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A joke has been circulating in British political circles for some time now. It goes something like this: ‘A Blairite, a Brownite, and a Corbynite walk into a bar. “Hello Mr Burnham,” says the bartender, “what’ll it be then?”’ After the first few weeks of Andy Burnham’s leadership of the United Kingdom, can we discern which version of the new prime minister will manifest in power?
In answering this question, we should acknowledge that in line with the joke about mixed allegiances, Burnham’s political backstory is more than usually complicated. Born in 1970 into a working-class family of Irish descent in the North West of England, Burnham had a relatively ordinary upbringing. Some commentators have emphasised the centrality of Catholicism in his development; remarkably, Burnham is the first openly Catholic British prime minister, and he has claimed that Catholic social teaching ‘underpins’ his politics.
More generally, we can say that Burnham’s tribal credentials mark him out as an outsider from the British establishment (as well as his religious exceptionalism, he is the first born-and-bred northern English prime minister since Harold Wilson, and only the second with Irish Catholic heritage after James Callaghan). However, a key fact about Burnham is his ability to combine this oppositional side with more conformist characteristics.
Burnham’s mainstream instincts have some of their origins in his early adulthood, during which time he followed a fairly standard British political trajectory. After graduating from the University of Cambridge in the early 1990s, he found work in journalism, before becoming a researcher for the Labour politician Tessa Jowell and beginning to rise through the ranks of the Labour hierarchy.
In this auspicious opening chapter to his political career, Burnham developed the outer appearance of a typical New Labour apparatchik. Whatever his upbringing, the Burnham that was shaped in the Labour Party circa 1994 to 2010 was very much a product of the Blairite consensus that held sway in these years: a classic ‘Third Way’ combination of support for both neoliberalism and social democracy.
Though he was often associated with the ‘Brownite’ grouping that gathered around the New Labour chancellor and later prime minister Gordon Brown, Burnham’s early career culminated in political work most people would view as being broadly faithful to Blairite principles. As a backbench MP, he voted in favour of the Iraq War in 2003. In 2009, he was promoted to Brown’s cabinet — as Secretary of State for Health — where he continued the push towards ‘foundation trusts’ that introduced elements of privatisation into the National Health Service. When Labour was voted out of government in 2010, Burnham remained on this broad path, becoming an advocate of the feeble, post-Blairite centre-leftism that defined the party under Ed Miliband.
A Leftward Turn?
But when Miliband was defeated in the 2015 general election, Burnham’s political journey took a fateful turn. In the immediate aftermath of the election, he stood for the vacant Labour leadership following Miliband’s resignation, and in other circumstances he might have been expected to win. But during the course of the leadership campaign, Labour was subject to a sudden and violent shock — in a word, ‘Corbynism’.
Given that Labour had become both electorally unpopular and almost wholly devoid of ideological direction by the mid-2010s, it was unsurprising that an authentic left populist like Jeremy Corbyn would win the hearts of the party membership at this point. Corbyn won the election in a landslide, with over three times the number of votes as Burnham, who finished in second place. The party’s — and Burnham’s — plan to continue on the trajectory established in the New Labour years was firmly knocked off course.
It was at this point that Burnham discovered his sense of soul — or at least, a political identity fit for the post-2008 world. Having witnessed the crumbling of Labour’s Blairite consensus at first hand in the 2015 leadership campaign, Burnham reinvented himself as a different kind of Labour politician. Instead of sniping and plotting against Corbyn from the sidelines (as did most of his former New Labour colleagues after 2015), Burnham stood for the mayoralty of Greater Manchester — duly becoming the first occupant of this newly created role after a comfortable election victory in early 2017.
Burnham was a hegemonically popular Manchester mayor. He would use his imperious position to develop the political creed he has recently christened ‘Manchesterism’ as he seeks to advance a vade mecum for his leadership of the country as a whole. Whether or not Manchesterism amounts to a coherent political philosophy has been the subject of much debate. But if it is to be understood as a literal extension of Burnham’s mayoral record between 2017 and 2025, then we have some concrete examples to flesh it out.
The North Will Rise Again
From a leftist perspective, the positive side of any putative Manchesterism lies in its reformist, even radical stance towards the conservative structures of the English establishment. Behind this stance lies Burnham’s passionate advocacy of regional devolution in general — and the culture of the North of England in particular.
A major milestone in this narrative occurred in late 2020, at the height of the Covid period. In response to a perception that the Conservative prime minister, Boris Johnson, was giving preferential treatment to areas in the South of England when it came to lockdown regulations and supports, Burnham delivered a widely celebrated speech in St. Peter’s Square in Manchester. In it, he railed against the excessively London-centric nature of the UK, claiming that ‘different rules’ are ‘always applied to the North of England’.
This impulse was put into something like manifesto form in Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain, the 2024 book Burnham co-authored with the Liverpool city region mayor Steve Rotheram. As well as advocating examples of northern identity (Burnham is fond of referencing northern cultural touchstones), Head North surveyed the narrative of regional inequality in England; the British economy has long been heavily centred on London and the South East to the detriment of the North and Midlands, especially since late-twentieth-century deindustrialisation.
