Newsletter #80: Andy Burnham's car-crash profile(?) with the New Statesman
On this showing, Reform has nothing to worry about
Good morning.
On 3 June, the New Statesman’s Ailbhe Rea wrote an interesting profile on aspiring representative for the local area, Andy Burnham. It did not go well.
This newsletter’s agenda: Andy Burnham’s car-crash profile(?) with the New Statesman (full feature).
The profile gives us very little idea of where things stand in Makerfield. But it does give us a good idea of whether Andy Burnham would make a good Prime Minister.
The first thing that immediately comes across is the fact that Burnham is extremely tetchy, and responds very poorly to any criticism — or indeed, even the lightest of push-back. Most politicians are already used to being criticised, often unfairly, hundreds, indeed thousands of times more than any normal person. It’s draining, but it’s an inherent part of the job. You just have to get used to it. Perhaps back in ancient history, when Burnham was a vaguely indeterminate New Labour figure, he also had gotten used to criticism. But in 2026, he has long since shed any such thick skin. Burnham has created a borderline North Korean media environment in Manchester, where anything other than sycophantic praise is anathema.
He even has a weekly show on BBC Radio Manchester in which listeners call in to tell him how great he is. Manchester Evening News, by far the dominant local news outlet in circulation, was known to have been an arm of the Burnham Regime. While the overall editorial line has perhaps softened (with headlines such as: ‘We spent three hours walking around Hindley and couldn’t find a single woman voting Reform’) as Burnham has reemerged as an actively political figure, rather than merely a local despot, the comments sections to some of these articles have very clearly hardened against Burnham. That is, where the comments sections are not disabled. I suppose if Kim Jong Un left North Korea to become the President of China, weeping adulation would also quite soon turn to rage. Even Starmer, himself a thin-skinned lawyer who has spent very little of his life in politics (which explains a lot), handles criticism better than Burnham.
Ailbhe Rea notes that ‘Burnham’s critics – including some of his Labour colleagues in Westminster – argue that he has been playing politics on “easy mode” in Greater Manchester’. She cites an article by Joshi Herrmann in The Mill, a relatively new Manchester-based publication (with its newness perhaps explaining why it dared to critique the Dear Leader). Herrmann argued that Burnham, while possessing a ‘remarkable ability to connect with people and understand the political moment’ (no article on Burnham on Manchester can entirely go without praise), was ‘not a details person’, and did not have any clear understanding of what had made Manchester successful. Immediately upon hearing this very mild critique, Burnham tenses up: ‘…I tell Burnham I want to put some of Herrmann’s criticisms to him and am surprised to observe I strike a nerve. “I didn’t read it”, Burnham says, abruptly. “He’s not sympathetic, so let’s start with that.”’ As if ‘sympathy’ to someone is somehow required for them to make legitimate arguments that require a response.
There is absolutely zero evidence that Burnham will be capable of making the leap from the mayoralty – where, in fact, he has been ‘playing politics on “easy mode”’ — to Number 10. It is telling that Burnham effectively went MIA after the news story about Henry Nowak broke, disappearing for over 24 hours (a time period during which even Ed Davey and Zarah Sultana managed to provide comment) before returning to post a video of himself campaigning in Makerfield, before finally offering an extraordinarily bland, content-free comment — not on his personal account, but on his institutional Mayor of Manchester account. This is not a man who is capable of leading; of finding the way through for Labour when communicating for the left-wing cause looks tough.
Rea continues to pull on this same thread throughout her piece, albeit in a slightly less obviously confrontational manner, asking Burnham for some examples of ‘difficult decisions’ that he has had to make, rather than just doing the things that will make him popular. Burnham, we are told, again ‘…struggles not to be tetchy when I put these criticisms to him.’ When it comes to ‘difficult decisions’, he first gives going to Hillsborough on the twentieth anniversary (a near-universally popular cause) and the infected blood scandal (a near-universally popular cause except among the people currently in government who have to pay for it). ‘Most people would say if you want to be liked, you wouldn’t take on things like that’, he says, unconvincingly. While mayor, he has ‘…dealt with terrorism, wildfires, a pandemic’, Burnham informs us. But of course, as George Spencer has observed, Burnham did not ‘deal with’ terrorism or the pandemic. He just said nice words when they happened. All the other people made the difficult decisions; he just had to make do with the consequences.
