Sir Keir Starmer resigned as Leader of the Labour Party on 22 June 2026, a day before the 10th anniversary of the Brexit Referendum. Later in the day, Andy Burnham, newly-elected Labour MP for Makerfield, made his way to London from Manchester and took his parliamentary oath in the House of Commons. A replacement Prime Minister has yet to be named. Starmer will continue in the interim as a caretaker-the sixth postholder in the decade after the referendum, and the shortest-serving Labour Premier of all time, having served 717 days in the nation’s highest office. It seems highly likely, however, that Burnham will succeed him as 59th Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland by mid-July, as he is catapulted from a by-election directly to the top political position in the country, bypassing a formal leadership contest. If chosen, Andy Burnham will inherit the poisoned chalice of the British Prime Ministership, which has become more akin to the managership of a Premier League football team, as incumbents come and go, replaced at the slightest provocation.
The new arrival on the Westminster scene was born Andrew Murray Burnham in January 1970 Old Roan, near Aintree, a northern suburb of the city of Liverpool in what is now the administrative county of Merseyside. He was one of three sons of a Post Office (later BT engineer) and a receptionist. A year after his birth, his parents moved to Culcheth, a Cheshire village which lies conveniently halfway between Liverpool and Manchester. He attended St. Aelred’s Catholic High School, a comprehensive school in Newton-le-Willows, and went on to study English at Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge, where he met his future wife, Dutch-born Marie-France van Heel.
By all accounts, Burnham can be considered a career politician. He began attending Labour Party meetings at the age of 14, and officially joined the party a year later. He was first elected MP for Leigh, in Greater Manchester, in 2001, after spending three years as a special adviser to Chris Smith, Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport. He joined the Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 2007. Posts as Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport (2008-2009) and Secretary of State for Health (2009-2010) followed in quick succession, giving him little opportunity to make his mark. Following the Labour debacle in the 2010 General Election, he came fourth out of five candidates in the Labour Party leadership contest. In the 2015 leadership contest, he came second to Jeremy Corbyn. Burnham stood down as MP in 2017 after becoming the Labour candidate for the Mayoralty of Greater Manchester.
Andy Burnham made his name as Mayor of Greater Manchester between May 2017 and June 2026, a period during which he was anointed the “King of the North.” He became the first directly elected leader of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) in 2017, and was re-elected in 2021 and 2024, when he won in all ten boroughs of the unitary body. The GMCA runs the UK’s second most populous metropolitan region after London. Burnham’s leadership was tested during the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 and during the COVID lockdown, when his efforts to secure a fairer deal for the city were widely appreciated.
Burnham resigned as mayor on 19 June 2026 to contest the by-election in the Greater Manchester constituency of Makerfield, where an opening was created when the sitting Labour MP, Josh Simons, voluntarily stepped down in May 2026 to make way for his candidacy. It is worth noting that Burnham had been blocked from standing in an earlier by-election in Gorton & Denton in February 2026 by the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party in an 8-1 vote, at the instigation of Keir Starmer. Burnham won more votes in Makerfield than all other candidates combined, receiving 24, 927 votes (54.8% of the vote), with a turnout of 58.8%, to 15, 696 votes for the second-placed Reform UK candidate. His overwhelming victory strengthened the case for Burnham’s bid for Labour Party leadership.
Burnham’s selling point is his so-called “Manchesterism”, a political philosophy that simultaneously supports economic growth and social uplift in the deindustrialised metropolis and seeks to attract investment in local industry. Between 2015 and 2023, Manchester became the UK’s fastest-growing sub-regional economy, with an annual growth rate of 3.1%, and the highest average annual growth in labour productivity of 2.0%. According to the GMCA, this growth in economic output has been largely driven by the services sector. Manchester’s services sector comprises both non-tradeable (hospitality, retail, care) and tradeable (business and financial services, creative industries) services, while the manufacturing sector is too small to drive growth. The city’s universities serve as hubs of innovation, in partnership with industry. Despite the good news, high-value activity in the manufacturing and service sectors remains unevenly distributed, being concentrated in four southerly local authorities.
Among Manchester’s notable successes are the Bee Network, an integrated and expanding transport network that brings together public transport (buses, trams, and light rail services), and active transport (cycling, walking, and wheeling routes) throughout Greater Manchester. Fittingly, the worker bee happens to be the emblem of the city. Investment in the transport infrastructure has improved local connectivity, thereby facilitating the construction of affordable housing projects and high-quality office workspaces on derelict land in well-connected areas.
Burnham supports devolution and local autonomy, being opposed to over-concentration of political power in the “Westminster Bubble.” He is an advocate for levelling-up policies for reducing regional inequalities. He has also spoken out in support of renationalisation of some public services and utilities. His calls for fairness and social justice make him a progressive “lefty” in the eyes of the suspicious right-wing media. He does, however, support the restrictive immigration control measures adopted by the current Home Secretary. As we await details of Burnham’s fiscal policy, his energy strategy, his views on welfare reform, and his defence and foreign policy priorities, it is all a question of whether his regional successes can be translated into a wider national arena, which, unlike Greater Manchester, is not conducive to cross-party consensus and working.
Were Andy Burnham to take over as Prime Minister, as widely expected, he will have to contend with a Britain that is “not working”, crippled as it is by decades of structural issues that have stifled progress. One hopes that he will be given a chance to make his mark, instead of having to follow his predecessors through the revolving door at the helm of the nation. In his favour, he appears to be more connected with public opinion than Starmer ever appeared to be. It must be said, however, that an impatient British public, keen for results, is unlikely to oblige him with the traditional honeymoon accorded its new leaders. Action that produces tangible outcomes is called for.
Ashis Banerjee