The north face: why Andy Burnham's fight for Manchester could shake up how Britain is run

In this, the year of the virus, there have been dramatic news moments aplenty, courtesy of everyone from Prince Charles to Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Until the autumn, however, truly political moments were in short supply: after years of Brexit wrangling and a Christmas election, the pandemic seemed more of a human and a technical story. All this changed abruptly on 15th October on the steps of Manchester Central Library.

At first blush, what unfolded looked like a piece of anti-theatre: an ordinary-looking man in a North Face waterproof with no rostrum or props save for a piece of paper, from which he read a short statement. There was no finger-jabbing and few rhetorical flourishes, as the mayor of a region with a rocketing coronavirus caseload refused to accept tighter restrictions, such as the closure of most pubs and cafés, on the financial terms the government was offering. 

And yet there was the unmistakable edge of anger in the hybrid northwestern tones of Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, and to those who knew their history, he was in a resonant spot, yards from the site of the Peterloo massacre. The sharing of the vast sacrifices imposed by Covid-19 was always going to get contentious at some point—“following the science” could not postpone the argument forever—and the man in the mac was catalysing a reckoning. 

Burnham was better placed than most to understand the grave public health and political risks of delaying Manchester’s lockdown: his first brush with pandemic preparation came over a decade ago, when he was health secretary during the swine flu scare in 2009. Uniquely among the new breed of city regions, Greater Manchester has powers over the NHS budget, and if ICUs end up overrun and Mancunians are left gasping in hospital corridors, Burnham could be in the firing line. And yet this affable character—who during his younger days was sometimes written off as a shape-shifting careerist—decided to take a defiant stand, refusing to budge over his final red line, concerning an almost rounding-error sum of £5m in the package of relief.

Why? Was it, as his critics in Downing Street say, a reckless and cynical calculation? (Downing Street imposed the regional lockdown by fiat days later.) Was it instead a straightforward consequence of penny-pinching on No 10’s part? Was it the kind of showdown that is only to be expected if you create a new model of mayors who are supposed to stand up for their cities by standing up against Whitehall? Or can the move from conviviality to confrontation be traced further into the Burnham backstory?  

The first 40 years of Burnham’s life are a tale of a remarkably rapid rise from remarkably ordinary origins. He was born just one week into the 1970s, and a fortnight after Ed Miliband, but a long way away from bookish London, in Aintree, just outside Liverpool. Being ribbed as a “Scouser” is a rare sensitive spot for a man who is nowadays professionally Mancunian. But he actually spent most of his childhood in Culcheth, near Warrington in Cheshire, which is between the two cities, meaning he grew up “facing both ways.”

So there is a touch of ambiguity there, but not much more of it in the life of young Burnham. His telephone engineer dad, receptionist mum and two brothers were evidently a close family, and remain so. In a toe-curlingly folksy video made for his 2015 run for the Labour leadership, the clan was assembled around the kitchen table in his parents’ house down the road from where he was an MP, swapping stories and affectionately joshing. 

Friends insist this wasn’t just for the cameras and that being with his family—especially watching football with his brothers—is where Burnham feels most himself. His mother recalled in that video how startled she was when teachers at his comprehensive relayed that it was worth him having a go for Cambridge. When he got to Fitzwilliam College to read English, a different social milieu opened up but his heart remained in the northwest. 

His ambitions, however, were already in Westminster: his Dutch future wife, Marie-France van Heel, recalled meeting him on their first day at Cambridge, and him saying he wanted to be an MP. They were soon a couple, and a sufficiently trusting one for her to appear on ITV’s Blind Date and wing a free trip to Gibraltar, on which she was disastrously paired with future Tory spin doctor Will Harris. The pair were married in 2000, when Burnham was 30 and they already had a baby son; two daughters would follow. 

“Three things are important in my life apart from family,” he told the Guardian in 2009. “Everton FC, the Labour Party and the Catholic church—in that order.” Eight years later, when I did an hour-long Labour conference one-to-one with the new Manchester mayor, he told me exactly the same thing: the only twist was that he was an observant rather than a believing Catholic. Formulaic it may be, but everything I heard in hours of phone calls for this article suggests that the trinity of family, football and (the rituals of) faith still sums up his personal life. He is a guy who knows who he is. 

But what of his political life? From one vantage point, his Westminster years look like a tale of empty ambition. He hopped from parliamentary researcher to special adviser to safe seat (Leigh in Greater Manchester, in the 2001 election) to ministerial bag carrier. He kept his head down and went through the lobbies for Tony Blair on everything, including the Iraq War, and was rewarded with junior and then middle-ranking ministerial jobs. He travelled affably and lightly enough that, though seen as a Blairite, he was promoted under Gordon Brown, joining the cabinet as chief secretary to the Treasury, before bouncing to culture and finally health. By 40 he’d had three different seats at the top table, though he hadn’t stayed in any ministry long enough to get that much done.

