Prime Minister Andy Burnham has revealed what he said to his mum during their emotional embrace outside Number 10 Downing Street, as his father watched from a care home 200 miles away.
The former Greater Manchester mayor, now Makerfield MP, took over from Sir Keir Starmer as Labour leader and PM last month. In the days before taking office, Burnham said his dad Roy, who has Alzheimer's, was unaware he was about to become the country's top leader.
Care Home Staff's Special Moment
Burnham has now said staff at the home where his father is cared for believe Roy may have been 'momentarily' aware as he watched TV footage of the event. Speaking on the How to Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast, Burnham recounted visiting his father's care home six days after becoming PM.
He said: "One of the staff said 'oh, the manager wants to speak to you before you leave'. So I went over and I spoke to her and she said 'we all wanted you to know'.
"I have to be careful here, this does make me quite emotional. She said, 'we all knew what time you might be coming up Downing Street so we got Roy in his chair, and we got the telly right in front of him, and six of us stood around him and all said 'Roy, look'. And she said he turned and momentarily, they said, 'we thought he knew'."
Whispering About His Dad
Burnham became emotional as he added: "At the time that they were doing that, I was holding my mum and we were having a chat about him so the thought of them doing that 200 miles away." Asked if it was his mum he hugged outside Number 10, he confirmed it was and said: "I was whispering in her ear about my dad."
Burnham also spoke about his father's health, revealing Roy was diagnosed with prostate cancer at the end of the pandemic, and the family believe the treatment may have 'brought on' his dementia. He said: "You hear that and you think, 'oh my goodness, we must get him into treatment'. My brothers and I, we look back at that and we reflect on it because I don't think we knew enough or had thought or had it explained to us enough that the intensive treatment that comes with prostate cancer may in fact have brought on the dementia.
"With all my background in health, I didn't understand enough the relationship between those two things. It was shortly after he'd had his prostate cancer treatment, I think it would've been 2022 sort of time, I remember sitting with him, in his bungalow, and he just kept asking me about could I see something in the trees and he was saying he could see shapes in the trees and I was like, 'no, it's nothing, dad it's fine'. But I remember coming away that day thinking something has changed, and you never forget that."
Drive to Overhaul Social Care
Burnham has said his personal experience with his dad has been a big driver in his desire to overhaul social care. He told Elizabeth Day: "Millions of people are going without their basic needs being met because the system isn't good enough to meet their basic daily needs, so that's the first thing.
"Second thing, you have millions of family carers, people like my mum, who try to care for my dad at home, who in the end are actually the main issue. We discovered as a family, my mum was sinking under the pressure of trying to make it work when the care system couldn't make it work for her. But that's the reality for so many people in this country as a consequence of broken social care.
"Then there's the next injustice of having to pay a fortune for this broken care that people get. They pay a lot of money for a very poor standard of care and some people, the most unfortunate, those who get let's say, Alzheimer's at an early age, pay with everything down to £23,000 of their savings, so they can spend hundreds of thousands of pounds. They can be cleaned out by the whole experience of being unlucky enough to get dementia. The randomness of it. If you've got a cancer, you can get everything paid for but you get dementia, you get absolutely wiped out physically, emotionally, financially. It's just terrible, isn't it?"
He said some of his proposals 'might be quite radical' when they are brought forward but that 'the British public will let us know which one they can accept and they're actually often quite radical in what they want.'
Wife's Reaction to PM Bid
Burnham also revealed his wife Marie-France van Heel's reaction to telling her he was again going to bid to become PM. He said: "She was like, 'what? Not again. They told you twice they don't want you. Why are you doing it again?'." He added: "She took some persuading, to be honest, because I guess she didn't want to see me go through it all again and then end out on the wrong side, at the end of it."
Burnham said his failed previous leadership bids, in 2010 and 2015, 'really strengthened [him]'. "It took me to lose in 2015 decide to come back home here and stand to be the first mayor of Greater Manchester, and then really challenge myself about when I'm thinking and speaking for myself without any party line, because I was quite clear when I left, I was going to do this myself, place first, not party first," he said. "Do what's right for here. It really strengthened me as a politician."
