Burnham has ‘ghosted’ the Labour left, says Clive Lewis

Clive Lewis has accused prime minister Andy Burnham of “ghosting” the Labour Party’s left flank. 

Speaking on the Labour Left Podcast ahead of the party’s annual conference, the Norwich South MP did say the culture at the top of the party had improved since Starmer’s departure.

“Andy Burnham feels more tolerant”, Lewis said. “But I don’t want to be in a party where I’m tolerated. I want to be in a party where I’m an integral part of it, and our views are an integral part of it, and our values are an integral part of it. And I don’t think we’re there yet.”

Asked whether Labour was on track for a “reset”, Lewis said it depended “on how quickly you expected to see change” inside the party.

“I would say where we are at the moment: no”, he added.

Lewis said Burnham’s administration “isn’t a government of all wings of the party. The left were firmly kept outside of it.” But he referred to it as an “improvement”. 

The Labour MP said that figures on the left had suspected Burnham “might not be everything that was on the tin”, but backed him because “we really did need to get rid of Keir Starmer and the people around him as quickly as possible.”

He added: “Andy Burnham was the best bet to do that. And I stand by that.”

He described Burnham reaching the door of Number 10 with the left behind him, only to be told he could come in but his allies must stay outside. “He’s gone, ‘all right, done’”, Lewis said. “We’re kind of at the door banging: ‘Andy, are you coming back out?’”

“Is that a terrible thing? Yes, it is. He’s ghosted us. But at the end of the day, mission achieved. Starmer has gone.”

He said: “I might be crying into my soup in a couple of years’ time, bemoaning the fact of what we did, but at the moment there are options on the table for us.”

In November 2025, Lewis reportedly became the first Labour MP to call on Keir Starmer to resign as prime minister. At the time, he urged Burnham, then the mayor of Greater Manchester, to return to parliament and “step up and become the next prime minister”.

Lewis subsequently suggested he would “give up” his seat to ensure Burnham could return to parliament. 

Lewis is a member of Mainstream, a centre-left network within the Labour Party. The group was launched in September 2025 by the think tank Compass and the activist group Open Labour. It describes itself as a home for “Labour’s radical realists” and aims to influence the direction of the Labour government.

Speaking ahead of Labour conference, Lewis was also questioned about Burnham’s commitment to electoral reform and proportional representation (PR). The prime minister has long supported electoral reform, and spoke at a fringe event on proportional representation at last year’s conference.

Asked whether Burnham would deliver PR, Lewis answered: “The honest answer is I don’t know.”

He claimed some senior figures Burnham promoted are “not as hot on PR as him. In fact, they’re probably very cold on it.” 

Lewis also warned against assurances from inside government that reform would simply appear in the manifesto. “That is a guarantee for it to be negotiated away, forgotten, pushed into the long grass”, he said. He called for an electoral reform commission to report before the next election.

Lewis is a member of the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) for fair elections – a cross-party group of MPs and peers that campaigns for electoral reform. In May 2026, he signed an amendment to the Representation of the People Bill, calling on the government to establish a “national commission on electoral reform”.