Prime Minister Andy Burnham - ‘I’m a better politician for having failed.’

Andy Burnham is the first Prime Minister on How to Fail. Past leaders have run scared of doing a podcast with ‘fail’ in the title - but not this one. As he says in this conversation: ‘if you’ve not succeeded, you have to understand why it happened, and what you’re going to do about it.’ Wise words from a global leader. Burnham is now our 7th Prime Minister in 10 years, having won a decisive by-election in Makerfield and having received nominations from 94% of Labour MPs in an unopposed leadership contest. In this exclusive episode, recorded at No. 10 North, Andy talks about growing up, how his Catholic faith has shaped his outlook (and whether or not he snuck some communion wine as an altar boy). Plus: imposter syndrome, what he learned from his past failed leadership bids, friendships within politics, how his wife responded to his desire to run for PM, the meaning of ‘home’ and whether or not his dad, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, knows his son has become Prime Minister. A must-listen, even if we do say so ourselves. IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Introduction 03:12 Imposter Syndrome and Authenticity 06:13 Faith and Catholic Roots 08:32 English Degree and Power of Words 10:19 Failed Leadership Bids 16:50 Politics Friendships and Family 21:07 Post Cambridge Job Hunt 25:06 What Home Means 26:26 Hillsborough and Two Britains 27:36 Number 10 North Vision 28:43 Building Safety and Hope 32:49 Radical Yet Sensible Politics 35:35 Fixing Social Care 38:16 Roy and Alzheimer’s 43:10 Faith Power and Farewell LINKS + MENTIONS: Join the How To Fail community: www.howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content Elizabeth’s Substack: www.theelizabethday.substack.com WANT MORE? Ed Miliband - swap.fm/l/YTnZMo8h78DZNf7ZmKnF Sadiq Khan - swap.fm/l/FcuzDh396Ul76Sc46KRb Jess Phillips - swap.fm/l/EHHLbfGCH6oBDbOaMhbX LOVE THIS EPISODE? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts Leave a 5⭐ review – it helps more people discover these stories Follow How To Fail & Elizabeth: Instagram: @elizabday TikTok: @howtofailpod Podcast Instagram: @howtofailpod Website: www.elizabethday.org Guest bookings for How To Fail only come from official @sonymusic.com emails Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com Production & Post Production Coordinator: Eric Ryan and Jen Mistri Sound Engineer: Ed Gill DOP: Keith Gubbins Assistant Camera Op: Charlie Painter Assistant Producer: Shania Manderson Senior Producer: Hannah Talbot Executive Producer: Alex Lawless Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Elizabeth Day?

  Hello and welcome to How To Fail with me, Elizabeth Day. This is a very, very special episode. We don't often get politicians who are willing to admit to their mistakes and talk about failure. But today, we have someone in an incredibly unique position. Before we get started on this conversation, please do remember to like, follow and subscribe so that you never miss a single episode.

• 0:24Elizabeth Day?

  Confession time. I have a tendency to postpone certain decisions for far longer than is sensible. Not the big life decisions, oddly enough, those I can usually handle. It's the smaller ones that somehow become disproportionately complicated. For me, rugs fall squarely into that category. I've known for a long time that a rug can completely change how a room feels. But I've always found sizing for a space tricky. That's why Ernesta appealed to me. Ernesta makes designer quality rugs custom cut to the exact dimensions of your space. So instead of making do with something that's close enough, you're choosing something made specifically for your home.

• 1:04Elizabeth Day?

  I also love the fact that you can order five oversized 12 by 12 samples for just $10 before committing. And Ernesta's design team will help with sizing completely free of charge. Visit ernestacom and order five samples for only $10 and you'll get $50 towards any rug of your choice. That's ernestacom.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Hey, everyone. This is Jonathan Van Ness from Getting Better. You know what you believe. Maybe your faith is at the centre of your life. Maybe you're still figuring it out. Maybe religion just isn't your thing. Those choices are personal, and in America, they should stay personal. That's why Americans United for Separation of Church and State is fighting for something that affects all of us. The freedom to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Because religious freedom isn't just about protecting your right to practise or not. And it surely isn't about having one forced government sanctioned religion. It's about protecting your right to say, this is what I believe, while your neighbour

• 2:11Speaker 01

  says, I believe something completely different. And honestly, that's the whole point. If that sounds like the kind of America you want, learn more at au.org/gettingbetter. Because your beliefs are yours and theirs are theirs.

• 2:27Elizabeth Day?

  In his first speech as Prime Minister outside Number 10 Downing Street, Andy Burnham promised a new politics of hope, saying it was time to invest in people's success rather than paying for failure. It was a line that could just as accurately reflect his personal trajectory. Born in Liverpool, raised in Cheshire and forged in Manchester, Burnham is the middle of three sons. His father, Roy, was a telephone engineer, his mother, Eileen, a GPs receptionist. He joined the Labour Party as a teenager after watching Boys from the Black Stuff on TV and, encouraged by his English teacher, applied for a place at Cambridge. He was rejected from his first interview, but was later picked out of the pool by Fitzwilliam

• 3:11Elizabeth Day?