In response, the basics of a Burnhamite programme are put forward. In a climactic ‘ten point plan’, Burnham and Rotheram call for the abolition of the House of Lords (the archaic upper house of the UK parliament) in order to make way for an elected ‘Senate of Regions and Nations’. They also recommend that something resembling the provisions in the modern German constitution for equal distribution of funding throughout federal states should be emulated in Britain. Such reforms should be given concrete form, they argue, in a written constitution (Britain still has none), and come along with a general shake-up of the voting system.
Two Kinds of Manchesterism
Whether or not these radical proposals will be implemented by Burnham as prime minister is the million-dollar question. The conservative nature of the British deep state — and indeed the modern Labour Party, which is still predominantly centrist — means that he will face severe difficulties in turning the ideas outlined in Head North into effective and lasting constitutional reforms.
And in fact there are other aspects of Burnham’s ‘Manchesterist’ record that suggest a more compromised side to his political vision. Though Burnham has often talked — in a tribute of sorts to Manchester’s radical history — of his intention to ‘end neoliberalism’ and oppose its destructive ‘four horsemen’ (deindustrialisation, privatisation, deregulation, and austerity), he has also tended to continue Manchester’s liberal capitalist traditions when it comes to the specifics of how a Burnhamite economy and infrastructure can work in practice.
A good example is the ‘Bee Network’, the integrated transport system for Greater Manchester introduced in 2023. Undoubtedly positive in its basic effects, the arrival of this generally well organised piece of infrastructure stood out as an unusually bold development in poorly connected modern Britain, where an outdated private transport system is the cause of widespread public anomie.
Nonetheless, for all its symbolic power as a rare example of successful civic modernisation from the left, the Bee Network is in fact the product of a classic ‘public private partnership’ between local government and local businesses (private companies operate the buses and employ the drivers), rather than a full-on return to public ownership. Indeed, Manchesterism in general is strongly in favour of continuing the preference for public-private collaboration that has dominated British society since the New Labour years.
Becoming Mr Burnham
The early signs are that the Burnham premiership will continue the tug-of-war between reawakened left reformism and centrist compromise that defined his tenure as Greater Manchester mayor. On the one hand, it is clear that he is not viewed by either the Parliamentary Labour Party or the mainstream media as a Corbyn-style threat to the status quo. Burham’s first cabinet — announced on 20 July — was notable for being the first majority-female ministry in British history. But it was otherwise characterised by rather cautious choices from the party’s soft left. Perhaps most strikingly, Burnham opted for John Healey (a rather uninteresting centre-left figure) as chancellor over the more assertive former party leader Ed Miliband.
However, we should be clear that what is likely to define Burnham’s time in government is how easy it will be for him to appear ‘radical’ in the context of recent British political history. Indeed, it would be difficult not to conclude that Burnham has entered office as the most ostensibly left-wing figure to become UK prime minister since James Callaghan in 1976. If we also bear in mind the continuity Thatcherism of New Labour, the savage austerity of the 2010-2016 Cameron government, and the succession of risible figures that have occupied 10 Downing Street since 2016 (culminating in Burnham’s predecessor Keir Starmer, whose government was defined by stasis bordering on paralysis), it is fair to say that Burnham does not have a tough act to follow when it comes to reforming an ailing, unproductive British nation.
With this in mind, it is unsurprising that while Burnham’s first weeks have certainly not amounted to a leftist putsch (his nebulous stance on Israel-Palestine and his apparent commitment to high levels of military spending have dismayed many on the far-left), they have also witnessed a clear willingness to proactively reform British society in broadly leftist ways. The introduction of a second executive seat of government in Manchester (‘Number 10 North’) is perhaps the most radical of Burnham’s early acts as PM. But there have been several other policy announcements — a lowering of the maximum national bus fare from £3 to £2, a pledge to eradicate rough sleeping, a cut to VAT on electricity bills — that give strong indication that Burnham will indeed be the most left-wing British leader since the 1970s.
In the short term, a notable side-effect of all this has been a marked deceleration of the ‘Green surge’ of late 2025 and early 2026. Under Starmer, and following the abortive launch of the post-Corbynite Your Party tendency last year, the Greens had looked unassailable as the party of the populist left under the leadership of Zack Polanski. But in the midst of the ‘Burnham Honeymoon’, Green Party polling figures have plummeted, suggesting that Burnham’s leftward feints have stolen back a chunk of softer-left voters from Polanski. The upcoming Holborn and St Pancras byelection, in Keir Starmer’s now vacant constituency, will give some sense of whether this Green downturn is a permanent trend: if Polanski cannot win here, in the new Green comfort zone of central London, his party is probably doomed to remain on the parliamentary margins in the long-term. Nevertheless, Burnham’s radical-lite messaging is itself arguably a sign that Polanski has managed to push Labour to the left in recent months.
Whatever the outcome of such local tussles, we can say that the Burnham years are likely to be ideologically innovative in ways that the Starmer years were not. One of the internal mantras in the new Burnham administration is: ‘Andy gets things done’. If Aristotle was right that character is defined by how someone puts their ideas into action, it seems likely that we will soon have an answer to the barman’s question that began this article. Given his willingness to seize the moment and practically implement a new left politics (whatever it may be), it seems certain that Mr Burnham will at least be himself in government — a very different kind of Labour PM.
