Andy Burnham: ‘I feel for Sadiq with London going into Tier 3’

I want to correct a myth,” says Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, in an earnest voice. “I love London. London does better pubs, they are the thing I miss the most from when I lived there.” This is a significant statement from a man who is known as the King of the North. “Well not the beer,” he qualifies, adding more seriously, “When we argue for the North we are only saying we want the same as everybody else, not that we resent London.”

He adds that he wants to work with Boris Johnson — despite the fact that when he goes out to walk his dog in Golborne, the Conservative constituency where he lives, “people come up to me and apologise for having voted Tory, they have a feeling they are not as committed to the North as they said”. “But I would rather move on. I’d welcome Boris to Manchester if he wanted to come.”

Burnham is at home, dressed down in a normcore black sweatshirt with a pretty vase of lilies behind him just visible on the Zoom screen. “I don’t buy these things,” he says, underlining his no-nonsense northern dad image. He hasn’t heard from the Prime Minister since October, when it was announced that Manchester was going into Tier 3 and was only going to receive £22 million of financial support. Burnham found out from a text during a press conference, which sparked a rousing speech. His anger was writ large on his face and he forcefully spelt out how pitiful that sum of money was at a time when a lot was being asked of the public and national unity was needed. “Andy-monium” broke out and for some he became a pin-up for a country feeling bruised from the effects of lockdown.

It was the moment that Westminster began to take the northern Mayors seriously, and completed Burnham’s transformation from the well-meaning Labour MP who lost to Ed Miliband and then Jeremy Corbyn in two leadership elections into a powerhouse. “That was an extraordinary time,” he says, blushing as he brushes off his sex symbol status. “It was my aide Kevin’s big moment in the spotlight, he was trying to show me the text about the funding,” he laughs. “I never actually saw that text. My reading glasses weren’t working, Kevin told me what it said. It was hard to hear that I manufactured my response, so frustrating when Jacob Rees-Mogg claimed my reaction was an act... it’s that idea that everything is a political game. As someone who knows Westminster it was like my old world was at odds with the one I am in now.”

He continues: “I left Westminster because I was fed up with that way of looking at the world. The job I do is a real one and if you think something is going to damage lives you have to speak out in the most effective way you can.”

Burnham says he “doesn’t miss Westminster” but he invested a lot in it. He became MP for Leigh in 2001 and was culture secretary and health secretary under Gordon Brown. He was initially sceptical about the job of mayor but having made the role his own since he was elected in 2017 is now calling for more devolution. He seems to have realised that he can make more of a difference from outside the Westminster bubble, looking vindicated when he points out that “everything we called for in October is now in place — including an extension of furlough with 80 per cent of wages paid and support for the self-employed”.

Cases are finally going down in Manchester, or “District 12” as he calls it in a reference to The Hunger Games’ no-go zone, but he speaks regularly to Sadiq Khan and Steve Rotheram, the Mayor of Liverpool, about how to control the virus and rebuild. “I feel for Sadiq with London going into Tier 3,” he says, looking crestfallen. “My personal view is that being in Tier 3 creates the risk of more informal gatherings in the home and you don’t have the regulations of hospitality. I don’t think either tier is constructed in the right way. They are certain to cause economic harm but not stop the spread of the virus. Retail has a big green light, the emphasis on hospitality is not right, that is not where the major spread is.

“I have real concerns that the whole approach to Christmas and the New Year hasn’t been properly thought through. We are now at the point where we are trying to manage the virus with restrictions alone. I don’t think the Government has understood how hard it has been for people to live under restrictions since the end of the summer.”

He would have liked more say in the Government’s response from the start. “This year has shown us that if you try to run everything from one postcode, SW1A 0AA, unsurprisingly it becomes dysfunctional and impossible,” he says. “The decisions are too far from the ground. A wrong call was made early on, when the Government centralised the response to the pandemic and outsourced it instead of localising it. If you routed those billions that were spent on the pandemic through local government you would have effectively had a doorstep face-to-face approach to test, trace and isolate. Not doing that has been the single biggest mistake.”

So why didn’t the Government call on the mayors? Burnham gives a long sigh. “I don’t mean this in anything like a patronising way, but I think it is a reflection of them being quite new in government. New governments have a tendency to want to centralise and control — I was involved in 1997 when Labour came in and this was reminiscent of that. But in a pandemic that is all wrong; you are taking on more than the centre can manage.”

Next year, he wants the balance of power to shift. “Looking at how the pandemic has been managed makes the case for devolution,” he says. “I hope the May elections could be something of a referendum on devolution, there is a hunger. This year has shown that we need that strong voice at the regional level. If we built that up, the country would function better. That’s true for the recovery... when London, Liverpool and Manchester speak together it is a powerful axis.”

The Government’s plans to “level up” the country are “just ribbon-cutting funds, scattering money all over the place”. He wants a new public transport network for Manchester and has just finished plans for a clean air zone.

How will Brexit affect this? “A deal is what we want,” Burnham states plainly. “The EU is our largest export market for Manchester business so a no-deal scenario would cause chaos. Talk of gunboats to protect our fish is madness.”

Burnham’s wife, Marie-France van Heel, is Dutch and works in advertising. They met at Cambridge, then moved to London (“we were in Fulham before it was gentrified and Holloway Road, probably the worst place I lived”), and have a son, Jimmy, 20, and two daughters, Rosie, 17, and Annie, 14. “It is a strange life for [my children],” he says. “They are forever being challenged at school over something I have said and they know nothing about. I am not sensing any rush for them to want to go into politics.”

Burnham brightens when he talks about Jimmy, who is coming home for Christmas in the five-day window. “It was hard for London in lockdown. In the summer though we joked about how we poor northerners in District 12 are looking down at him in London living his life of Riley.” He adds, “I feel for our young people, this has taken its toll on everyone’s mental health.”

He has “not stopped working” since March. “I haven’t had time to stop and think. During the Christmas break I think I will end up reflecting and recovering a bit. It has been hard.” Running has provided welcome distraction. “I have run more than I ever have before, about 1,500 miles this year — at least five kilometres, five times a week. My team tend to get calls at the end of my runs because ideas become clearer when you are out running.” On his runs, he listens to music and he speaks at length about all the bands he has discovered this year, “reviving my tired repertoire”. It’s solidly 6Music fare — he’s just discovered Fleet Foxes and recommends their album Shore, as well as Richard Ashcroft’s solo material, “a treasure trove”.

“I am missing live music a lot,” he says. “I looked at a picture of a socially distanced gig in Liverpool last night by a band called The Lathums who played at my 50th in February and felt how much I missed it,” he says looking wistful. “But New Order at Heaton Park on September 10 next year is triple-underlined in my diary. My son and I are pinning our hopes on that.”

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