  College, where he met his wife, Mary France, and graduated with a 2-1 in English. Burnham briefly became a journalist on illustrious titles such as container management. But his heart was always with politics. He got hired first as a researcher before being elected in 2001 under Tony Blair, later becoming a Cabinet Minister for Gordon Brown and going on to serve in the shadow cabinet under Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn for six years. Burnham ran two failed leadership bids himself before standing down from Parliament and being elected Mayor of Greater Manchester with 63% of the vote. By any metric, Burnham made a success of his mayoral terms, becoming so popular, he

• 3:54Elizabeth Day?

  was nicknamed King of the North. He probably prefers that label to Kemi Badenoch's drive that he was nothing more than a pair of eyelashes and a black t-shirt. Despite once claiming that Westminster makes a fraud of good people, Burnham is now our seventh Prime Minister in 10 years, having won a decisive by-election in Makerfield and having received nominations from 94% of Labour MPs in an unopposed leadership contest. So, third time lucky. Still, as Burnham said in 2022, I never relax. I always feel I'm having to prove myself. There's never a sense of, I'm here, I've arrived.

• 4:39Elizabeth Day?

  Prime Minister, welcome to How To Fail.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, Elizabeth. That was a very fair introduction.

• 4:46Elizabeth Day?

  I'm glad, but surely is there a sense that you have now arrived?

• 4:50Speaker 02

  I never feel like that in any job. And I get the sense that if you do, you're not in the right frame of mind because you've always got to prove yourself, haven't you? You've always got to challenge yourself, to prove people who doubt you wrong. I mean, I always carry that sense with me. I don't think that will ever change.

• 5:08Elizabeth Day?

  Well, I think that's the opposite of entitlement, which is precisely what we need right now.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's not much entitlement here. I've always had a bit of that imposter syndrome that many people from these parts and other parts of the country carry with them. You walk in somewhere, your first job or going to universities, you said, always struggled and waited for the tap on the shoulder. And it took a long time for that sense to leave me. But eventually you get beyond that. But even now, I still have that feeling of, no, I need to show the people who don't think I can do this that I can do this. And I've got that feeling right now in this job. But I've got the bit between my teeth. And actually, I go into this job probably differently than anyone before, a bit more like when I went in as Mayor of Greater Manchester.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  I learnt there just to be myself. I knew the city, I knew the people. Right, I'll just be myself in this job. I was free from Westminster and I'm carrying that forward now back to Westminster to say, you know what, all of you down here with the way you do things and your strange ways, well, I'm going to come in and carry a bit of Manchester back in here and show you there's a better way of doing politics.

• 6:22Elizabeth Day?

  And it's why we're recording this in Number 10 North, so it's a joy to be here for the first time. You are my first ever Prime Minister on How To Fail and I am incredibly grateful. We've got close in the past, but most politicians run scared of doing a podcast with the word fail in the title. Why did you decide to do it?

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Because life's a journey and mine certainly has been. And you have to be prepared to understand why, if you've not succeeded at a particular moment, well, why didn't that happen? And what am I going to do about it? How do I make myself better from that experience? And I've definitely done that throughout my political career because I've always had that degree of self doubt or, you know, am I good enough? But I think that's a healthy thing, actually, and it can make you somebody who is prepared to sort of reflect and learn and come back, come back stronger.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  I think probably in any walk of life, people who do that probably are more likely to stick around and, you know, be there for the longer haul. Yeah, not everything has gone right in my, in my journey, but I've always, you know, taken the moment to think, to challenge myself and, you know, really kind of go through it and then understand it and then come back that little bit better.

• 7:47Elizabeth Day?

  Love to hear it. Now, not only are you the first Prime Minister who's come on How To Fail, you are also the first Prime Minister who did English at university.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  First, first ever? I don't know.

• 7:57Elizabeth Day?

  I think you are. And, and I believe the first Catholic Prime Minister.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Yes, I think that is true. Boris may have been baptised but never was raised in that way. But I, I was. I'm not going to claim that I'm the most observant, but once you are one, you're always one when it comes to Catholicism, you know, you can't, you can't shake it out of you. And I definitely would be in that, in that space. And it shaped my views, you know, when I was at school, I'm old enough to remember something called the catechism, Catholic social teaching. You know, it was a very big thing in my early days.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  I was an altar boy and I used to have to put the tape on every week at Mass on Sunday from Archbishop Derek Warlock, who was a big figure in the Catholic Church here in the North West. And he would be speaking very much about the 80s and some of the challenges in the inner cities, Toxteth Moss Side and then the miners' strike. And all of that, I absorbed all of that and couldn't, and still don't actually differentiate faith and politics particularly. I think they're all part of the same thing. How do you live your life? How do you treat other people? Do you have a care for people at the heart of everything that you do? And if you do, I think basically you're going to be on the right lines. So I've tried to stick to that approach.

• 9:25Elizabeth Day?

  Did you ever sneak any communion wine?

• 9:27Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 9:28Elizabeth Day?

  Did you?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  You know what we're like. You know what Catholic, any Catholic would know, we all have that gene within us, you know, it's a, yeah, the Catholic Church, I don't know, it kind of changes through time. But the Catholic Church in my youth was always quite irreverent, quite Irish in terms of the priests we used to come into contact with, you know, a big emphasis on humour. And it became a bit more judgmental, I think, in the, in the 2000s. And I was a big supporter of Pope Francis because I thought he brought back the humour, the humanity, the slightly live and let live approach that had been lost by his predecessor.

• 10:07Elizabeth Day?

  What about your English degree? Has that shaped your political outlook?

