Eleven years ago, Andy Burnham stood up in the house of commons and delivered a sombre statement about a pandemic sweeping the nation. Twenty-nine people in the UK had died from swine flu and the then-health secretary had been warned that 65,000 lives could be lost.
Experts from Imperial College in London – including one Professor Neil Ferguson – were urging him to shut schools to slow transmission. Grim-faced, Burnham told MPs “the virus has now taken hold around the country, rather than in isolated pockets”. The government had ordered enough vaccine for everyone, he said, but it would be months before a mass immunisation programme would begin.
Fast forward to August 2020 and Burnham, now mayor of Greater Manchester, is sitting on a bench overlooking Pennington Flash, a water park built on an old colliery in what was until 2017 his Leigh constituency.
Having been assured a photographer would not be in attendance, he is wearing navy Birkenstocks and jeans. Almost everyone recognises him from his 16 years as MP. “Hiya Andy!” beams a speedwalking lady; “All right, mayor!” yells a topless man. Burnham’s children – aged 15, 18 and 20 – hate going to the supermarket with him, but he clearly loves the attention: “If you don’t like chatting to people, don’t become a politician.”
The government announced last week that Greater Manchester would remain subject to enhanced lockdown restrictions for a third week, and Burnham is threatening to withdraw his support unless they compensate those who cannot work – either because they are told to by contact tracers or because their workplaces are shut.
Much has changed since his ministerial days. Leigh has gone Tory for the first time in its 113-year history, lost in December to his successor, Jo Platt – “It’s a real lesson to everybody in life isn’t it? Nothing is a given and nothing lasts forever” – and Burnham is dealing with a second deadly virus outbreak in his 19-year career in frontline politics.
It’s from this position – or more correctly, a makeshift study in his son’s old attic bedroom in the nearby village of Golborne – that Burnham has arguably shaped the government’s response to the pandemic more than anyone else in the Labour party.
Though denied a place on the government’s emergency “Cobra” committee (unlike his London counterpart, Sadiq Khan) he has used a constant stream of media appearances, press conferences and dawn-till-dusk video calls to expose the literally fatal flaws in its centralised approach which for four key months deprived local experts of real-time infection data.
With little executive power but his phone number in a lot of TV producers’ phones, he also lobbied successfully for more contact tracing to be done locally after pointing out that Greater Manchester’s team had a 98% success rate while the national call centres managed barely half; got the government to give huge life-saving subsidies to the area’s trams; and at the very start of lockdown persuaded ministers to give £5m to house 1,000 homeless people in hotels in the region, inspiring the national Everyone In scheme.
Some might say he is better at calling for other people to do things than getting stuff done himself, but that could be the lack of hard power that comes with his £110,000-a-year job.
“I like to think we are beginning to change politics,” Burnham says of himself and the other elected “metro” mayors, notably his friend Steve Rotheram in the Liverpool city region and Andy Street in the West Midlands – a Tory candidate who said last week he wished he could stand as an independent.
“We’ve not changed the government machine yet. I think it went into default mode: ‘We are running everything. We will find a place for London on Cobra but not you.’ But I think what’s happened during this is that we have provided a clear and consistent voice back to that machine to tell them what they are doing wrong.”
Though elected on a Labour ticket, Burnham considers himself now “outside of the main cut and thrust of party politics”. He says he stopped taking orders from party HQ after losing to Jeremy Corbyn in the leadership election in 2015. “Seumas Milne [Corbyn’s spin doctor] tried it a couple of times but I didn’t return the calls,” he says. “I don’t think the Labour party have treated me very well over the years, so I do feel a little bit distant from them, more so than I ever have done before.”
He began the Covid-19 pandemic warning Boris Johnson that his experience handling swine flu had shown him the importance of clear communication.
On 15 March, infuriated that the health secretary, Matt Hancock, had used a column in the Sunday Telegraph to announce that anyone with symptoms must isolate at home for seven days, he pushed for a daily press conference fronted by scientists and health experts. The following day Johnson held the government’s first daily televised briefing.
