As Britain prepares to welcome a new resident to 10 Downing Street, many of you might be asking: who is Andy Burnham? Known for his strong northern accent and passionate speeches, it is now all but certain that he’s will swap the Manchester mayoralty’s Tootal Buildings for the United Kingdom’s Westminster and Whitehall. Such a vertiginous rise is bound to pique the nation’s curiosity about the man behinds the office(s). This fact-file will tell you everything you need to know about the man set to become the UK’s 59^th Prime Minister.

Andrew Burnham was born in Aintree, Liverpool, in 1970. Burnham was born into an unremarkable family, and had an unremarkable childhood: his father was a telephone engineer, his mother a receptionist, and he attended a local comprehensive. Nevertheless, as he doggedly reminds every interviewer, voter, and house pet interacts with, he persevered, and became the first member of his family to go to university:  Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, to graduate with a 2:1 in English Literature. Rapidly, he started his career in politics: within a few years of graduating, Burnham worked as a researcher for the Labour Party, and then as a special advisor for Labour ministers; he has spent his entire adult life on the public payroll. While his avowed persona – enter, ‘ordinary working class bloke’ – is not false, his immediate post-university career compels us to label him as a career politician.

Elected MP for Leigh in 2001, Burnham experienced a meteoric rise through the New Labour hierarchy. Beginning as a Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Home Secretary, and then the Education Secretary, he won recognition and praise within the upper echelons of government. After the 2005 election, he was promoted to Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Culture Secretary, and, in the taxing final year of Gordon Brown’s ministry, Secretary of State for Health.

Throughout this period, he was steadfastly loyal to Blair and Brown, dutifully voting with the Government’s line on Iraq – both for the war and against the commissioning of an Inquiry. While he has sought to disassociate and absolve himself from the geopolitical transgressions – the Labour membership he now courts would prefer the label ‘war crimes’ – of these governments, a cynic couldn’t help but point out he only made this move when it became politically advantageous to do so.  

Burnham’s impressive ministerial resumé failed to impress the Labour Party in 2010 and 2015 when he unsuccessfully ran for the leadership – both times from the right of the party. As Labour’s period in Opposition lengthened, and after these two rejections at the hands of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Burnham relocated to the North West, the Manchester mayoralty in his sights.

Landing the job of Mayor of Greater Manchester was widely seen as a consolation prize parcelled off to a finished politician. Burnham treated it instead as a branding exercise. Upon his accession to the office, he promptly began to redefine himself as a Northern maverick challenging the dominance and snobbery of the South. Moreover, his patriotic and emotional response to the Manchester Arena bombing established him as a figure of moral authority. During the pandemic, when Westminster tried to impose Tier 3 restrictions without concurrently increasing financial aid, Burnham staged a furious press conference: he accused ministers of treating the North as “sacrificial lambs,” and dominated the news cycle for days.

While Burnham’s great stand changed nothing about the Government’s lockdown policy, his personal disappointment was surely ameliorated by a significant boost to his approval ratings. He had successfully framed a bureaucratic negotiation as a north-versus-south culture war, and won the propaganda battle even as he lost the policy war.

Yet his policy achievement of Mayor of Greater Manchester were lengthy: the Bee Network of integrated public transport is popular, and his “A Bed Every Night” homelessness scheme has been lauded by, remarkably, a bipartisan press. These policies are incredibly photogenic – buses dressed in bee patterns, Burnham in a high-vis jacket – and built the ideological and political narrative he utilised when carrying out a bloodless coup against Sir Keir Starmer.

Aside from politics, he supports Everton FC, enjoys music, once interviewed Paul McCartney, and has three children with his wife Marie-France. Apparently, his guilty pleasure is Geordie Shore – that irritating cynic in the room, though, would once again assert that this is a borderline shameless attempt to seem down-to-Earth. He runs by Manchester’s canals, often trailed by photographers. His (ostensible) lifestyle is a masterclass in image management, but even the best branding can start to feel a little prefabricated.

Andy Burnham is clearly intelligent, resilient, and politically gifted. But the tale of the straightforward northern lad sticking it to Westminster is a story as elaborate as any party manifesto. It may well be true in his heart, but there is also no doubt that Burnham is an arch-dissimilator: he has edited, polished, and packaged himself for maximum appeal. When you watch him deliver his first speech as Prime Minister, ask yourself: how much of this is the real Burnham, and how much is the immaterial myth that got him there? Of course, the answer is probably a bit of both, but it’s for you to decide.