While there are few tales of sharp elbows from these years, Burnham could be a bruiser on the government’s behalf. At one point, he had to apologise to Shami Chakrabarti, then director of the human rights charity Liberty and working across party lines to stop the government’s illiberal policy of extending detention without trial for terror suspects, for his innuendo about “late-night, hand-wringing, heart-melting phone calls” with the Conservative libertarian David Davis.

Officials and advisers with strong principled or technocratic views on the details of policy viewed him with particular disdain. “I like him, but I’ve got absolutely no idea what he believes,” a senior civil servant who worked closely with him at the Department for Health told me. One leading policy wonk of these years once told me Burnham could be relied on to duck the idea of trade-offs between competing objectives, and run a mile from tough choices. Another recalls, ironically given where he would ultimately go, that he was particularly dismissive of proposals for devolution: his attitude is dimly recalled as “think tank bollocks.”

Indeed, when the prospective Manchester mayoralty was first lined up to have powers over health in 2015, Burnham warned it could lead to a “Swiss cheese NHS.” Concerns about “postcode lotteries” (which he described to me in a 2010 podcast as “the most hated thing”) took precedence over any thoughts about what could be done with local control. 

And yet. When you ring round people who have worked alongside Burnham you are inundated with something rare in political interviewing: not so much admiration, as love. 

Chris Smith was Blair’s urbane first culture secretary, and knew that he needed help on the football side of things. Smith had heard about this young man making waves on a working party reviewing the sport, so brought him in and “just knew immediately he was the right thing.” Burnham became Smith’s special adviser, and he set to work—Smith said “diligently,” “collaboratively and collegiately,” and always with an “absolutely clear” sense of direction, which came not from calculation but from deeply-held feelings about right and wrong. 

[su_pullquote]“The younger Burnham’s attitude to devolution is dimly recalled by one former insider as ‘think tank bollocks’”[/su_pullquote]

Charlie Falconer, an old friend of Blair’s who was at the heart of things as a law officer and ministerial fixer from the start of the New Labour government, said: “first impressions? Clever, decent, calm.” He expanded on the “decency” element by recalling how, as a brand new MP brought along to a meeting where one of the cabinet’s top brass had rounded “brutally” on his own young civil servant, Burnham alone had subsequently taken the trouble “to look after her and ask whether she was OK.” 

Former Home Secretary Alan Johnson reached for the d-word too: “he’s one of the most decent men I met in politics,” and recalled the rare genuine affection he inspired “on his own patch” after doing the constituency dinner in Leigh. The current Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy was a neighbouring newbie MP in 2010 who could have run into grief for siding with Ed Miliband over local boy Burnham in his first leadership run. But Burnham made sure it didn’t happen, telling Nandy that “he—and especially his wife—felt that ‘I was a new MP and must be free to make my own decision.’”

And it’s not just a case of Labour politicians patting one of their own on the back. Margaret Aspinall, whose 18-year-old son died in the Hillsborough tragedy and led the families’ decades-long campaign for truth and justice, is emphatic about all the dealings she has had with Burnham since her first meeting with the then-culture secretary in 2009: “He said ‘I’ll do everything in my power’—and he did.”

She recalls his determination to read out a letter from the PM to the families at a 20th anniversary service, even though she had warned him that the bereaved were deeply cynical about politicians. His words were broken up by chants of “justice for the 96,” yet this didn’t perturb him, it inspired him. While other MPs such as Maria Eagle had slogged tirelessly for the cause before, Burnham was in the cabinet, and so could “open doors” to the meetings and documents that would eventually lead to the original whitewashing verdict of “accidental death” being quashed. After Labour lost in 2010, he retained links with the families and would sometimes turn up at court as the process of unearthing the truth ground on. David Conn, the investigative journalist who did more than any other to put the record straight, said that while “it took some years for Burnham to fully understand” the scandal, once he did he “made a huge political contribution to overturning arguably Britain’s worst ever miscarriage of justice.”

As for achievements away from the spotlight, Burnham’s admirers insist there are plenty if you know where to look—going right back to the start of his career. Smith described how Burnham would sink “his teeth into things” he cared about and “become a force of nature.” Conn—whose 1997 book The Football Business had caught Burnham’s eyes—agreed. He admiringly recalled how the young special adviser “had no government backing to legislate, so any change had to be gained by his own initiative,” and yet managed to pull off two considerable feats in that first culture department role, both—interestingly—where the role of the government was more to co-ordinate and carry a coalition of actors, rather than simply to act. 