• 10:12Speaker 02

  I think so. I had a job to persuade my dad that I should study English at Cambridge. He kept saying, well, what are you going to do with a job like that? As you said at the start, you know, he came from an engineering background. And I kept saying to him, no, I like it. And then I found in a poem I got really interested in by a poet called Tony Harrison, who was a poet from Leeds, and he was quite controversial at the time in the eighties. He wrote a poem called V that was on Channel Four and it was full of swear words. But to me, my English teacher said, you'll like this because you'll relate to it. And I put this video on of his poem and I realised for the first time in my life

• 10:57Speaker 02

  that poetry could have a northern accent and that was quite a thing. But I kept pointing my dad back to the quotation at the start of V from Arthur Skargill, no less. And this quote said, my dad reads the dictionary every day. He says, your life depends upon your power to master words. So I went to my dad and said, look, I actually liked Arthur Skargill. Look, Arthur Skargill says this, you know, doing English is intensely political. It's about your power to get your point over and, you know, communicate well. And I like to think that even though sadly I can't have this conversation with him now, I'd like to think that even now he would accept that that was a good choice.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Because I think a power over language and an ability to use language to make your point, I think has probably helped me quite a bit in my political career. And getting the emotion into what you do and what you say and the connection with people.

• 11:54Elizabeth Day?

  We'll talk more about your dad who has Alzheimer's later as it pertains to one of your failures. But let's get into your first failure, which is your failed runs at Labour leadership. I'm so glad that you are going to talk about this. As we said at the beginning, so much of failure is learning, is data acquisition about what to do differently. Do you think now you are Prime Minister despite those failed leadership runs or because of them?

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Probably because of them. I became a much better politician in the end for not getting the position at that time. Because I probably hadn't really thought things through enough. And the Westminster world puts you on a certain track and makes you think a certain way, speak a certain way even. You quoted that thing that I said about Westminster making a fraud out of good people, but it does. You've got the whips telling you what to say in interviews and how to vote in the lobbies. And it's not about being your authentic self. You know, it kind of takes people away from that and makes them appear something that they're not.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  And it took me to lose in 2015, decide to come back home here and stand to be the first mayor of Greater Manchester. And then really challenge myself about, well, what do I, when I'm thinking and speaking for myself without any party line, because I didn't, I was quite clear when I left, I was going to do this myself, place first, not party first, do what's right for here. It really strengthened me, if you like, as a politician. And it would be true of anybody in any organisation, isn't it? You know, people at work can think, oh, do I just do what the official line will be this?

• 13:45Speaker 02

  And do I just stick to that? Or do I stand outside of it and say, oh, you know what? I don't agree with that. I'm going to do something slightly differently. I think anyone who wants to go towards a leadership position in an organisation has to hit that moment in their life where they don't just look up and do what they think is expected, but actually then develop the ability to say, you know what, what they're doing isn't right. I'm going to do it this way. And the fact of losing in 2015 and then coming into this role here made me a million times better as a politician.

• 14:18Elizabeth Day?

  Are you worried you might lose it again under the pressure of being Prime Minister?

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:24Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Yes, definitely, because the world down there has that effect. It has norms and ways of working and it expects people to follow that. And anyone who challenges it is seen as an outsider or gets, you know, sneering coverage and gets denigrated in one way or another. So yes, is the answer, but I'm just going to do this job exactly as I've done the job I did here in Manchester. I've decided actually, and maybe this has come over in the early days. I don't know. I hope so. I'm just being myself. I've relaxed into it.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  The only way to do it, as far as I can tell, is to go into it as yourself, come over as yourself, explain to people what you're doing and why you're doing it. And then I think you've got a chance of people connecting with it and saying, okay, well, I'll give this a chance. If you're going to go in and do the Westminster thing, then, well, you know, I'll be the, there'll soon be an eighth in 11 years if we're not careful. And I don't want that, obviously, to happen. I want to, to come in and if I can, give the country something to tune into, to believe in, to get some hope going. And hopefully then some stability that might come from that.

• 15:46Elizabeth Day?

  You're focusing on the 2015 leadership bid, but there was a previous one in 2010. Was the 2015 one more painful when you lost to Jeremy Corbyn? Is that why there's this particular focus on it?

• 15:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was very much the outsider and the underdog in the 2010 election. And actually, it probably went fairly well for me because David and Ed Miliband were the sort of, you know, took all of the story of that contest. But it allowed me a space to go over the line of standing in a leadership election, which is a hard thing to do, but with a bit more freedom to just speak to the things I thought were important. So I look back on that as having really helped me. And I don't consider it particularly a failure because, you know, it moved me forward in terms of how I was as a politician. It was just after, I would say, the biggest turning point in my political career,

• 16:41Speaker 02

  which was when, as Culture Secretary, I went to Anfield on the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster. And I'd had to make a choice that day whether I was going to toe the government line or be true to what I knew and the people I'd grown up with, which was that there was a major injustice. And the whole city of Liverpool had been subject of a slur campaign for 20 years, orchestrated from the highest levels of the land. And I knew that. And I had to decide on that day, was I going to toe the line of the government I was in? Or was I going to challenge it? And I did challenge it. And things started to change on that issue.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  But it also then changed me as a person and a politician. Because I realised that in the end, I hadn't come in to toe the lines of people in London that I just couldn't possibly, the 19-year-old me could never have agreed with. You know, I remember saying at the time, if I wasn't the minister at Anfield on that day, I would have been shouting at the minister. And I knew that. I had to reconcile that thing inside of me. I did it in hopefully the right way. And then I went into that leadership election with a bit of that outsider energy. And I think I kind of learnt a lot then. But that's why 2015 was so painful, because I'd become the frontrunner by the time that leadership election came around.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  And oh my goodness, in life, when you're the frontrunner for anything, it just, I don't know, it's hard. You know, you're in a, you're in a more difficult position in a strange way when all the eyes are on you. And you're, I don't know, doing what you think everybody wants you to do. You're listening to advice that you really should reject. And definitely, that was me in 2015.

