On Monday, 56-year-old Andrew Murray Burnham of the Labour party, better known as just Andy, will become Britain’s 59th prime minister after a mandatory audience with the British monarch King Charles III. In a somewhat revolving door scenario, he will be the seventh holder of this office in a decade.
Burnham was elected Labour leader unopposed –– which meant a coronation rather than a conventional contest –– as nearly 90% of his party’s MPs rallied behind him, leaving no scope of another candidate. Under Labour’s rules, an aspirant needs the support of at least 20% of MPs to be eligible to run for the leadership.
On Friday, in his first speech as the official successor of outgoing PM Keir Starmer and prime minister-in-waiting, Burnham said net migration –– a thorny issue –– ‘needs to fall further’. He spoke of ‘returning power to communities’ and adopting a new path from ‘the last 40 years’. He said his approach will be ‘distinctively Labour, unashamedly Labour’, pledging greater ‘public control’ of the British economy and ‘reindustrialisation’.
To fulfil his goal, Burnham will require financial resources, which indicates rises in indirect taxes. There’s a buzz around the present Pakistani-origin home secretary Shabana Mahmood, a barrister, as his probable chancellor of the exchequer. What portfolio will the half-Indian Lisa Nandy, now culture secretary and an ally of Burnham, be allocated, is another topic of discussion.
If India is concerned with continuity in London’s policies –– in the light of the trade agreement –– New Delhi may rest assured Burnham will want nothing other than successful trading relations. Indeed, there’s chatter in the corridors of Whitehall that he may lead a business mission to India this year itself to consolidate economic ties.
Managing US president Donald Trump will –– amid fraying Anglo-American ties –– be a priority. This could be challenging, for in the White House occupant’s eyes, Burnham is more liberal than Starmer.
As Greater Manchester’s mayor, Burnham was impressed by China’s high-speed rail network. As PM, he will have to weigh economic benefit against security risks. Relations with Russia will remain in cold storage until a settlement in Ukraine. He is expected to tweak Britain’s Palestine policy to make Israel more accountable –– since Starmer’s softness towards Tel Aviv cost Labour traditional left-oriented and Muslim support.
Most importantly, as planned by Starmer, Burnham is likely to roll back Brexit to the extent of restoring frictionless trade in goods with the European Union. This is envisaged to reignite a stagnating British economy.
Burnham will inherit an economy in better shape than what the Conservative party left it two years ago; but still with little elbow room for spending. He needs a much faster GDP growth, to reduce the cost of living, and invest further in the National Health Service (NHS) to see off the unprecedented rise of the far right Reform UK party.
Unlike the half a dozen Oxonians who preceded him in the past 10 years, Burnham –– an Everton Football Club fan who himself still dribbles adequately in weekend games –– read English at Cambridge, loves poetry and insists on writing his own speeches.
Burnham is no stranger to London. In 2001, he was elected MP from his home town of Leigh in Greater Manchester. He served as a junior minister under Tony Blair, before being promoted to cabinet roles in the succeeding Gordon Brown government as, first, secretary of state for culture, media and sport, and then secretary of state for health. After Labour were defeated in 2010, he twice unsuccessfully competed to become party leader. He resigned as an MP in 2017 to become the first elected mayor of Greater Manchester, where from all accounts he has been a hit.
In 2024, Starmer led Labour to a landslide victory and to a remarkable comeback after the party’s devastating defeat five years earlier, when the left radical Jeremy Corbyn was at the helm. But, in May, an electorate, increasingly frustrated with a British economy in the doldrums, inflicted heavy losses on Labour in local and regional elections, including unseating them in Wales for the first time since a devolved government came into being there in 1999.
Consequently, the question turned to not whether but when Starmer would step down. The answer was provided quite emphatically with Burnham returning to Westminster with an unequivocal win in a parliamentary by-election in Makerfield, in his backyard of Greater Manchester, on June 18. Burnham turned the tide against Reform –– which had swept the board in local elections in the same locality in May –– by attracting over 54% of votes.
Burnham’s ambitions for the stewardship of Labour and thereby the prime ministership of the United Kingdom was evident at last autumn’s annual party conference. He refused to rule out aspirations for the top job, even criticising Starmer and his chancellor Rachel Reeves’ fiscal parameters by suggesting the government was “in hock” to the bond markets. Burnham began his career as a Blairite centrist, but has since shifted steadily to the left; and, therefore, appears to be more socialist than Starmer. He has advocated renationalisation of water and energy to de-escalate the burden on the consumer.
His critics have labelled Burnham a weather vane, tilting with political winds to seize his opportunities. He was clearly not in sync with Corbyn’s hard leftism, but served in his shadow cabinet. Without confrontation, he took the shrewdest decision of his career by retreating to local government, making a success of his job as Greater Manchester’s mayor, not to mention receiving voters’ approval three times.
A mayoral stint as a launchpad for a national head of government role is more a phenomenon in mainland Europe than Britain. Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt and recently Olaf Scholz followed this path in Germany. In France, Jacques Chirac was mayor of Paris before he became president of France. Turkish president Recep Erdogan was Istanbul’s mayor. In the UK there is no such example. London’s mayor Sir Sadiq Khan has just been pushed upstairs to the House of Lords, which disqualifies him for occupancy of 10 Downing Street.
UK prime ministers have mostly hailed from England. Arthur Balfour, Ramsay MacDonald, Alec Douglas-Home and Gordon Brown were Scots. David Lloyd George was Welsh. Even within England, men and women originally from or settled in the prosperous south rather than the poorer north have enjoyed the honour. Burnham will be the first northern Englishman since Labour’s Harold Wilson in the 1960s and ’70s to be PM.
That is significant because northern England has, for decades, been Labour’s impregnable bastion, but which has recently been dented by Reform’s inroads into the white working class vote. This segment could well warm to Burnham, who is a self-proclaimed northerner and could be embraced as one of them.
Amid increasing non-religiosity among British Christians, a majority of Britons, if anything, adhere to the Church of England; and historically most British prime ministers have been of this faith, even if non-practising. Burnham describes himself as being of a Catholic upbringing, but “not particularly religious”. This will matter little in today’s multicultural Britain, albeit threatened by the racism of Reform, as long as he delivers, particularly on the economic front.