First, he paved the way for the creation of Supporters Direct in 2000, an outfit that helped football fans take a stake in their own clubs and make it count, a timely idea in a big money era when sharp suits could do things like moving Wimbledon FC to Milton Keynes. 

Secondly, he got involved with a challenge the competition authorities were pressing against the Premier League. They argued—on solid technical grounds—that the League’s practice of selling broadcast rights as a block was cartel behaviour. But the idea of individual deals for separate club-by-club coverage was even more anathema to fans than the subscriptions they were just getting used to stumping up for Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB coverage of the matches. Burnham brokered a creative bargain, in which the government swung behind the League in return for a 5 per cent share of the TV royalties being earmarked for community football facilities. 

Was 5 per cent enough? Unlike the dispute over the final £5m this October, that question did not unduly detain the young Burnham: it was something, and the best he felt he could get. He was always fundamentally pragmatic. Closely related is his instinct for being a party loyalist in all seasons. He was one of the only senior figures from the Blair operation who continued to serve in the very different top team of Jeremy Corbyn, and stood by him as shadow home secretary even after the vast majority of Labour MPs had voted no confidence in the leader in the wake of the Brexit referendum. 

Ironically, however, the Burnham creed of practicality proved ruinously impractical in both his leadership bids. Looking back, the strange 2010 race reveals what a cliquey and narrow church Labour had become: it pitted Tony’s Miliband (David) against Gordon’s (Ed), and one Gordon Ed against another (Balls). You’d have thought someone could break it open, and as an insider-outsider Burnham might have been well placed with the less-metropolitan positioning that he summed up to me and Allegra Stratton at the time: “economically… I can veer more to the [Labour] left,” while being much more “firm” on “the law and order agenda.” 

It wasn’t to be, though, because he lacked definition. In the same interview, he explained how as health secretary he had introduced an assumption that, where all else was equal, the NHS’s “preferred provider” would be public hospitals. He had gauged the mood in both an exhausted health service, where tendering for contracts were becoming a serious distraction, and in the Labour Party, where there were growing fears that the market-based Blair reforms could erode the core of the health service if left unchecked. The party wanted a line in the sand on privatisation, but Burnham failed to draw one anyone would actually notice, because of his instinct to find a middle way—in the same interview, he told us he “would defend PFI pretty resolutely” since it got hospitals built. 

As for his 2015 leadership bid, it’s now easy to forget that Burnham was being lined up as Len McCluskey’s preferred candidate and had almost locked in the mighty backing of his Unite union before the Corbyn insurgency took hold. But this time he took the wind out of his own sails by falling into line with acting leader Harriet Harman’s weak-kneed decision to abstain on one vote on George Osborne’s latest round of harsh benefit cuts, several of which the Tories would eventually be forced to retreat on themselves. 

The second leadership defeat, Burnham’s friends say,  “wounded” him, and it seems fair to ask whether some of the confrontational steel we saw on behalf of low-paid workers this October is related to the ill-judged equivocation five years before. However painful it was, though, defeat in 2015 cleared the way to the move back up north—and to a new type of job.

New directly-elected mayors were a pet project of both the New Labour and then the Cameron governments, and their creation could sometimes seem like something to occupy politicians who had run out of other ideas. 

Hartlepool was a pioneer, agreeing to give one a go in an underwhelming 51-49 referendum in 2001. A year later, the town elected a man who campaigned in a monkey outfit, Stuart Drummond. He went on to serve three terms, before the town’s citizens decided to abolish the post in a fresh 2012 referendum. Most local referendums on the idea ran into “No” votes, but the politicians didn’t give up: New Labour let councils create mayors without local votes, and then—after the coalition got the thumbs down in nine of the 10 referendums it had mandated in 2012—it decided that mayors would be built into the structure of new city regions without troubling the voters for approval. 

If mayors have often looked like a solution in search of a problem, experience in London—particularly the inaugural mayor Ken Livingstone’s introduction of a congestion charge—suggested there was potential. But the wild west echo in the job title is, perhaps, an invitation for a macho form of politics. We have had Ken, Boris and now Sadiq in London, who is today joined by eight other city metro-mayors—Burnham included—all of them men. 

Taking to a bully pulpit on behalf of your city is almost written into the job description. But then a lot of political power always boils down to the power to persuade, and if Burnham is beginning to stand out from the mayoral pack, that is because he has grasped that effective persuasion is not about hectoring on your own patch, but forging a local consensus. 