• 18:25Elizabeth Day?

  How difficult is it to maintain friendships in politics? So you mentioned there that you stood against Ed Miliband in 2010. He's now serving as your Foreign Secretary. Presumably, you had to have a really honest and frank conversation with Keir Starmer when you and Sue were going to stand and make a field. How, how does one maintain these friendships? Or do you?

• 18:48Speaker 02

  I do broadly because I don't thrive on, you know, personal campaigns against people. I've never done my politics like that. But in the end, it's more than you, isn't it? You're kind of standing forward to represent a strain of thinking or opinion within the party, to give a voice to more people than you because people are not feeling represented. So yes, it can get difficult in terms of personal relationships in politics. That will always be baked in. That's a part of, parcel of politics. The question is, when those difficulties arise and those tensions come up,

• 19:29Speaker 02

  can you find a way of not making them the product of animosity or, you know, really rancorous sort of relationships? And I've, I've never done that. It was hard earlier this year when I was blocked in terms of standing for the Gorton and Denton by-election. But, you know, I will always say what I thought about that, but then I carried on working and did events with Keir Starmer after that. So politics, people in politics have to recognise that when things happen, they are not necessarily personal. They happen because the political moods of the times are shaping things. And people have to accept that, you know, sometimes you're on the wrong side of that thinking and those moods.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  And I've had to do that in my political career and we all have to do that at times.

• 20:18Elizabeth Day?

  One of the things I hear a lot from listeners is how tiring it can be when your mind just doesn't settle. And I can only imagine this feels even heavier with intrusive thoughts. It's that quiet sense of being worn down by something you never asked for and never wanted, but just can't seem to switch off. If you struggle with this, I want to tell you about NoCD, because it's a resource that genuinely helps people. NoCD provides specialised treatment for OCD. And what I appreciate about their approach is how human it feels. You're matched with a licensed therapist trained in ERP therapy. That's Exposure and Response Prevention. And over time, you learn skills that help your OCD symptoms

• 20:59Elizabeth Day?

  become manageable, so you can live more of the life you want to live. If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NoCD can help. Book a free 15-minute call to get started at learn.nocd.com/fail.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Hey, everyone. This is Jonathan Van Ness from Getting Better. You know what you believe. Maybe your faith is at the centre of your life. Maybe you're still figuring it out. Maybe religion just isn't your thing. Those choices are personal, and in America, they should stay personal. That's why Americans United for Separation of Church and State is fighting for something that affects all of us: the freedom to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Because religious freedom isn't just about protecting your right to practise or not. And it surely isn't about having one forced government sanctioned religion. It's about protecting your right to say,

• 21:57Speaker 01

  "This is what I believe", while your neighbour says, "I believe something completely different", and honestly, that's the whole point. If that sounds like the kind of America you want, learn more at au.org/gettingbetter. Because your beliefs are yours, and theirs are theirs.

• 22:15Elizabeth Day?

  What was the conversation like with your wife, Marie Frans, when you said, "Listen, I know I've tried twice already to be leader of the Labour Party, but I've got this plan now to become Prime Minister"? As a wife myself, I just don't think I could cope with that. I mean, she seems amazing, don't get me wrong, but what have those conversations been like?

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Oh, goodness me. It's why I kind of find this podcast easy, because, you know, she's quite blunt in telling me about my failures and past endeavours, and she doesn't hold back. And yeah, there's no soft landing there. Yeah, she was like, "Oh, not again. They've told you twice they don't want you. What are you doing again?" Yeah, we know, we've always just had honest conversations about it. You know, she knows why I'm in politics and what I'm trying to do. It is about changing the country to make it fairer. I know that sounds a bit sort of corny to say that, but it's exactly why I'm doing it in the same way that I stood to be mayor of Greater Manchester. So she took some persuading, to be honest, because I guess she didn't want to see me go through it all again and

• 23:21Speaker 02

  then, you know, end out on the wrong side and, you know, at the end of it. But she gives me good advice. The funny thing, everyone laughs at in the early stage of my political career, this to give you a flavour of the famous Marie Frans Van Heel, as she now is, I would be, as a young politician, I'm talking, you know, sort of 31, 32, when I was elected in Lee in the early 2000s. And I'd go in and do these interviews, and thinking I'd done really well, because I had taken the sort of the handout from the Whip's office, and I'd done an interview where I'd not strayed from the line at all. And I would come out,

• 23:58Speaker 02

  and I'd turn my phone on, my old Nokia mobile phones, and first text in block capitals from said person would just say, and this is what it would read, "Answer the F*ing question".

• 24:18Elizabeth Day?

  That's amazing.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that's the kind of feedback I've had from her. And yeah, it's probably relevant to this podcast, isn't it?

• 24:25Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, I hope she listens to this podcast.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  It would be up her street, for sure.

