Burnham to the ground

By-election special on the contempt of unseriousness.

“I no longer live in Manchester, but Manchester lives in me.”

At around 5am each morning an email from Labour’s Media Monitoring Unit drops into the inboxes of Labour MPs and advisers. This is probably done by AI now, but it used to involve junior members of staff staying up all night reading the papers to send out a summary of the day’s news before sunrise.

My nervous system has never quite recovered from this experience and the accompanying emails, WhatsApps and phone calls that would start at 6am. It was the pre-morning routine and pre-TikTok era but first thing in the morning is not a safe space for a political adviser. Start the day off right and ‘come get ready with me’ - but instead of journaling, ice baths and meditating it’s angry emails from John McDonnell, 7am conference calls chaired by Shabana Mahmood and blazing rows with the Today programme. Anyway, I often find myself wondering what the media monitoring emails must look like these days:

• Cabinet Office investigates Cabinet Office Minister over smear campaign accusing award-winning Jewish journalist of acting for a foreign power

• Labour deselects three Hackney Councillors after calls for independent inquiry into the election of a paedophile Councillor who was Organiser of pro-Starmer Labour First group

• Southwark Cabinet Member resigns over Labour cuts that are actually bigger than Tory austerity

During one particularly rocky period a directive even went round to exclude any particularly negative stories. Yet now the Labour Press team find themselves having to decide whether to include stories about their ex-line manager Matthew Doyle being the latest Labour Lord to be caught red-handed befriending a nonce in the daily news digest.

This week I’ve been thinking about Andy Burnham and the road not taken. Well, to be more precise, I’ve been thinking about how the same people who blocked Andy Burnham from standing to be an MP in this week’s Gorton and Denton by-election appointed Peter Mandelson as US Ambassador. For a quick precis of how the Labour selection process – which we have been repeatedly assured is focused solely on ensuring that all candidates are of the highest calibre – really works please see below:

• Popular and effective Mayor of Greater Manchester who donates 15% of his salary to the homelessness charity he set up? You are not fit to be an MP.

• Best mate of international mega-nonce billionaire and convicted paedo? My liege, please be my Ambassador to Washington and tell me who my Cabinet should be.

I’ve grown to love Andy Burnham v3.0, on basically the exact same timeline as Andy Burnham becoming comfortable in his own skin as Cool Northern Dad Mayor (leaving behind v1.0 New Labour Darling and v2.0 Perpetually Strained Leadership Candidate, telling Mumsnet that his favourite biscuit is chips, beer and gravy).

I think he would be the ideal Uncle or step-Dad - sneaking you a beer in the pub, taking you to the footy in a cool shacket and a pair of Wallabees and giving you his old Joy Division and New Order albums for your birthday.

The latest chapter in the Burnham/Starmer saga reveals some truths about this government and the Labour Party:

1. The only thing that Starmer and the people around him are good at doing is fighting factional, internal Labour Party wars. Starmer likes to present himself as a serious leader and a statesman astride global affairs but he just isn’t. He joins Labour NEC Teams calls on Sunday mornings to block candidates from making the shortlist for a by-election.

2. This fact is directly linked to - and indeed a major cause of - the failure of this government. The Starmer project has been proven to not actually exist beyond purging the Left and taking back control of the Labour Party. The reason why Starmer appears aimless is because there was never a grand vision for the country or anything to cohere around beyond that modus operandi and raison d’etre.

3. A significant proportion of the Parliamentary Labour Party despises their leadership, yet not enough to do anything about it. Hence we find ourselves in this impasse which could last three months or even three years. The Parliamentary Labour Party has chosen the slow, painful death option.

Starmer’s insecurity

At the heart of the Prime Minister’s antipathy to the Mayor of Greater Manchester - probably Labour’s most successful and certainly most popular politician since 2010 - is above all else rooted in a deep insecurity.

In May 2021 I was sat across the table from the Prime Minister when the news came in that Burnham had won the Greater Manchester mayoralty by a landslide (75%). Starmer approximated then what he presents as now - a grown-up teenager, too jealous and insecure to congratulate his rival for being made Head Boy and coming top of the year.

Burnham is at once everything that Starmer is not while also being strangely similar. They talk the same language of values and football, family and growing up, but Burnham comes across as natural, authentic and comfortable in his own skin. The most arresting thing about Starmer’s miserable communication style is that he somehow even manages to talk about the things he is apparently most passionate about as if he is reading lines written by ChatGPT.

