Andy Burnham has had it easy, at least compared with what will hit him when he walks through the door of No 10. “He’s going to get the shock of his life when he sees how degraded and different it is from what it was when he left,” says former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara. “People who haven’t been in government since 2016 are really clueless about how different it is. People feel powerless.”
From Manchester to Downing Street
In May 2017, with Labour being run by Left-winger Jeremy Corbyn, Burnham left the Commons to become mayor of Greater Manchester. Just over nine years later and buoyed by his Makerfield by-election triumph, he will be Prime Minister on Monday.
Far from lacking in confidence, he has already pledged big, very big. With “Manchester swagger”, he has vowed to deliver the “biggest devolution of power in modern times”, the largest council homes building programme since the post-war period, to regenerate high streets, offer cheaper public transport and billions more for defence.
Tax Rises on the Horizon?
Yet Burnham has largely still to answer how he will pay for his radical reforms. Having broadly committed to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules, he has ruled out ramping up borrowing and has shown few signs of making significant welfare savings. So that leaves a third possible option — tax rises. “If he does follow through on some of his tax and spend rumours, we might actually see an exodus of people... the middle class essentially starting to go,” says Cleo Watson, deputy chief-of-staff to Boris Johnson when he was Prime Minister.
The Squeeze on the Leafy South
It would be no surprise if Burnham had rich Londoners in his sights, possibly with a new property tax, as he seeks to govern to the Left of Sir Keir Starmer. Pressed on whether the middle class — Londoners on good incomes but also facing the capital’s high cost of living — could also be caught by Burnham’s Treasury net, Watson adds: “Is he essentially talking about taxing people in the leafy South in order to pay for the North? “It’s where you draw the middle class... I think we’re edging down towards the aspirational people who now can’t quite afford to send their kids to a private school, who are now also feeling the pinch on their holidays... they’re feeling the stress of the rung below them, and whether they just start thinking Canada looks a whole lot easier or Australia.”
Warnings from Former No10 Insiders
The warning is stark, possibly slightly surprising. But Watson and MacNamara, who now present the In The Room podcast, have years of behind-the-scenes experience of No 10, and wider Whitehall, and their candid take on the challenges of government could no doubt help the Burnham team avoid some of the mistakes which plagued Starmer’s Downing Street. “He’s got two-and-a-half to three years to be able to turn things around, and for people to feel differently, and as much as he has articulated how people feel, it’s very Clintonesque ‘I feel your pain’, whether he could turn that around remains to be seen,” says Watson. “The pattern of the last few years suggests that he can’t, so with my most negative view, I think that we’re headed for perhaps a hung Parliament, perhaps a strange coalition, and trouble ahead.”
Manchester Swagger in No 10
MacNamara is more optimistic, especially in an era when personality seems at times to matter at least if not more than policies. “What I really hope that we can see in this reign of Burnham is some of that Manchester swagger because you want confident leaders,” explains the former civil servant, who played a key role in the staging of the London 2012 Olympics.
With the UK set to get its seventh Prime Minister since 2010, the “constant changing” has hit the Government’s confidence in delivering. The biggest blow, she adds, was the “astonishing” gap exposed by the Covid pandemic for which the Government was supposed to have been fully prepared but was found hugely wanting. Both MacNamara and Watson highlight the torrent of decisions that Burnham will have to make. He will be shocked by the pace of No 10, says the ex-civil servant.
Will Power Corrupt Burnham?
Even before he gets to No 10, the Prime Minister-in-waiting has to choose his Cabinet, with Labour open to accusations of sexism having never had a female leader. “All the data shows that there is a sexism problem in the Labour Party,” states MacNamara. While sceptical about an “old boys’ club” in Government, she tells how the “exercise of power is a thrilling experience” and of “naivety” among some people that they are “immune to power corrupting them and power impacting on their behaviour”.
So will power corrupt Burnham? “I’m not sure it will,” says MacNamara. “He comes across as the guy who’s comfortable in his own skin, and he’s pretty old for a Prime Minister.” Watson takes a different tack: “Power will expose whether this is a shtick or not. If he is authentically who he seems to be, then I think he’ll be fine. But this kind of scrutiny and this kind of power will reveal whether this is the real Andy Burnham.”
