Andy Burnham set to become Britain's 59th prime minister

Andy Burnham, aged 56, is set to become Britain's 59th prime minister on Monday, following the sudden resignation of Keir Starmer after approximately two years in office. Labour colleagues alarmed at the party's unpopularity pushed Starmer out and Burnham — the only candidate in the subsequent leadership contest — was the inevitable successor.

The road to No. 10 began in a commuter village between Liverpool and Manchester, where Burnham grew up in a close-knit Catholic family. His father was a British Telecom engineer and his mother a receptionist. His former English teacher at St. Aelred's Catholic High School, Stephen Harrington, later told the BBC: "He needed a lot of persuading to apply because he felt that as a working-class boy, going off to Cambridge wasn't for him. He didn't believe in himself. But he did it, and the rest is history."

Burnham and his brothers were the first generation of their family to attend university. At Cambridge he studied English and met his future wife, Marie-France Van Heel, a Dutch fellow student who is now a marketing executive. They married in 2000 and have one son and two daughters.

After graduating, Burnham worked as a journalist at trade magazines before becoming a researcher and adviser to Labour politicians. He was elected to Parliament in 2001 for the Manchester-area constituency of Leigh. Between 2007 and 2010 he served in Gordon Brown's Cabinet in three successive roles: chief secretary to the Treasury, culture secretary and health secretary.

In 2009, Burnham was heckled at a commemoration of the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster, in which 97 Liverpool football fans were crushed to death. He subsequently became a determined champion for the bereaved families. He helped push for a new inquest, an official apology and a law imposing a duty of candour on public officials to disclose the truth about tragedies regardless of reputational damage to institutions.

After Labour lost power in 2010, Burnham ran for the party leadership that year and again in 2015, losing both times. In 2017 he quit Parliament to run for Mayor of Greater Manchester. His governing philosophy, which became known as "Manchesterism", blended business-friendly investment with public ownership and he brought the region's fragmented transport network under public control.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Burnham publicly criticised Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson's approach as "London-centric" and damaging to northern cities. The public prominence that followed earned him the nickname "King of the North", a reference to the TV series Game of Thrones. To return to Parliament, Burnham contested a special election in the Manchester-area seat of Makerfield, triggered when a sitting Labour MP agreed to resign and defeated the Reform UK candidate.

He was then the sole contender for the Labour leadership. Burnham has pledged to deliver "a new politics based on unity and hope" and "an economy that works for everybody." A key plank is devolving more powers to regional leaders; he plans to establish a "No. 10 North", a satellite prime minister's office in Manchester.

Critics say his platform is vague on funding and that he has limited foreign policy experience. Joshi Herrmann, founder of the Manchester news site The Mill and a long-time observer of Burnham, said: "A whole range of people across the Labour movement and in the country have projected onto Andy Burnham their hopes and their fantasies about how the country should be run and what Labour should stand for and what Andy Burnham stands for. He has got lots of people's hopes up."

Herrmann also described Burnham as having "a set of principles about trying to make the country fairer, trying to bring people out of poverty, that he really does believe in." Sacha Lord, a Manchester music entrepreneur who served as Burnham's nighttime economy adviser, offered a sharper portrait: "He's not scared of locking horns with people. Everybody thinks Andy's this nice, cheeky-chappy guy. But trust me, when he wants something... He tends to get it."