Andy Burnham’s cult of no personality

The first days of Andy Burnham’s premiership have given the entire country a taste of what was previously the preserve of Manchester alone. Since taking office last Monday, we have watched his speeches from Downing Street, read his social-media pronouncements and witnessed the first removal of his court from London to Number 10 North in Manchester. Through it all, Burnham has displayed a curious combination of ordinary-bloke affability and the kind of seigneurial self-aggrandisement that Britain supposedly left in its feudal past.

Ordinary Joe he may be, but someone who underestimates his own abilities he is not. After he was elected MP for Makerfield, Burnham’s return to London took on the air of a restoration. His arrival at King’s Cross lacked the historical grandeur of Lenin stepping on to the platform at the Finland Station or Ayatollah Khomeini landing in revolutionary Tehran. Yet the media and the parliamentary Labour Party treated it as a watershed. Rolling news followed his train south, before Labour MPs assembled in Westminster Hall for a mass selfie.

Hot on the heels of his return from the wilderness, Burnham posted about the grooming-gang ringleader, Shabir Ahmed: ‘Like everyone, I want this vile criminal out of the country… I will ask the home and foreign secretaries to review all possible options – and they should consider nothing is off the table.’ Some may have thought this a bold statement from a backbench MP elected less than five minutes earlier. Yet note the repeated first person: ‘I want… I will…’

This tendency to announce policies as if they were his own fiats has become a striking feature of Burnham’s communication strategy as prime minister. ‘I’m choosing to end rough sleeping’, he announced. ‘I’ve done it before and I will do it again now: a £2 cap on bus fares for millions across the country’, he declared. ‘I’m giving thousands of pubs, clubs and music venues a 20 per cent cut in business rates’, he offered as largesse. ‘I have instructed my team to put a pause on the sentencing changes that were due to start in September’, he stated. Every policy appears to flow directly from Burnham himself, rather than from a cabinet, a parliament or even a government.

Nor is this merely a quirk of language. Watch Burnham move through the raggle-taggle crowd of Labour activists, lickspittles and drooling campaigners on Downing Street, after their new king’s audience with the actual sovereign. He advances as a liege lord extending his hands to the local squirearchy. Unlike his recently deposed predecessor, he can bask in the adulation, untouched by collapsing poll ratings. The crowd delighted in a man who, like Monty Python’s King Arthur, ‘hasn’t got shit all over him’.

In the same vein, there are Burnham’s much-vaunted weekly trips to Number 10 North, which have much in common with the Tudor royal progresses. These journeys allowed ordinary subjects to see their monarch, cultivating loyalty in regions distant from the court while simultaneously reinforcing the sovereign’s authority. Burnham’s own progress between Westminster and Manchester performs a similar function. For all his talk of devolution, he is hardly about to risk loosening his grip on the power base that made him.

Everything has to become part of the Burnham story. The occasion of his first visit to the ugly brutalist block chosen to house his northern away-days was marked by his telling the gathered staff that this ‘might be the best day of my life’. It’s all biography and buying into ‘me’ with little Lord Andy.

Yet what substance lies beneath this? Pronouncements and progresses are good for the time being, but time is fleeting. Promises remain contingent. No matter what Burnham says, prisoners will have to be released unless he recalls parliament, repeals the Sentencing Act and ultimately builds more prison space. The tax cuts and fare caps will need to survive a budget. Pakistan will have to have its chin tickled, or its arm twisted, before the charming Mr Ahmed wings his way home. None of this will happen just because Andy Burnham speaks it into being.

Burnham is playing a dangerous game. If ‘my government’ or ‘we’ are promising these wonders, then one minister or another can take the blame when they fail. But if ‘I’ promise them, then ‘I’ may fail to deliver. And then ‘I’ must take the fall.

The new PM clearly believes that, after the Starmer disaster, he must rebuild trust between the office and the electorate. To do so, he offers himself. The curious Instagram montage issued by Downing Street last week showed Burnham, then his ministers, first as children and then as adults. We see an ordinary boy (happy knowing nothing?) in cricket whites, followed by the equally ordinary politician who now occupies the highest office in the land. Burnham seems determined to build a cult around that boy turned man. But given the studied dullness of the bloke himself, it amounts to a cult of no personality, barely masking the same old substance-free politics.

James Martin Charlton is an English playwright and director. Follow him on X @jmc_fire.