• 24:29Elizabeth Day?

  Great.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, she's quite forthright in that. She's Dutch, and they don't hold back. They're pretty plain speaking. And yeah, I've been on the receiving end of a lot of that over the years.

• 24:39Elizabeth Day?

  Well, talking of your wife brings us to your next failure, where we're going back in time, and it's not being able easily to get a job in the North or at home after you finished at Cambridge. Can you talk to me a little bit first about the experience of Cambridge and how it felt to you?

• 24:58Speaker 02

  So I loved my time at Cambridge. I really did. Loved it. It was, well, it still is a magical place. That's how I felt about it. It was like a land that was so different to here, you know, a blessed place. And I so much wanted to be accepted there. That took a while, but in the end, you know, I did feel that I was accepted. And I did well. I mean, I, you know, obviously met Marie Frans there, played a lot of football there, didn't do the student politics. I enjoyed university life to the full, and enjoyed the subject. And I consider myself really lucky to have gone to Cambridge. The chip

• 25:42Speaker 02

  on the shoulder was there to begin with, but it kind of left really, as I just understood what an amazing place and what it had to offer was. The hard thing was leaving and coming back here. That was the hard thing, because you've just had a glimpse of a different world and people who've got different connections in their kind of world and their social life. And I came back here, and it was the summer of 1991. There was loads going on in this city at the time, music wise. You know, it was a great place to be. But the reason the music scene was booming was because it had kind of come through into the empty factories

• 26:26Speaker 02

  and the empty warehouses, because the rest had gone. The jobs had gone, everything had gone dark, you know, and the music scene was the thing that kind of was coming through to try and pick the place up. And I spent months here sending CV after CV, trying to find a job, and I just could not find anything. And it sticks in my mind, because, back to that conversation with my dad, he tried to persuade me to go to Cambridge, because I was initially a bit reluctant, you know, thinking I wouldn't fit in, it would be awful. And he was right that I should have applied. But when he was trying to persuade me, he kept saying, "Oh, when you graduate, all the doors will fly open, you'll have no problem

• 27:09Speaker 02

  at all". And it wasn't like that. But people I'd been at university with, who had, let's say, well-connected parents, they were walking into internships at The Times and placements at the BBC, and this, that and the other. And here was me, sort of trying to find a foothold in journalism, and there was just nothing. My first job came in November 1991, but it was unpaid. Unpaid reporter on The Middleton Guardian in North Manchester. And that was where I started. And it felt incredibly hard and tough. And in the end, I gave up. I'd said to everybody who knew me that I wouldn't be moving to London, but I then did.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  And there were so many people of my generation, born in the North West in the 1960s or 70s, for whom that was what the reality, you know, if you wanted to get on in life, you had to go south. But it felt like a failure. It felt like a big failure, actually, when I left and took a job on container management, as you correctly said. It's the reason why I've never been on Have I Got News For You, because I just know, they've asked me about 20 times, I just know they would make container management the guest publication of the week, and they would read out my old articles. I couldn't bear the humiliation.

• 28:29Elizabeth Day?

  But those trade publications are absolutely great, because I started out as a print journalist, and I used to get so many stories from trade publications like that. Yeah, they're great. You mentioned in the wording of this failure to me, your failure to get a job at home.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:46Elizabeth Day?

  Home clearly is an extremely resonant concept for you. It's very important.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:52Elizabeth Day?

  What do you think home means?

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Home means safety, in that you know where you are, you know who you're with, you just feel supported and secure. So I always had that feeling coming home in term time from Cambridge. Home just meant you're back in your comfort zone, and you don't have to worry about being somebody you're not. You can just be yourself again. And it's been a bit of a theme of my life, really. When I left Westminster and came back as mayor of Greater Manchester, it felt like being home. I often describe walking in my very first morning as mayor of Greater Manchester, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority,

• 29:38Speaker 02

  and all the people were there clapping when I came in. It felt the opposite of going into my first job in a Whitehall department, where you felt half the place was working against you and trying to sort of find you out or trip you up. You know, it felt very different being back here in the city when I left Westminster. And it was definitely a part of my university days. I remember being at home back to Hillsborough in the Easter of 1989, in my first year. And I was at home, and I went to the other semi-final on the day of Hillsborough. All my school friends were at the Liverpool game at Hillsborough. And then they came back to the same pub where we'd been the night before, traumatised,

• 30:23Speaker 02

  and, you know, some didn't come back at all.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  That never left me that experience because then when I went to Cambridge, nobody was even talking about it. Or to the extent that they were talking about it, they were blaming the Liverpool supporters. And this kind of idea of Britain as two worlds has always been a sort of feeling and a theme in my, in my life. When I went to Cambridge, you know, it felt like I'd gone to a different world and I would come home to feel that feeling of connection again. Or when I worked in London in the nineties, I would come home to go and watch Everton. And again, I'd feel like I was connected again. And it was true in my days in Westminster, you know, it was always out of my comfort zone, trying to live in someone else's world and then back here. And I don't know, now I kind of feel I've moved beyond some of that, that feeling as

• 31:11Speaker 02

  I go into this, this role. But it's never left me this feeling that Britain is two worlds. And if there's a theme that I want to define my time as Prime Minister, it's making this country not feel like that, not have a sense that some areas are favoured and some are not. And then the feeling that comes to young people growing up in those areas, that's what Number Ten North is about, getting growth, good growth going in every postcode, making Whitehall look after Middleton as much as it looks after Marlowe in, in the south. You know, that, that's what I'm about really. I've always been about that. And it's why I feel relaxed in this role. I know what I want to do with it. I know what I'm trying to achieve.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  I know how Britain was when I was growing up. It, it did feel too much like two worlds, people living parallel lives. And that's what I want to change.

