do less.
Jaywick, in Essex, has been rated by the government’s own Index of Multiple Deprivation as the most deprived neighbourhood in England for the fourth time running. These are not northern communities. They are not part of Burnham’s plan. And without a contested leadership race, nobody has been able to make him answer for it.
Even the policies he has announced do not survive close reading. He has pledged fiscal discipline while promising the biggest council house building programme since the post-war period. He has talked about “greater public control” of water and energy without specifying where the line falls between regulation and renationalisation. These are positions broad enough to sound good and vague enough to abandon. We have seen that before, too.
Burnham was last in Government under Gordon Brown. That was in 2010. Politics has changed. A king cannot ride in from a distant city, reminiscing about the Blair years, and assume the country is as he left it. Historically, the returning king at least has to rally the nobles, face down a rival, and win a battle. Burnham caught the Avanti West Coast to Euston, collected 322 signatures before lunch, and posted a thank-you on X. His path to the premiership has involved fewer obstacles than the average planning application.
This is, remember, a government that won its majority on less than 34 per cent of the vote, the lowest for any majority government since records began. Its democratic authority was already historically thin. Now it is transferring what remains to a man who has not been required, this time round, to explain what he would do for the parts of Britain that are not Manchester. A contested leadership race might have forced those answers. Without one, they go unasked.
To be clear, this is not an attack on Burnham the man. He may be a capable Prime Minister. He may even be a formidable one. But nobody, not the public, not a single Labour member, not even a rival candidate, has been allowed to ask him what he intends to do with the job. Somebody must remind him of the fate of his predecessor.