Andy Burnham is very much the flavour of the month in Labour circles at present. Having left Westminster in 2016 when it became clear he wasn’t going to become leader any time soon, he has undergone something of a renaissance as mayor of Manchester.
In this capacity he gets to govern an overwhelmingly left-leaning city and enjoy the tributes of cooing London based journalists who declare him the ‘king of the north.’ The contrast between Burnham and his struggling leader was most apparent in the aftermath of May’s local elections; whereas the former was re-elected with 67 per cent of the vote and bagged himself a column in a London newspaper, the latter gave a dreadful pool clip and then disappeared for the following 48 hours.
Now Burnham has done yet another interview, highlighting once again his Northern roots and the inequities of Westminster. Appearing on – where else? – Channel 4, Burnham told an attentive Krishnan Guru-Murthy about all the doors he thought his education at Cambridge University would open for him:
When I graduated, it was that moment of graduation that brought over to me that it wasn’t quite what I thought. I was at college with people and i probably at least achieved as much as they did while I was there and I just saw people walking straight out into Goldman Sachs, The Guardian, The Times, BBC and I was writing CVs to all of these… I wanted to work in the media at the time and zero was coming back. And I was just thinking ‘Hang on a minute, why aren’t these doors opening for me? My said they would and obviously what that came over then was the connections, the networks that run this country.
Such claims by Burnham are nothing new of course. Readers with longer memories will of course recall his dismal 2015 leadership campaign when he managed to blow his frontrunner status to come a distant second behind Jeremy Corbyn. In the course of that campaign Burnham bemoaned how ‘for too long there has been a sense of a metropolitan elite at the top of the Labour party’ and claimed ‘I never have been’ part of that elite.
Steerpike therefore thought it worth reminding readers about the hardships of Burnham’s own post-university career. Far from suffering from a lack of connections in his youth, Burnham appears to have embraced them, judging from a black tie picture with other New Labour rising stars like BBC bigwig James Purnell, lobbyist Tim Allan and New Statesman columnist Philip Collins.
By the age of 24 poor unconnected Andy was working as a researcher for shadow minister Tessa Jowell and at 28 he was a special adviser for Culture Secretary Chris Smith, a role he held for three years until his election at 31 as an MP for Leigh. He was in the Cabinet by 37 and only left Westminster in 2016 after more than two decades working there when elected mayor of Manchester, after two failed tilts at the top job. In his Channel 4 interview Burnham went on to claim:
The notion of when I left and eventually got a job after graduation, I really resented the fact that i had to move to London to do that job. You know, I didn’t want to actually, I wanted to stay in Manchester. And I couldn’t because I just couldn’t find a job there that was what i wanted to do. So there’s been this thing, hasn’t there, as long as we’ve been around that if you want to get on in life, you’ve got to go to London and that really stuck in my throat to be honest.’
Still, tolerable enough to make the career politician hang around in SW1 for 22 years eh? At least we now know that Burnham has finally found a job he actually wants to do in Manchester, even if only being mayor is good enough for him.
Comments