Three weeks later, Hancock was left helping to steer the ship when Johnson was in intensive care with Covid. Burnham knew better than most how hard it must have been. “I don’t envy anyone in government dealing with this situation because I had a minor version of it with swine flu – a smaller health crisis which didn’t have the economic crisis along with it. I know how hard that was … so there’s no point me making a tribal point about it,” he says. Fewer than 400 people died from swine flu in the UK in 2009, compared with more than 41,000 Covid-related deaths in England alone.
“Where I am less forgiving is having done things wrong, they have carried on doing things wrong – the way they have announced things, with no consultation, no explanation, late at night; constantly putting out very centralised contracts which don’t really work on the ground.”
Yet Burnham admits he would happily swap places with Johnson, himself a former mayor: “There’s no point me saying I wouldn’t because I have tried to lead the Labour party in the past and therefore I wanted to be prime minister. What I have changed my mind on is the way power needs to be distributed around the country. The model of government doesn’t work … I think we need a massive reorganisation of the British state.”
Until now, he has supported the extra lockdown measures in Greater Manchester and advocated for the entire region of 2.8 million people to be treated as one. But perhaps not for much longer. He is worried about the small print in the government’s latest announcement, which says: “Where possible the government will remove individual areas from these measures while maintaining or even strengthening measures in others as necessary.”
The prospect of a sudden “proper” lockdown – closing shops and businesses with no notice – is a worry, he says: “I said I was nervous about it at the start and I am coming back to a big nervousness about local lockdowns. I am going to be seeking a very frank exchange with the government about it. Not an argument. But it can’t be done too easily.”
The government can’t suddenly tighten restrictions without a package of compensatory measures for workers, insists Burnham: “How can I justify it to people when things like support for people to self isolate hasn’t been sorted? You can only try the most restrictive measures if you have tried everything else… We have hit a point now where local lockdowns cannot be the default thing that they slap on places where they get over a certain threshold – especially as they have refused to identify the threshold.”
Having been health secretary, he knows that the clock is ticking for the government to get a grip of the virus: “I think the worst is yet to come, I’m afraid. I know that’s not a cheering message, but schools returning – not that it’s a bad thing, I think it’s really important – poses a whole new level of challenge. Colleges and universities returning. Flu season arriving… No vaccine.”
Burnham believes England came out of lockdown prematurely, saying the government should have ensured an effective test-and-trace system was up and running first. He says he has hardly left the house since it began, apart from what he calls his “state-sanctioned” 5km daily run, two trips to the pub and, from the look of his toenails, certainly no outings for a pedicure.
He has been to just one restaurant, last Wednesday, to calm his 18-year-old’s nerves ahead of her A-level results. He refused to take advantage of the government’s Eat Out to Help Out discount – “I can show you the receipt if you don’t believe me” – believing it to be the wrong way to help the economy.
“Who benefits? The discounting benefits people who might have gone anyway. It doesn’t necessarily end up in the pockets of the staff. The business maybe gets some benefit. There would have been better ways of helping the industry and I just found it amazing that they could find that level of funds when you are not helping people isolate if they are ill or asked to do so. It’s a question of priorities, isn’t it?”
In an alternative universe, Burnham would probably have won his second mayoral election in May. Despite the Conservatives gaining a third of Greater Manchester’s 27 seats in the general election, the party failed to find a high-profile candidate to oust him as mayor, fielding a local councillor to nibble at his 230,00 majority.
It was only when the mayoral elections were cancelled, on 13 March, that Burnham admits he understood the gravity of the situation. He will stand again next year, pandemic permitting. Some of his campaign pledges will have to be rethought – public transport was to have been his first priority. But Covid has sharpened others, such as the move towards a carbon-free future by 2038.
“I think a legacy of Covid will be the acceleration towards a zero-carbon economy. It’s got to, hasn’t it? Partly a result of living differently, but also the economic imperative,” he says. “I look back at that world before lockdown it was a very different world and it’s a world that isn’t coming back.”
