Andy Burnham ran to be Labour leader in 2010, and again five years later, so it would be hard to say that his leadership ambitions now are completely opportunistic. “The thing that’s different about Burnham from most candidates is that he’s never denied it,” Pippa said. “The usual response if they’re asked is to say that there isn’t a vacancy. But he decided quite early on to be more honest about it. He’s said that he wouldn’t have run for leadership twice if he wasn’t interested in the job.”
In 2023, for example, he told the Daily Telegraph that he wanted Starmer to win the election – but that “I can foresee a day where I could return … if the party thinks well maybe it is your time, I wouldn’t turn away from that.”
That has always made him an anxiety-inducing blot on the landscape for the incumbent leader – but the road to No 10 is a very difficult one. “He probably has an idea of how it could work,” Pippa said. “But he doesn’t have complete control of how to make it a reality.”
Why is everyone suddenly talking about his prospects?
Angela Rayner’s cabinet departure has increased speculation over Starmer’s future, partly because of the questions it has raised about his judgment, alongside the disastrous handling of the Peter Mandelson scandal. But it has also opened up space for Burnham, if he can find a way back into parliament – because the two of them occupied the same “soft left” lane of the party, the fuzzily defined territory occupied by those who were unconvinced by Jeremy Corbyn but are turned off by Starmer’s attempts to compete with Reform and the Conservatives on immigration and welfare.
“It suddenly becomes much more realistic with her out of the picture,” Pippa said. “She was the most obvious successor, and she is on the soft left of the party. That’s Burnham’s constituency now.”
What kind of leader would he be?
When Burnham ran for leader in 2015, he missed the mood of the party membership – which, you will remember, chose Jeremy Corbyn in a landslide – as calamitously as anyone. Where Corbyn ran on an uncompromising anti-austerity message, Burnham launched his campaign at the London headquarters of accounting giant EY (previously Ernst and Young) with a promise to support welfare cuts.
He strikes a very different tone today. “Running Greater Manchester has fundamentally reshaped his politics,” Pippa said. “He’s seen up close how housing and transport interventions can change people’s lives.” Cynics might ask if he has also reached a different view of where the political opening now lies. As a former shadow cabinet member told me for this 2020 piece: “One of Andy’s gifts is to convince himself that the best thing for him also happens to be the right thing to do.”
Burnham has been setting the tone of a leadership bid for a while – most notably in May, at an event hosted by soft-left pressure group Compass, when he argued that if the opposition at the next election will be “the divisive, populist right”, then “we must be the unifying, popular left”. He opposed the government’s vexed welfare cuts bill, and has argued that the spate of St George’s flags appearing on roads across England are an attempt to “seek confrontation” – another sharp contrast with Starmer’s approach.
A new Compass-backed political network, Mainstream, launched last week – the day after Burnham appeared on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg to say that Starmer needed to start listening to Labour MPs and be “less factional and more pluralistic”. Mainstream has Burnham’s endorsement, and “it could be a vehicle to organise, fundraise and develop policy if he runs,” Pippa said.
While its policy offering is so far fairly scant, its website highlights Labour members’ support for a wealth tax and an end to the two-child benefit limit. Mainstream has also been strikingly hostile to Starmer’s leadership, accusing Starmer’s Labour of putting “party factions’ interest before your party and before the country” at a deniable degree of distance from Burnham himself.
What support does he have within the party?
If Burnham was looking for reasons to seek the leadership again, he would have found them in his popularity with Labour party members. Polls like this one regularly find him the most popular candidate, with a lead that Rayner’s exit is likely to have increased; he is also the most popular candidate among those who voted Labour at the last election.
To reach the membership stage of a leadership contest, Burnham would first have to secure the support of 20% of MPs – and not being in Westminster might put him at a disadvantage. “He has his supporters on the backbenches, but there’s not a campaign ready and waiting,” Pippa said.
But with candidates on the right like Wes Streeting looming, others might turn to Burnham: “If he looks like a winner and staves off something else, there are plenty who could live with him. I’ve spoken to women MPs who have really felt it needs to be a woman who now say, we need the best person available.”
What obstacles are in his way?
Only one, really, but it’s absolutely massive: to run for the leadership, he would first have to become an MP again – and Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney has exercised an iron grip over the party’s selection process through his allies on the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC).
If the leader’s position looked more secure, and Burnham had the leisure to wait for a seat to come up organically, it might be politically impossible to deny him one – but as it is, Burnham will probably have to admit that he is running with an eye on the leadership. He will also need the cooperation of a friendly Manchester MP ready to give up their seat (and their career) – before Christmas, if he doesn’t want to risk the bandwagon rolling on in unpredictable ways, or even Starmer’s resignation coming before he is in place to run.
“There are a couple of MPs who might stand down, perhaps in return for a future peerage,” Pippa said. (Graham Stringer and Andrew Gwynne, who was suspended last year over offensive WhatsApp messages, have both been mentioned.) “But it would still be incredibly difficult. Even with the vast majority of local party members behind [Burnham], McSweeney’s control of the NEC means that he can be blocked. Burnham can say that this a denial of democracy, but McSweeney is not likely to care.”
If he gets the nomination, some of the seats that might be options may also appear a lot less safe than they once did, with Reform doing well in Manchester and Nigel Farage beating his chest about the possibility of exacting a “humiliating” defeat.
Can they be overcome?
If Burnham can’t beat Reform in Manchester, you might argue, there’s not much point in him becoming leader anyway. “He is such a big name there, and there’s a huge amount of personal affection even among people disaffected with Labour,” Pippa said. “So I think he can overcome that threat if he gets the right seat.”
McSweeney’s blocking ability could still be terminal to his prospects. But if the embattled chief of staff’s departure turns out to be the price of Starmer’s survival, it’s not at all clear what would happen to the faction he controls on the NEC – and if the body’s members conclude that the tide is going out on Starmer, his ability to control them might dissipate anyway.
“As long as he’s there and empowered, it’s very difficult for Burnham,” Pippa said. “But if that changes, or the NEC reaches the point of disillusionment with Starmer that some MPs are at, then all bets are off.”