• 32:07Elizabeth Day?

  Good English degree alliteration there. Middleton, Marlowe, appreciated that.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Had to struggle for a find a place with an M in the south there very quickly.

• 32:15Elizabeth Day?

  Home is resonant for so many of us. And I think that so many people struggle to feel that sense of safety that you so eloquently portray there in the UK at the moment, whether they are the victim of racist attack, whether they are marginalised because they are a trans person. How are you going to embed this feeling of home? Because I know a lot of people felt so let down and angered by Keir Starmer's statement about the island of strangers. And these are knotty and complicated issues. But I imagine that you want to foster a greater sense of safety for those people to feel at home.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely, I do. And the answer is quite a simple one. And I started it really on the doorsteps of Makerfield. Bring back hope, bring back a sense of possibility to the country, that things aren't in a inevitable decline and that your place isn't shut out of having some good things happen. That, I think, is the best antidote to the negativity and the hate that we see in, in places across the UK. Give people a sense that, you know, you can do something about the cost of living, you can make people's life better. You know, we can all together feel that things are, things are moving forward. I think we've lost that feeling.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  I go back to this country at the moment of London 2012, that feeling was there in abundance, wasn't it? You could kind of almost touch it. It was brilliant. And yet, over that decade or more since then, it just drained out of the place, didn't it? And who knows, social media, but also the failure of politicians has a big part in it, you know, politics just wasn't working, connecting. And then that kind of feeling of hopelessness, pessimism seeps in and then you get the division that comes from, from that. So we've been in that place for a long time now as a country. And I don't want to, you know, be too simplistic about it. It's hard to turn that around.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  But I am determined in this role to talk about hope, bringing it back, giving people a sense that they're being heard, listened to, we're doing something about it, we can be better, the place where you live can be better, your kids can have better prospects. It's why I talk about an education system that balances technical education with academic education. For too long, goes back to my theme, this country has appeared as though it's for some people rather than all people, or for some places rather than all places. And in education, you've got a prime example. And I go back actually to the government I was connected to, the Blair government. We talked about a 50% target of young people going to university.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  But what did we say to the other 50%? It was deafening silence there. And that, I think, that approach to politics has been part of the problem. It's not felt like it's for people in all places. And that parents were like, okay, they're talking about the life chances of my kids, not just someone else's kids. And I've really, you know, thought about those things over, over the years. And that is the way back to, I think, a more hopeful country where, you know, we're not pandering to sentiment that is fostering on social media, but actually we're kind of, you're saying, no, no, I'm going to do the opposite of that.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  I'm going to stand on your doorstep in Makerfield, I'm going to talk about what I'm going to do, what I'm about, not point scoring against anyone else, what positive things I'm going to do to try and change your lives. Do you know, politics, Elizabeth, just isn't like that. Everyone spends their time pointing fingers, scoring points and no wonder it drives people mad. But that creates a negativity then, that politicians with more sinister intent sort of feed off that negativity and throw more negativity into the mix. And then we end up in a really, a really bad and divided place.

• 36:21Elizabeth Day?

  Talking of Tony Blair, I heard him say this thing recently, which already struck me, that in the political climate at the moment, the sensible people aren't radical enough and the radical people aren't sensible enough. How do you combine this big vision that you have with your stated ambition for more devolution, growth in every postcode? Is there a tension there?

• 36:46Speaker 02

  There is, but Tony Blair's right about that. I think radical people do need to more, be more sensible at times and sensible people need to get out of the sort of incremental change and start talking again about how does politics fix the big things? So social care, you know, we perhaps, we're going to come on to this. I feel that my generation of politicians is guilty of a shameful dereliction of duty, political cowardice of the worst kind in saying that this issue is too difficult and we're not going to touch it, we're just going to leave it. You know, this is about basic care of fellow human beings and those who are vulnerable.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  And we're saying that politics can't address that. But that's where we got to. And we got to it through that normal behaviour of Westminster. When I put forward an idea in 2010 for a national care service, that was branded a death tax. And Theresa May came forward and put some, forward some proposals, a dementia tax. That kind of creates a situation where everyone says, oh, well, don't go there. But what a failure that is, what a failure. Thirty years since the Royal Commission on Social Care, barely anything has really changed. In fact, social care has gone backwards. And doesn't that just say something about how politics has really fallen, if you like? You know, it has to be radical.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  We'd have never created the NHS if we weren't radical as a, as a country at times. And I think given where we are now, you have to have a degree of radicalism to change it. I've talked about the 40 years since the eighties. I don't think neoliberalism, trickle down economics has been kind to a lot of places across Britain, particularly the places that were the industrial centres of Britain. I think it's been very unkind to those places, actually. You go there now and you feel a sense of decline. The high street isn't what people want, would want it to be. And sometimes in politics, you have to say, I'm going to break out of the, the kind of consensus and start talking about those things in a different way. And it's what I've started to do.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  But you have to be sensible about it in terms of what solutions do you bring forward? And you have to be pragmatic about it.