He has little choice. Many of his powers, including those pertinent to the pandemic haggling, are exercised jointly with the 10 individual boroughs that make up the conurbation. One of these is represented by the swaggeringly confident administration of Manchester City Council, under the leadership of Richard Leese for the last quarter of a century. Together with his long-term chief executive Howard Bernstein, Leese was credited with a Mancunian renaissance long before Burnham arrived. While Bernstein retired in 2017, his influence was still felt: he had negotiated the shape of the new City Region with George Osborne, and ensured that the old Town Hall would retain great clout. 

To succeed, a metro-mayor has to pick big fights on small things that open up wider discussions, while keeping a lot of people rowing in the same direction. For politicians like Margaret Thatcher or Gordon Brown, who want to be involved with every policy detail, it would be a nightmare. It suits Burnham down to a T. 

According to the most respected observer of the city’s political scene, Jennifer Williams of the Manchester Evening News, things have moved slowly in many fields. Sometimes, as with the regional “spatial framework,” which is meant to redraw (without reducing) the green belt to encourage home-building, the glacial progress is an inescapable facet of how many players have to be consulted. In other cases, such as policing—the mayor’s job incorporates the role of Police and Crime Commissioner—mayor Burnham is not sufficiently interested in the bureaucratic grind that would be required to drive improvements, especially not when it could unleash simmering local controversy. 

Instead he concentrates on eye-catching issues, draws more publicity to them—and then uses it to make more of a difference than a bureaucrat might have thought possible. One example is homelessness, a scar on the conscience of a city where glistening new buildings shoot up to the sky even while people lie at their feet on the streets below. At first, cynics said Burnham’s campaign pledge to donate a chunk of his salary to the problem only underlined how few real resources he had got. But the gesture galvanised others, jolting the boroughs into raising their game while also enlisting churches, big-hearted sports stars and every shade of philanthropy under the banner of “A Bed Every Night.” While rough sleeping is only the tip of an iceberg of hidden homelessness, Williams—not an easy journalist to spin—judges there is now visibly much less of it. 

[su_pullquote]“Mayors need to pick big fights on small things that open a wider discussion. It suits Andy Burnham down to a T”[/su_pullquote]

He is, in Falconer’s phrase, a brilliant “mood politician,” someone who “really feels things” and “manifestly expresses” them—which brings us back to the battle over the lockdown. Speaking to MPs in the region at the height of the controversy, there was tooth-sucking anxiety about a grand showdown with “terrifyingly high stakes,” but ultimately no resentment at Burnham for running the risk. Rather, there was admiration for his skill in keeping together a coalition which, at least for a time, included Bolton’s Conservative-led council and a number of local Tory MPs, who rejected the government’s imposition of a Tier 3 lockdown on very different, libertarian grounds. “You just can’t describe,” said one ordinarily measured MP, “the depth of the anger here.”

Everyone accepts Burnham meant what he said about northern cities being made “canaries in the coalmine,” though some detected the true politician’s knack for feeling most strongly those things that will play well. Friends say the new northern chippiness runs deep: they refer to the teenager who first joined Labour during the 1984 miners’ strike; to the young politician who felt the London-based media never “got” him; and the maturing one who was never at the heart of Ed Miliband’s operation. Others say he has forgotten how snugly he fitted into a young generation of Westminster New Labourites, in the days when he played centre-forward for the Demon Eyes team alongside David Miliband, Ed Balls and James Purnell. They ask whether his real game plan is heading back to London. (In August, the Guardian’s Helen Pidd asked him if he would still swap places with Johnson, and he conceded: “There’s no point in me saying I wouldn’t”).

Whether or not a ticket back to London is the Burnham plan, the way he has handled this crisis might make it more difficult for anyone to rule from the capital. The Scottish National Party has shown that rallying resentment against Westminster can be a brilliant electoral strategy, albeit one with the unfortunate side-effect of turning politics into a zero-sum game. Things could get scrappy if the same style of argument becomes the path to power in the English regions. Nationalism is not the same factor of course, but in the north the resentment is just as real—sometimes for good reason. 

A fortnight after dismissing Burnham’s demands, the Prime Minister announced a nationwide lockdown accompanied by nationwide wage replacement of 80 per cent, instead of the mere 67 per cent Manchester had been offered. What had been unaffordable for the north alone turned out, by some strange arithmetic, to be affordable for the country as a whole. 

Should Manchester’s hospitals collapse under weight of Covid-19 in the coming weeks, Burnham’s stock could sink. But even then, the few days of delay on locking down caused by his standoff could draw less ire than the long weeks of sluggishness from the PM. Betting on reputations amid a fast-moving crisis is rash. But one former government insider, who was at one time a decided Burnham sceptic, predicts that he is likely to emerge from this episode as “a politician of the very top rank.” He has certainly shown that elected mayors, who for a long time looked like a gimmick, could end up disrupting our politics in ways that their establishment creators would never have imagined.