Andy Burnham has suggested that Brexit might never have happened if he had become Labour leader a decade ago. The Greater Manchester Mayor said the 2016 referendum could have 'played out differently' if he had not lost to Jeremy Corbyn the previous year.
The comments, made in an interview with the New Statesman, risk undermining Mr Burnham's efforts to gloss over his previous calls for Britain to rejoin the EU. They could fuel concern in Labour circles that the former minister is getting carried away by his own hype.
Despite being in the middle of a tough by-election battle against Reform in Makerfield, Mr Burnham has been making little secret of his intention to challenge Keir Starmer for No10. Asked about the consequences of his failure to win the leadership in 2015, Mr Burnham said: 'I mean, this is gonna sound too much, and I kind of hesitate to say it, and maybe I shouldn't, but I don't know whether 2016 may have played out differently.'
'I was always a voice inside, saying, look, I'm a Remainer, but we should be telling Cameron and Osborne, they've got to really get some serious changes. Would that have played out slightly differently if I was the sort of…'
He added: 'My other half doesn't give me credit for anything much in politics at all, she's my fiercest – not critic, but, like, challenger – about things, and she thinks it might, yeah. She says, well, maybe it would've been different.'
Mr Corbyn was widely regarded as having an ambivalent approach to the EU, although he insisted he voted for Remain. Mr Burnham suggested that he would have delivered a more 'patriotic' message about the virtues of membership, talking up Britain's history of defending Europe from right-wing politics and fascism.
But he complained that former Cabinet colleague Alan Johnson and others were not 'interested' in anything about the financial impact of Brexit. 'I was shadow home secretary instead of leader in 2016 and I made a speech on the patriotic case… for Remain, and I remember I tried to persuade the then Remain campaign to say ''this is what you should be fighting on'', not this sort of cold, financial, ''you'll be better off by this amount of money'' thing that they were doing.'
'I remember at the time Alan Johnson and others said, ''Oh no, we're not interested, that's not what we're doing.''
Mr Burnham has insisted he is not pushing to rejoin the EU anytime soon, as he fights to win a constituency that voted heavily for Brexit. Labour insiders have voiced anxiety about signs of hubris from Mr Burnham's camp, with his allies said to be 'wargaming' a snap general election and assembling a fantasy Cabinet.
This week he unveiled his own logo for the Makerfield campaign - with the only poll so far indicating the result is too close to call. It features a clenched fist and the message: 'Change Labour, keep the faith'. In keeping with Mr Burnham's 'King of the North' styling, it is based on the symbol for the Northern Soul music movement. The image - expected to be used on beer mats - was derided by one MP as looking 'like it was designed in the early 1990s by a local branch of the Socialist Worker Student Society'.