• 39:06Elizabeth Day?

  This episode is brought to you by the RSPCA. I know a number of people who've adopted their pet from the RSPCA with huge success. So I am personally a big advocate. Also, producer Hannah actually fostered kittens for the charity called Belinda and Millie. So we're very much aligned with what the RSPCA is trying to do here at How to Fail. We know that animals have rich emotional lives, just like we do. My cat Huxley is a prime example of a cat with a lot of empathy and wisdom, for example. And animals deserve the same kindness and respect. Every kind of animal matters, pets, wild or farmed animals. Together, we can create a better world for them.

• 39:51Elizabeth Day?

  Show your love for every kind and find out more and see what action you could take to help animals. Check out rspca.org.uk. There are so many things I wish I'd known when I started this podcast and my production company, Daylight. Like, why am I spending hours trying to make a website look good? Why am I designing everything from scratch? And why am I spending all my time just doing admin? What I really needed was one place that could do all of this for me. Enter Shopify. Shopify has beautiful, ready-made templates that make your website look polished without needing to become a graphic designer overnight. Its AI tools can help you get your site up and running quickly.

• 40:33Elizabeth Day?

  And Shopify Checkout makes it really easy for customers to actually go from, ooh, I like that, to, yes, I'll have one. If Shopify had existed when I started out, I could have saved myself a lot of time, stress, and some rogue design choices. If you're ready to hear the

• 40:51Elizabeth Day?

  of your first sale today, head over to Shopify.co.uk/fail to start your free trial today. That's right, start your free trial at Shopify.co.uk/fail.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Hey, everyone, this is Jonathan Van Ness from Getting Better. You know what you believe. Maybe your faith is at the centre of your life. Maybe you're still figuring it out. Maybe religion just isn't your thing. Those choices are personal, and in America, they should stay personal. That's why Americans United for Separation of Church and State is fighting for something that affects all of us. The freedom to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Because religious freedom isn't just about protecting your right to practise or not. And it surely isn't about having one forced, government-sanctioned religion. It's about protecting your right to say, this is what I believe, while your neighbour

• 41:47Speaker 01

  says, I believe something completely different. And honestly, that's the whole point. If that sounds like the kind of America you want, learn more at au.org/gettingbetter. Because your beliefs are yours, and theirs are theirs.

• 42:04Elizabeth Day?

  I just could never be Prime Minister for multiple reasons, but the stress of trying to find funding to overhaul the social care system, which is your third failure, so let's come on to it now. The stress of that must feel completely overwhelming.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  No, it doesn't. It doesn't, because the status quo is the worst of all worlds. That's the issue, isn't it? Let's just look at what we've got right now. Millions of people are going without their basic needs being met because the system isn't good enough to meet their basic daily needs. So that's the first thing. Second thing, you have millions of family carers, people like my mum, who tried to care for my dad at home, who in the end are actually the main issue we discovered as a family. My mum was sinking under the pressure of trying to make it work when the care system couldn't make it work for her.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  But that's the reality for so many people in this country as a consequence of broken social care. Then there's the next injustice of having to pay a fortune for this broken care that people get. So they pay a lot of money for a very poor standard of care. And some people, the most unfortunate, those who get, let's say, Alzheimer's at an early age, pay with everything, down to £23,000 of their savings. So they can spend hundreds of thousands of pounds. They can be cleaned out by the whole experience of being unlucky enough to get dementia. You know, the randomness of it, if you've got a cancer, you can get everything paid

• 43:45Speaker 02

  for, but you get dementia, you get absolutely wiped out physically, emotionally, financially. It's just terrible, isn't it?

• 43:54Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  So I don't get overwhelmed by it, is the point I'm coming to, because it can't be worse than that, can it? Surely we can make it better than that. People are already paying. So the money is going in, it's just being done in the most unfair way imaginable. It's like American healthcare, the most vulnerable, pay with everything. And we're okay with that in Britain, the home of the National Health Service? Well, I don't think so. And I think if I can get beyond the newspapers, who kind of work with the worst point-scoring politicians to frighten people about these issues, and it's happening now, given I've raised the issue again, if we can get beyond that and we can just put the proposals in front of people, some of them might be quite radical.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  I think the British public will let us know which one they can accept. And they're actually often quite radical in what they want.

• 44:44Elizabeth Day?

  Talk to me about your dad, Roy. When did you first start noticing as a family that he was showing signs of Alzheimer's?

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is difficult.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  I mean, it's just an emotional topic for me, but it was a year or two after the pandemic. So pandemic was hard for everybody, wasn't it? You know, and it took a toll on older people, my mum and dad to a degree, just because that contact wasn't there. And we all remember that time. And coming out of the pandemic, my dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer. And you hear that and you think, oh, my goodness, we must get him into treatment.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  And my brothers and I, we look back at that and we reflect on it because I don't think we knew enough or had thought or had it explained to us enough that the intensive treatment that comes with prostate cancer may in fact have brought on the dementia. I don't think I, you know, with all my background in health, I didn't understand enough the relationship between those two things. So it was shortly after he'd had his prostate cancer treatment, I think it would have been 2022 sort of time. I remember sitting with him in his bungalow and he just kept asking me about, could I see something in the trees? And, you know, and, you know, he was saying he could see shapes in the trees.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  And I was like, no, it's nothing, dad, it's fine. But I remember coming away that day thinking something has changed. And yeah, you never, never forget that.

