The Andy Burnham I know
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This is The Guardian.
Today, the Andy Burnham I know.
It's August 2020 and Andy Burnham and I are sitting on a bench in a park near where he lives in Wigan, watching the Ducks. We're deep in Covid, which is why we're meeting outside rather than in his office. It's sunny, he's wearing Birkenstocks. He's relaxed but frustrated. Would you swap places, Boris Johnson, if somebody did say... There you go, wave a magic wand. Would you want to be Prime Minister?
Yeah, of course.
Even right now, at this point in history, I would think it'd be awful. No easy solutions.
There's no point in me saying no, because I've tried to lead the Labour Party in the past, and therefore I've tried to want to be Prime Minister in the past.
Yeah, but I wondered if you've changed your mind on that.
No, although what I've changed my mind upon is the way in which power needs to be distributed around... this country you know it doesn't work i mean i think we've seen it again the model of government doesn't work that the kind of overall structure of a top-down we'll decide in whitehall and we'll just throw stuff out at you all it doesn't work it's it never did and it definitely doesn't work now um back then i was the guardians north of england editor and burnham was three years into his stint as the mayor of greater manchester
I think you can hear it in my voice that I was pretty surprised to hear that he still harboured ambitions to be the Prime Minister. I'm not too proud to admit that I thought back then, good luck with that. I thought he'd missed the boat and that his path back to Westminster was too difficult. How wrong I was. On Monday, Andy Burnham will move into Downing Street. But what kind of Prime Minister will he be? To answer that question, I'm going to talk to the people who've worked closest with Andy Burnham, from his Cambridge professor to his new Labour mentor, all through the Corbyn years to his rebirth as the King of the North. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd. Today in Focus, Britain's next Prime Minister by the people who know him best.
Andrew Murray Burnham was born in Liverpool in 1970.
In the garden of number 10, Conservative leader Edward Heath with his new cabinet. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Ian McLeod... April 10th, 1970. Today, Beatle Paul McCartney announced that the Beatles are breaking up. Here's the news...
The middle of three boys, born to Roy, a telephone engineer, and Eileen, a receptionist. The family lived in Culcheth, a village on the border between Merseyside, Cheshire and Greater Manchester. And they were sports mad. Burnham played cricket for Lancashire Schoolboys and was a fanatic Everton supporter. But he was academic too. One of the brightest students at St Allred's Catholic High School in Newton-le-Willows in Merseyside. It was there, aged 15, that he joined the Labour Party. And it was where he was encouraged to apply to Cambridge. Reluctantly, according to his old headteacher, who said that the young Burnham didn't think it was for people like him.
I didn't think this guy's going to be prime minister. I guess somebody seeing David Cameron or Michael Heseltine as a student might have known where they were going. I did definitely think this guy's going to be okay in life.
This is John Mullen, a professor of English at University College London. But over 32 years ago, he taught English literature to Andy Burnham at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
I interviewed him for entrance to Cambridge and I do remember... I believe that he was quite smartly dressed. I mean, it's a generalisation, but I think it's only overconfident candidates from a certain kind of perhaps more privileged background who have the gall to dress casually. I'm pretty sure I remember him wearing a jacket and tie. He was quite earnest and serious about the whole thing, but obviously had a sense of humour. I mean, he was confident enough to laugh at things sometimes in the interview. And I do also remember that my colleague Ruth, who was a medievalist, really took a shine to him. I think he was quite keen on Chaucer.
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