Andrew Gilligan: If Labour think Burnham is the answer, they might need to look again at the question

Andrew Gilligan is a writer and former No10 adviser.

I’m watching Andy Burnham’s arrival as Our Next Prime Minister-In-Waiting with a kind of bemusement.

Could this be the guy who lost by 19 to 59 per cent in a leadership contest against… Jeremy Corbyn?

Is this the same Burnham who attacks the “Westminster establishment,” after himself following the classic breadcrumb trail of Oxbridge, parliamentary researcher, quango administrator, special adviser, MP, Cabinet minister and shadow over his 23 years in SW1’s Postcode Of Shame?

It shows not just what trouble Keir Starmer is in, but the amazing halo effect of being a metro mayor.

One day you’re a member of – well – the Westminster establishment, abused by the press for, say, your refusal as health secretary to call a full public inquiry into the Stafford Hospital scandal (or your earlier decision, as a junior minister, to move forward the trust’s foundation status, giving it greater autonomy even as it was killing people.)

And then you’re a mayor, facing almost no scrutiny and uncritically covered by fawning local newspapers.

Last year, indeed, the political editor of one of those papers, the Liverpool Echo’s Liam Thorp, ghost-wrote a book, described as “half-memoir, half-manifesto,” for Burnham and Steve Rotheram, the metro mayors he is supposed to be covering.

Even the New Statesman found it jarring how this opus “relentlessly portrays Burnham and Rotheram as downtrodden heroes fighting injustices meted out by Tory governments” while doing “little to acknowledge the nuanced reality behind the ‘London elite’  vs ‘neglected north’ caricatures… An us-against-the-world subculture gives Liverpool its edge, but when the trope is employed so repetitively by politicians it begins to grate.”

As part of the unjust Tory government, No10 transport adviser to Boris Johnson, I actually worked quite hard to help Burnham, fighting off pressure from one of the big bus companies who wanted us to stop what became perhaps his signature achievement, local control of the buses.

And most of his improvements were, in fact, paid for by us; we started a large new fund for the metro mayors to invest in their local transport. (Recently, I sat in Bolton’s lovely Olympus fish-and-chip restaurant, which has a pianist on Saturdays and is also right by the bus station, counting how many of the new yellow buses had the “funded by HM Government” logo on them, as they’re meant to. Some, is the answer.)

Boris and I knew that Burnham would take much of the credit for the bus improvements, though we’d have been tougher on claiming our share if we were still in office. But we just thought it was the right policy, which had succeeded in London, helped working people who needed our help and got vastly more folk in the capital travelling by bus. The Manchester scheme has been a big PR success for Burnham, and has done real good on the ground – but not as much as in London, because he and the local councils simply weren’t willing to make the difficult decisions that London did, taking out road space and parking for bus lanes.

Even a nice new bus isn’t much use if it’s still stuck in traffic.

That’s sort of the story with Andy Burnham. I liked him as a person. I found him straightforward to deal with. Unlike, say, Sadiq Khan, he respected confidences and kept promises. But he’s not your guy for even slightly difficult decisions.

In 2022, though he’d recently won a mayoral election by a 48-point margin, and though Manchester has some of the country’s worst asthma and lung disease, he didn’t feel quite strong enough to do even a modest charge, in a tiny part of the city, to clean up the filthiest taxis and trucks. Now, his leadership pitch includes that new easy, magic answer – a wealth tax, which would probably cost more than it raised.

If Burnham reached No10, normal scrutiny of him would instantly resume. We desperately need better leaders. But I’m not sure he’d be found any more decisive, or more purposeful, than the man he wants to replace.