• 46:22Elizabeth Day?

  I'm so sorry. One of the terrible cruelties of this situation is that he doesn't know you've become Prime Minister.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:31Elizabeth Day?

  Is there a picture of you as Prime Minister in his room, in his care home?

• 46:36Speaker 02

  Not yet, I don't think. But something wonderful happened last week. So I went into his care home on Sunday. And so for people listening now, because this may have gone out later, this was the Sunday after I'd become Prime Minister, so six days later. And one of the staff said, oh, the manager wants to speak to you before you leave. So I went over and I spoke to her. She said, we all wanted you to know. Have to be careful here, this does make me quite emotional.

• 47:07Elizabeth Day?

  Of course it does.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  She said, we all knew kind of what time you might be coming up Downing Street. So we got Roy in his chair and we got the telly right in front of him and six of us stood around him. And all said, Roy, look, look.

• 47:23Elizabeth Day?

  Wow.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  And she said he turned and he had a, he said momentarily, they said, we thought he knew.

• 47:31Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, Prime Minister, how moving.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  Well, it was because at the time that they were doing that, I was kind of holding my mum and I was, we were having a sort of chat about him.

• 47:43Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  So the thought of them doing that 200 miles away was like, yeah.

• 47:48Elizabeth Day?

  Was your mum

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 47:49Elizabeth Day?

  No, please don't apologise. All emotion is welcome here. Was your mum the woman you were hugging for a while? Okay, that's beautiful. And how is

• 47:56Speaker 02

  I was whispering in her ear about my dad. But then to hear what the staff said.

• 48:01Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  I just need to say this, the staff who work in social care, I mean...

• 48:07Speaker 02

  When are we going as a society to recognise them and what they do? I've seen hundreds of people care for my dad. And when you see someone caring for a relative, you look at that process through new eyes, don't you? You see things you maybe wouldn't have seen before when just it was caring for somebody else. But they're incredible and I include the staff from other countries and overseas. They are incredible what they do. And that was just a another example of it, that they thought to do that on that day, rather than just leave him in his chair when that was when that was happening.

• 48:42Elizabeth Day?

  And how is Eileen Burnham doing?

• 48:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:46Elizabeth Day?

  Redoubtable by all accounts.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, not in us. She's not in the Marie France category of redoubtable. She's in a sort of more mild version of that. But no, she's, she's good. I mean, it's been a hard road for her in terms of what she's done, but she did an amazing job supporting my dad. And then has recovered somewhat because of the arrangement we've now got with the care home, which is great. And she went through the same thing as Marie France, actually, about me going further into this job. But I think in the end, as a family, we always talked these things through and everyone understood what I was doing, why I was doing it. And she absolutely understands as well. And all of my, you know, they're all bought into the idea of a country that is kind of fairer to everywhere, more rebalanced, a little north to south.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  And they all believe in that. So they know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. And again, they're behind it.

• 49:39Elizabeth Day?

  You've done me the honour of speaking so personally today and I'm so grateful. Do you think the most powerful politics are personal?

• 49:48Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. I go back to that point about faith and me as a child, really, you know, reading the Catholic social teaching and the catechism. I've never really differentiated politics from that. And, you know, the teachings that you hear and, you know, the same thing, you know, love thy neighbour as thyself, you know, all of that just meant to me that, you know, that's kind of basically what you should do, what you're being, you're being asked to do. And all religions have their versions of the, of the same thing. So I know some people think it's controversial to say religion and politics shouldn't mix, but they kind of, they, they are part of the same thing to me.

• 50:30Speaker 02

  I remember coming into Parliament in, in that period in the early 2000s. And somebody who was a Greater Manchester MP called Paul Goggins, you know, he was much more Catholic than me in terms of, you know, very devout, but, you know, he found, he singled me out because he realised we had a shared background and he became something of a mentor to me. And I'll never forget Paul saying to me, he said, Andy, in here, there are just so many people who come in here, get a bit of power and then kind of give that power to people who've already got a lot of power because they want to ingratiate themselves and get things from people who've got power. He said, that's the last thing you should do. Give your power to people who've got none. That's why you're here.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  And so Paul was like massive in terms of prisoner welfare and homelessness and refugees, you know. He, he really said to me, that's why you are here. And I never forgot that. And some of my work on homelessness has been very much influenced by, by Paul. But to me, that is bringing a sort of faith perspective to politics. And the reason why people think sometimes they don't mix is because probably that's an exception really in terms of Paul was an exception to the norm. But that's why, you know, I remember him and I like talking about him because he, he should be talked about. He was an incredible influence on my life.

• 51:52Elizabeth Day?

  Prime Minister, first Prime Minister on How to Fail, you've set the bar very, very high. I obviously have to ask you if your eyelashes are real, if you do anything to them, anything to your brows, your lashes.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  They're not falling off. I get accused. I don't, this is one thing I've from my dad, actually, I can be great. He's, he was, kept his sort of darker hair, not so much now, but quite, quite late. And everyone thinks I diet. I don't, I can prove that I don't. But no, so he gave me some, gave me some good things.

• 52:21Elizabeth Day?

  Well, it's been a real privilege to ask you that important question and all of the others. Thank you so, so much for coming on How to Fail.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  You're so welcome, Elizabeth. Thanks for having me on.

• 52:31Elizabeth Day?

  Please do follow How to Fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.