Even insiders don’t know what Burnham has planned for Britain

LONDON — If everything goes right for Andy Burnham, the challenger to Prime Minister Keir Starmer will win a by-election, a Labour leadership contest and then the keys to 10 Downing Street before winter comes.

Yet this would only be the start of the battle for the politician nicknamed “King of the North.” Becoming the U.K. prime minister weeks or months after returning to parliament after almost a decade away would be a transition at a speed unprecedented in postwar Britain — and it leaves a heap of unanswered questions about what a Burnham government would look like.

The Greater Manchester mayor’s pitch is to turn his philosophy of “Manchesterism” — devolving power and money to regional leaders, gaining public control of transport infrastructure and partnering with private industry — into a national program. He has evangelized state involvement in housing and an emphasis on non-university education.

But getting Britain out of its current hole will be far more complex than that.

Burnham’s disparate groupings of allies are already diverging on what direction he should take. There are questions about how left wing he will really be.

Meanwhile, the veteran Labour politician is outlining the rest of his vision in real time, fleshing out his views on tax and foreign policy while not yet officially running for No. 10 — and receiving no help from the national civil service, which is routinely offered to incoming PMs, to thrash out his platform. If he wins, he will have to balance his calls for radical reform with a Whitehall system that is slow to act, and an inherited agenda based on a Labour manifesto he backed two years ago.

Even if he manages to wrangle all that, he’ll have less than three years to get it all under way before the next general election.

“I think his big ideas are very ready, and we’ve all seen him talking about them,” said one person who has worked with Burnham, granted anonymity — like six other allies of the mayor quoted in this piece — to speak frankly. But they added: “I think that, except probably in areas [like housing] where he’s already been right down in the weeds of the detail as mayor, there’s a lot of thinking still to be done.” 

“I wouldn’t be surprised if what we end up seeing is a massive vibe shift and not much of a policy shift,” said a second person who has worked with Burnham. “I think he believes, probably correctly, that he can turn a lot of it around on vibes and personality alone.”

The foreign policy question 

Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram, a long-time personal friend of Burnham, said: “Andy’s probably one of the most extremely intelligent people that I’ve ever met in my life. He’s got huge capacity to understand geopolitics.”

Yet Burnham’s most significant hurdle is that his remit in Manchester can only take him so far. He has said little to nothing of his intentions on foreign policy or defense.

There are signals. This week he clarified his comment last September that he hoped Britain would rejoin the European Union in his lifetime, saying arguments about Brexit would trap Britain in a “permanent rut.”

Burnham heading to a March 31 Downing Street mayors’ meeting with Liverpool Mayor Steve Rotheram, who says the leadership contender has “huge capacity to understand geopolitics.” | Justin Tallis/WPA Pool/Getty Images

And Burnham called for a “relentless domestic focus in this period. Let’s fix our own country.”

Allies took this as a swipe at Starmer, who has pitched much of his premiership on being a global fixer, though it is also convenient for the by-election in Makerfield, where Burnham is facing the right-wing nationalist Reform UK. 

A third person who has worked with Burnham predicted he would do the “bare minimum” of foreign policy if he becomes PM. “I think Andy would be the complete opposite [of Starmer] and want to do as little foreign travel as humanly possible,” this person said. “His foreign secretary will be quite a big appointment because they would have to be much more active.”

A fourth person who has worked with Burnham said that might be a plus when it comes to winning the next general election against the insurgent Reform Party. “I know it’s a banal thing, but we’ve not had a northern prime minister for a really long time, unless you count Rishi Sunak,” this person said. (Sunak represented a leafy Yorkshire constituency but is from the south of England.) “It does matter, because every weekend conversation … will be migration, housing, cost of living, dirty high streets, antisocial behaviour. Great — we win on those, we win the country.”

The first person who has worked with Burnham said it is deeper than raw electoral politics. This person said Burnham sees many policy issues through two main lenses — rewiring the economy and bringing communities together.

As such, he is not totally off the world stage. As mayor, he has carved out time in his diary to see diplomats — in part because Manchester has the most consulates of any English city apart from London. And he has been on trade missions to the United States, Japan and Singapore. One person who works with the mayor’s office said another trip is planned for India in the fall.

Leader-level geopolitics will be unavoidable. Burnham would start at square one with U.S. President Donald Trump, whose relationship with Starmer has turned from friendly to frosty. At least he has something in common with Canada’s Mark Carney — they both support Everton Football Club.

Oddly enough, viewing foreign engagement through the lens of economic growth could lead to Burnham’s approach resembling Starmer’s, said the third person quoted above: “I don’t think he is ideological about foreign policy. I think he’s got a set of principles and then his position would be, what’s in the interests of the rest of the U.K.?”

The focus on the economy extends to areas such as defense. While Burnham floated the idea of borrowing outside the U.K.’s fiscal rules to find a boost in defense spending — a position his team walked back this week — he has not set out an overarching defense vision. A fifth person who has worked with the mayor predicted Burnham would see defense through the lens of “an industrial opportunity” for investment, rather than geopolitics.

It can take in green technology too. Burnham has sung the praises of local renewable energy storage projects and has an aim for Greater Manchester to be carbon neutral by 2038. He is an ally of Ed Miliband, the energy secretary and a net zero evangelist, who many MPs believe could become his chancellor if Burnham enters No. 10.

100-day plan for government

Yet even as he straightens out these policies, Burnham faces an enormous list of practical hurdles before he can make them happen.

The first hurdle is bandwidth. 

