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Andy Burnham barely put on his headphones in time for Dave from Rochdale to put a flea in his ear. “Good afternoon Andy,” said the first person to call BBC Radio Manchester, before noting that Burnham was “not the flavor of the month” in London. “Basically,” he said, “should I consider quitting?”
Burnham thought not, and Janet de Bolton agreed. “Hi Andy,” he said. “You have done everything possible. How do you feel about yourself? “
“Completely shattered,” Burnham replied, and even his biggest critics would understand why. Over the past fortnight, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, who since taking office has had to deal with a terrorist attack, an austerity-fueled financial crisis and the alarming vision that his former Leigh headquarters was occupied by a conservative for first time. – has found itself at the center of a fierce battle for central government funding as the region enters level 3 coronavirus restrictions.
At the end of the negotiations, the mayor was asking for 65 million pounds and the government offering 60 million; then, at least in the Burnham camp account, the government shut it down. During a press conference on the steps of Bridgewater Hall, Burnham accused Boris Johnson of “playing poker with people’s lives” and was interrupted when he was shown an email stating funding of just £ 22 million to describe the measure as “brutal” and “downright shameful.” ”.
One reporter called him a “showboat” and Jacob Rees-Mogg claimed he was “stingy and obnoxious.” But if the crowd that gathered and cheered as he spoke was any measure, the people of Mancun disagreed. Eventually, the £ 60 million was found, and while no one would say that Burnham had succeeded, no one could deny that they had heard him.
If his opponents see him as an opportunist, Burnham’s defenders suggest that the coronavirus crisis and the accompanying sensation of an English division have established him as exactly the voice that the north of England, not just Greater Manchester, needs.
“The role suits Andy, he certainly has the experience, the reputation, the popular position to make it his own,” said Lucy Powell, a Labor MP from Manchester Central. “Without him in that job, I’m not sure it would have worked the same way.”
By all accounts, Burnham is in his element, conducting endless Zoom meetings and media interviews from his son’s attic bedroom and taking the hour-long bike ride to Manchester once a week to work in an office. almost deserted.
In a feverish political climate, he has largely maintained unity between council leaders and local MPs whose backing he needs, including the Conservatives. A person present at a council leaders meeting considering their response to the government’s latest offer remembers Bolton’s conservative council leader David Greenhalgh, summing up the mood in the room by saying, “What a group shit.”
Greenhalgh eventually agreed to negotiate a separate deal for Bolton. But overall, even those who are not instinctively aligned with Burnham have seen his approach as effective.
“His attempts to paint himself as the champion of the north can sometimes sound a little hollow and sound like public relations,” said James Schneider, Jeremy Corbyn’s former director of strategic communications. “And it can sometimes lead him to have a much more thoughtful, interesting and surprising politics than the rest of his part of the party. For the moment, it has been quite perfect ”.
A search for articles by the name of Burnham and “king of the north” in the last week returned 21 results, with only three mentioning his tabs. These days, a ship that seemed to have set sail has reappeared on the horizon: time and again, he is asked if he would finally like to be prime minister.
In its early days in New Labor, such questions seemed unlikely. As special advisor in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and center forward for the “Demon Eyes” soccer team, he was seen as an effective operator, but with the Milibands, Ed Balls and James Purnell around, he was never the player of gold. boy.
“He was a very nice guy with a good brain and had more Labor authenticity than a lot of the posh Southerners,” said Tim Allan, a Demon Eyes teammate and former adviser to Tony Blair, who later founded the Portland public relations agency. . “You would have said that he would have stayed, being involved, but not that he would have gone on to lead Greater Manchester. But many of the most obvious superstars of that era are simply no longer on stage. “
Burnham was smart, ambitious, and perhaps a victim of his own success. Chris Smith, his boss at DCMS, says his former protégé has done “an extraordinary job” in the last fortnight “with real passion and authority.” But, he suggests, his rapid rise through the ranks left him in a straitjacket.
“Maybe it was a disadvantage for him that his talent saw him promoted so early,” Smith said. “I think one of his mistakes for a while was not allowing the passion we’ve seen in the last few days to manifest. He felt he had to be the identical politician, always looking over his shoulder. “
If the lowest point of his orthodoxy was what Schneider called a “very stupid right-wing campaign” during his second bid for Labor leadership in 2015, in which he missed the mood of the members so colossally that he launched it in Ernst & Young with the promise that “the entrepreneur will be both our hero and the nurse,” was also a blessing in disguise. (A source close to Burnham said the memory “still pierces my heart”).
“He was trying to climb the pole, wasn’t he? In my early years in politics,” Burnham told GQ last year. “I was. I wanted to ‘move on’. It was later that I started to re-evaluate a lot of things.”
The transition to mayor was perhaps as pragmatic as it was idealistic. “One of Andy’s gifts is convincing himself that what’s best for him is also the right thing to do,” said a cabinet member in Ed Miliband’s shadow.
But Margaret Aspinall, the Hillsborough activist who befriended Burnham through her pivotal work on that cause, dismisses that opinion. “He is absolutely true to his convictions,” he said. “Many politicians give you tea and sympathy and then slam the door in your face. He fought for us. “
If that boxing has garnered national attention in the past fortnight, it has been a fair feature of Burnham’s political style for some time. “I think we have lost the art of anger,” he said in that GQ interview. “I only found my anger at the end of my parliamentary career.”
Released like this to speak for himself and his region, would he really leave it for another chance at Westminster? Like Johnson when he was mayor of London, he has both, telling interviewers that he hopes his current role will be “my last job in politics” but that he “wouldn’t rule it out.”
A current Labor leader sees the misunderstanding as a mere reflection. “I suspect that he no longer has serious ambitions to lead the party and, of course, that is enormously liberating,” he said. “It is not calculating, it is just being, and that is why it is working. It has been a long time since the North has had such a powerful voice. “
