Andy Burnham: ‘The real me comes out when I’m angry’
It is a Tuesday afternoon in October and Andy Burnham has just got off the phone with Boris Johnson. After two weeks of negotiations over how to deal with Greater Manchester’s soaring Covid rates, talks have collapsed, and as the region’s mayor, it is his job to tell the public why. He leaves his office and walks round the corner to Bridgewater Hall to be greeted with the biggest press pack he has faced in years.
The press conference was sold to me, the Guardian’s North of England editor, as a “select event”, but it is nothing of the kind. I am standing in line behind national reporters, with well-wishers shouting, “Go on, Andy, lad!” as Burnham begins to speak.
I’m not used to having to queue for the mayor. We last met in August when, sick of screens but banned from meeting indoors or in gardens, he suggested a walk around Leigh, the part of Wigan he represented in parliament for 16 years. Back then, it felt like things were getting back to normal; he was delighted when one of his old constituents lent me 50p for my parking, and we walked unremarked past young lads smoking weed by the canal.
But with Covid’s second wave, Burnham, 50, has become box office: dubbed the “king of the north” after a stirring speech in a cagoule on the steps of Manchester’s Central Library, and inspiring a Vogue article headlined, “Suddenly, Inexplicably, We All Fancy Andy Burnham”.
The venue today feels significant. Bridgewater Hall stands opposite Manchester Central, a conference centre requisitioned to become one of the Nightingale hospitals. Perhaps more importantly, it is in full view of the Peterloo memorial, a reminder of the bloody 1819 massacre in which an estimated 18 working-class Mancunians were crushed to death by government-backed yeoman as they peacefully protested for a vote, starting the long battle for universal suffrage.
Much of Burnham’s speech is stuff I’ve heard him say countless times before. There’s a familiar dig at Westminster – those who will suffer most in tier 3 are “people working in pubs, in bookies, driving taxis, people too often forgotten by those in power” – followed by a bit of Mancunian exceptionalism: “This city region has never walked on