A betting company’s odds on contenders to be the next leader of Britain’s Labour party on Whitehall in central London on May 12. | Brook Mitchell/AFP via Getty Images

Rotheram told POLITICO Burnham’s “full attention” is on the June 18 by-election in Makerfield, northwest England, to win a parliamentary seat. Yet POLITICO reported Tuesday that people around Burnham are working on a plan for his first 100 days in No. 10, which is likely to include reforms to England’s social care system.

A sixth person who has worked with Burnham said his allies are quietly carrying out three pieces of work in parallel — on the by-election, any leadership election and a transition to government. “They’ve got to be done and knitted together in a way that works for the particular audience in Makerfield, the Labour Party and then in the country,” the person said.

The second hurdle is time. 

If Burnham emerges victorious in Makerfield, MPs who back him are braced for a leadership contest soon after, which centrist former Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said he would fight too. Yet it remains plausible that Starmer and Streeting both back down, crowning Burnham as prime minister within days — as happened to Sunak in 2022.

“I don’t know how much thinking Andy has done about what comes next,” said the third person who has worked with Burnham: “He definitely needs to think about what happens if he’s sworn in [as an MP] on the Monday and becomes prime minister within a week — it’s possible. At the moment I would be quite worried. There is still time to get it right.”

The third hurdle is what he’ll inherit from Starmer. 

The sitting PM has an in-tray full to the brim with his own agenda. King Charles III outlined 34 proposed bills to parliament last week, many of them based on Labour’s 2024 election-winning manifesto. Burnham would face a dilemma about what to deprioritize or whether to bring forward his own king’s speech.

“He wants to make an impact very fast,” said the first person who has worked with Burnham quoted above. “If he’s walking into No. 10, we want to see big announcements of deliverable, achievable, pragmatic and visionary policy.”

Yet the fourth person who has worked with Burnham said: “There is a lot in the king’s speech that he agrees with, and there will be some wariness about departing too far. 

“There will be an early choice about how much licence to take in doing things where the demand for a fresh mandate would be pretty overwhelming. There is a debate about how much risk he’s willing to take if an early general election is on the cards. That’s not settled.”

That brings Burnham to his fourth problem — Whitehall. He has talked of overhauling the way Westminster works, yet Starmer’s allies have long complained that when they pull a lever in the civil service, nothing happens.

Burnham would have to decide how quickly to take on major structural reform. He has suggested scrapping the first-past-the-post voting system, replacing Britain’s unelected House of Lords with a senate of nations and regions and even ditching the system of whipping MPs to vote with their party. Rows over these would gum up other policies.

British Health Secretary and potential leadership contender Wes Streeting at the State Opening of Parliament at the Palace of Westminster in London on May 13, 2026. | Toby Melville/WPA Pool/Getty Images

And that leads to Burnham’s fifth dilemma: how radical he can really be — or wants to be. 

Burnham condemned “40 years of neoliberalism” this week and said a vote for him “will be a vote to change Labour;” he talked on Saturday about “public control” of water and energy utilities. But others around him say part of Manchester’s success has been partnership with private industry.

Henri Murison, chief executive of the business-led think tank the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said Greater Manchester has the fastest-growing productivity of any city region in England and has started to close the gap with London. But that “doesn’t easily correspond to a right-left traditional political hierarchy,” he said. “Those foundations are based on an economically compelling understanding of what drives that productivity, rather than a strictly factional, party political view of the world.”

The second person who has worked with Burnham said: “There is a lot of mythology around Andy. I think he’s someone who goes with the wind, and I mean that as a compliment — he is adaptive and a bit of a chameleon.”

Not for nothing does a longstanding Labour Party joke go as follows: A Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walk into a pub. The barman asks: “What’re you drinking, Andy?”

The sixth person who has worked with Burnham added: “Clearly there’s got to be prioritization — both short-term policy stuff, but also structural reform of democratic, political and economic systems. All of those are very difficult judgments which are going to test his leadership skills; a mix between idealism and pragmatism.

“[But] isn’t going back to do the same old thing. Some things will be trimmed down, some things will be boosted up, but the overall thrust of where he’s going is definitely going to be a big change agenda.”

Working out the detail

For now, many of the answers are stuck in detail that will only be worked out much later.

Burnham has called for “much bolder action” on social media for under-16s, but not said outright what he would do (many Labour MPs favor a ban). 

He is standing on a joint ticket between Labour and the Co-operative Party, which backs diverse forms of public ownership such as mutualization. This could see water companies run for the benefit of members without paying dividends to shareholders, rather than fully nationalized.

Either route would still cost money and hoover up bandwidth. Rotheram told POLITICO: “It will need a change in legislation, and million and one other things. So the intention is one thing and the delivery will be something else.”

There is much, much more. Burnham told the Telegraph newspaper in September that the 10 percent tax rate for lower earners — scrapped in 2008 — was “innovative.” He recently called for “a root and branch review of land and property taxation overall,” including council tax, a residential property tax which is based on valuations from the early 1990s. In 2024 he called for the right for tenants to buy their council homes to be paused, and in 2023 called for a freeze on private sector rents.

Burnham’s allies are now debating how far to take these positions. Some will be warily pondering the words of Richard Leese, the long-serving former leader of Manchester City Council. He said in 2014: “As an unabashed socialist, I am concerned with the distribution of wealth — but if you don’t create any in the first place it is a bit of an empty discussion.”

Yet for now, everything is frozen in limbo. There is no leadership contest; there is no Burnham prime ministership. There is only a by-election in Makerfield to elect a backbench Labour MP. At least, that is the official line.

A spokesperson for Burnham said in response to this article: “Andy is fully focused on working hard for every vote in Makerfield so he can represent them in Parliament. 

“Andy is not standing on a national manifesto at this election; he is standing to make a difference for the people of Makerfield and to bring the change he has delivered in Greater Manchester to the national stage.”

The policy questions will haunt Burnham for some time yet.