People who have known Andy Burnham for years still occasionally say: “Is this happening? It's Andy who does the buses and now he's got the nuclear codes.” It is a comical assessment, but one that passes muster given the new Prime Minister's stratospheric rise to power over the last 12 months.
From Conference Absence to Number 10
In September 2025, Burnham was keeping a low profile at the Labour Party conference. So low, in fact, that he was not actually present at Sir Keir Starmer's speech to avoid creating a distraction. Speculation swirled about which seat he could take over to become an MP as friends encouraged him to challenge Starmer after setting out his stall in an interview with The New Statesman. Starmer allies briefed that it all felt “a bit desperate”. But a year later, Burnham sits in both Number 10 and Number 10 North.
It is quite a story, as Manchester Evening News journalists discuss in the latest Mancunian Way podcast episode. In it, we hear about Burnham's storytelling abilities, his big promises, and the silence that defined the most significant speech of his life.
Storytelling and Big Promises
As Politics Writer Iram Ramzan says: “Every time he made a policy announcement he brought it back to an anecdote from his own life. If you've got a compelling story it does stir up some emotions in you.”
Following a leader's speech which saw Burnham make radical announcements about social care, the EU and electoral reform, there are still plenty of questions. As Features and Perspectives Editor Rob Williams says: “I don't think I've seen anything quite as raw as that.” He adds: “And just the huge scale of the announcements. This wasn't tinkering around the edges, it was commitments to over 10 years of multi-billion pound projects that will transform Britain. The National Care Service could be transformative, both not just to people's everyday lives, but to the functioning of the NHS, to the way in which the care system works entirely. There are a lot of questions about it.”
Reaction in the Room and on the Streets
As local democracy reporter Charlotte Hall says on the podcast, there was so much anticipation ahead of the leader's speech that people in the overflow room started clapping at the screen showing it. “There was already such a kind of buzz,” she says. “There was a massive queue outside the hall. Speaking to people on the streets the day before they were all saying we acknowledge now that it was a good idea to switch. But reading between the lines of some of what they said, there was a sense of like we still don't really know what this guy is about. Then it came to the day of the speech. At the beginning people were quite tentative about clapping and cheering, but as the speech went on there was more of these sort of storytelling elements introducing himself, really vivid details like the ring being stolen from his grandmother's finger in the care home. You just could feel in the room people were rooting for him and by the end of it you had people doing standing ovations.”
Protests and Omissions
But Burnham-mania did not extend to everyone. Charlotte Hall spent a “surreal” few hours chatting to protestors of all stripes outside the conference hall. “On the first day I arrived, I arrived quite early and I was walking towards the conference hall and out of the corner of my eye I saw an Andy Burnham bust in a shopping bag, somebody getting dressed up as a fox, then there's like the EU anthem blasting.”
Further down the track, a giant, red-face, inflatable baby-Trump was hoisted over a group of climate campaigners opposing the expansion of the Rosebank Oil and Gas Field - a plan Burnham has avoided giving definitive answers on since the beginning of his Premiership. “Andy Burnham completely avoided that subject in his speech despite covering many different things,” says Charlotte. “The climate crisis didn't come up.”
As Rob says, it was a strange omission following one of the hottest summers on record. “Conference is like Glastonbury for nerds. There's wristbands, people drink too much, there's not enough sleep and you know everyone eventually ends up crying in the toilets. It is a bubble. So how that plays out to the rest of the world and how it plays out to the likes of us is entirely different. I think it's a legitimate question about climate. I think what Labour are banking on that people are so unhappy with the country and the way things are currently that they're not even thinking about the possible end of the world.”
You can watch The Mancunian Way podcast here and listen here.
