The UK's next PM: Being 'likeable' isn't enough...

It felt inevitable and perhaps it was: Sir Keir Starmer has resigned and looks very likely to be replaced by Andy Burnham as Prime Minister.

Burnham won a decisive victory in last week’s Makerfield by-election, beating out Reform UK by 20 points, exceeding even the pollsters’ predictions. The unique nature of the contest has made it hard to draw any decisive conclusions about the result’s significance for British politics more broadly, but it has now all but guaranteed that Burnham will be PM by September.

Burnham has effectively acknowledged that his leadership may well be a last roll of the dice for Labour. Despite the majority they won in 2024, razor thin victories in many of their seats make it one of the most marginal governments since 1945. Accordingly, Keir Starmer swiftly became the least popular Prime Minister since records began, with Reform UK and the Green Party surging in the polls at his expense.

Labour has reckoned that Burnham, Mayor of Manchester since 2017, is their best chance of survival. But why? And is there anything to their reasoning?

Policies

Starmer simply struck many as unlikeable. Despite his best efforts to make much of his alleged love of football, he came across as cold, procedural, and po-faced, every inch the lawyer. With the country full of unrest and in need of political courage, he was entirely the wrong man at the wrong time. And this is to say nothing about his highly unpopular policy choices.

Yet we must say something about the policy choices, because Burnham’s policy platform will be essentially indistinguishable from that which have proven so unpopular under Keir Starmer. Burnham’s hands will be tied by the same things which have tied Starmer’s: Labour’s manifesto promises not to raise taxes (a promise already shattered in the spirit if not the letter); Labour’s self-imposed fiscal rules; and very little wiggle room to borrow more money because lenders have very minimal in the British economy or government at present.

Burnham is supposedly the inventor of a unique agenda called “Manchesterism”. Yet when one looks closer, it is indistinguishable from Starmer’s incoherent economic approach, best summed up in the contradictory name of a recent Bill: “Regulating for Growth”. “Champagne Supernova socialism” is probably a better label.

Andy Burnham

So why Burnham? Unlike Starmer, it must be said he is fairly likeable and a popular regional politician, the “King of the North”. His “our Andy” persona is obviously hammed up to some extent, but one senses more humanity than in Starmer. And such personae are nothing new: Winston Churchill, Harold Wilson, and Boris Johnson all leant into their own performances of themselves.

It is tempting for Christians to imagine that an affable personality combined with a touch of Northern salt-of-the-earth patter means that Burnham possesses that vital ingredient of great leadership: character, both in terms of being morally upright and firm in his convictions. He has come offering change and decked out in his polo shirt seems to be cut from a different cloth to the usual Westminster fare.

But if there is one thing that Burnham isn’t, it’s a breath of characterful fresh air. His move to Manchester was a calculated (and clearly successful) long-term attempt to position himself as a future Prime Minister, taking a leaf from the playbook of former-London Mayor Boris Johnson. Before that, he became a special advisor in the Blair government in 1998, and was then an MP from 2001 to 2017, being a cabinet minister and running for Labour leader. If you think our political problems are a result of our political class, remember that Burnham has been a member of that class for 30 years.

Believing that all political leaders need is to be decent and try their best was perhaps a sustainable idea when the country was more homogeneous and united, with basic consent on what its problems were. In that context, political division was largely about how to solve those problems.

But that is not where we are. Right now, more than ever, good character for a leader will mean being honest about problems which many simply deny and making calls about the trade-offs needed to solve them. In such a time, the man of good character is not the one who will have a pint and commiserate with you down the local but then maintain the status quo back in SW1. It’s the man whom you might not like a great deal, but who will take on that burden which is essential to politics: the willingness to make choices.

The British public are, generally, able to give new Prime Ministers a fair crack at the whip before writing them off. Starmer had that and failed miserably. Now it’s Burnham’s turn, but sadly there is little reason to believe that he will fair any better. Britain’s structural problems will remain the same, and no amount of best intentions and Northern soul will change that.

We have monumental national debt and very little room to borrow more money; we have the highest ever tax burden in peace time; we are an ageing population undergoing a dramatic collapse in birth rates; record high energy prices are driving up the cost of everything, shutting down businesses and deterring new ones form starting; our welfare bill is skyrocketing due to public health crises and widespread fraud; decades of high immigration which the electorate never asked for has pushed social cohesion past its limits.

These problems all require hard, hard choices to address. Until they are made, we will find ourselves stuck in a loop of the first half Proverbs 28v2: “When a country is rebellious, it has many rulers.” But we should bear in mind the second half of that verse too: “But a ruler with discernment and knowledge maintains order.”

en seeks to carry a range of views on issues such as this by evangelicals who hold a variety of political positions. en itself does not endorse any one political party.

• Read Comment from Graham Nicholls here.
• Read Comment from Tim Farron here.