During lockdown and after the early struggles of this government the strategy and briefing from around Starmer was the same – when people see the ‘real’ Keir they will warm to him, he just needs to be himself. The opposite has proven to be true – the more people see of him, the more they dislike him. Downing Street’s attempts to wheel Starmer out on mid-morning ‘on the sofa’ TV shows, podcasts and more relaxed, personal interviews reveal a hostage victim forced to answer questions under enhanced interrogation (on a football podcast he listed ‘football’ and ‘goals’ as his favourite thing about football).

A crumb of serious analysis, please sir

The paucity of analysis that we have come to expect from our Westminster/media class has been especially abject of late, as people from North London scramble to explain what they don’t understand: the people, history, culture, demographics, politics and economy of the North of England.

The point about Andy Burnham which has not been well made or properly understood is the depth and breadth of his reach and the political, electoral and social coalition he has built in Greater Manchester. He didn’t just win every borough; he won every ward in Greater Manchester.

Greater Manchester is nothing like London. It is not actually a city at all - it is a disparate and disjointed agglomeration of cities, towns and villages - each with a long, proud history and sense of independent political and cultural identity. Someone from Bolton or Wigan sees themselves as no more Mancucian than a Scouser would.

Burnham’s success is built on this unique ability to craft, cohere and communicate a vision that cuts across these class, race and regional divides - building a coalition of people who strongly identify with him, united in a shared belief that their Mayor is on their side. The question of how Burnham has done this is not one that anyone at the top of the Labour Party or the UK media ecosystem has sought to interrogate, understand or answer.

There is no other politcian in this country who has successfully united inner-city graduates and renters in the city centre, older white voters in the ‘left-behind’ towns, Muslim voters and liberal centrist Dads who live in leafy suburbs (sorry but if you live in Altrincham and went to Manchester Grammar School that’s Cheshire). In other words Burnham has built, grown and retained the electoral coalition that Labour needs nationally and that this government has set fire to.

In London-centric terms, this is equivalent to winning a landslide amongst the Bengali community in Tower Hamlets (who will now vote Aspire, Your Party or Gaza Independents); graduates with sky-high rent and student loan repayments in places like Hackney, Camberwell and Islington (who will now vote Green); older white voters in Barking & Dagenham, Redbridge or Havering (who will now vote Reform); and rich people who live in Richmond or Wimbledon, go to Gail’s and wish that Rory Stewart would just bloody well sort things out as a sort of post-colonial beneficent Governor-General (who will now vote Lib Dem).

The fact that the power-hungry, self-interested control freaks around Starmer seek to traduce Burnham at every turn rather than learn from him tells you everything you need to know about them.

Manchester? We hardly know her

But there is a broader point here - in focusing entirely on personality there has been no consideration of Burnham’s record. He has developed a strong sense of municipal identity (not that Mancs need much help with this) by drawing a clear link between the displacement and powerlessness so many people feel and the fact that our public services have been privatised, deregulated and degraded - most notably public transport, which in the North West is an unmitigated disgrace.

The truth about Manchester’s growth is that it has been delivered by giving developers the keys to the city and letting them do what they want. Walk around Manchester and the growth is obvious and in your face but hollow - like some nice-looking furniture made out of plywood. The city was sold off to Abu Dhabi for a pittance - we got the same new-build high rises, influencers and shit brunch places but none of the sun.

Burnham has sought to prove that the state is back in business and doing things again in Manchester - housing homeless people and running the services that people rely on. But there are legitimate questions that can and should be asked.

How does appointing a property developer to Chair the Mayor’s Homelessness Charity accord with Burnham’s stated commitment to reversing privatisation, deregulation and austerity – his four horsemen of the apocalypse. What about the apparent fraud carried out by the Mayor’s close ally and former Night-time Economy Adviser Sacha Lord?

Yet instead of serious questions about policy or ideology we get London-based journalists reducing our second city into a Westminster pantomime and popularity contest. The BBC published 16 articles about Andy Burnham in the week after he was blocked from standing in Gorton and Denton (count them here), and not one offered any real analysis or anything much at all beyond personality politics and internal Labour machinations.

This is fundamentally unserious, lazy and patronising. For every journalist giddily talking up the prospect of Burnham becoming PM there has been a dearth of serious analysis of what makes him an attractive leader. What has he done and what is his record after a decade in charge of our country’s second city?

So often the treatment of Manchester by London is dripping with this implicit contempt, a sense of looking down one’s nose. The Guardian used to be written and published in Manchester, now its readers talk about the city’s Mayor as if he is some kind of foreign kitsch - tasteless and brash but he’s so popular with the natives! Sorry Andy, but your jackets will always have a special place in my heart at least.