(Bloomberg) — Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham quashed speculation that he’s seeking to replace Keir Starmer as he sought to draw a line under a week in which he’s directly challenged the UK prime minister’s stewardship.
Burnham ruffled feathers at the top of Starmer’s Labour Party with an interview in the New Statesman magazine last week in which he urged the government to embrace more radical policies, saying the state should retake public control of services including housing, public transport and utilities. He followed that up on Sunday with a broadside against the “climate of fear” he said pervades the governing party.
The critique of the government just as Labour began its annual conference in Liverpool was viewed by many within Labour as a pitch for the leadership of the party — something Burnham has tried and failed to win twice before. However on Monday, he tried to damp down that speculation, saying he loved his current job, and didn’t meet a key criterion needed to become leader — holding a seat in the House of Commons.
“I can’t launch a leadership campaign; I’m not in Parliament,” Burnham told the Guardian newspaper’s Politics Weekly podcast. “That is the bottom line. And the thing that I’m doing is putting forward ideas that in any scenario, whoever is the leader, I think Labour needs to to take on board.”
More than 60% of Labour members would prefer Burnham to lead the party, compared to 29% for Starmer, according to YouGov polling published on Tuesday by Sky News. The poll of 702 Labour members conducted last week also found around one-third of respondents no longer believed Starmer was a good prime minister.
Burnham was an MP for 16 years before leaving the Commons to become Manchester mayor, a role he described as “the best job politics can offer,” adding “this is such a privilege. It’s a job I’ve loved every minute of.” He even offered Starmer some sympathy after the prime minister logged the worst approval rating by any premier in an Ipsos data series stretching back to 1977.
“I think it is unfair, because of the scale of what he and the government inherited,” Burnham said. “It was a harder inheritance than I think any government has had in our lifetime.” He added that while Labour has done “good things” in 15 months in office, “what they’ve got to do now is turn those good things into practical changes in people’s lives.”
Burnham also described as “inaccurate” a report that he’d advocated increasing government borrowing by £40 billion ($54 billion) to pay for more council homes to be built. Instead, he said he’d pointed to a sum of £39 billion the government had already allocated to housing and said the government should allocate 100% of it to council and social housing, rather than the 60% planned.
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