Becoming Burnham: People Pleasing, The Shadow Years and Losing to Jeremy Corbyn

Who are the political figures that shaped Andy Burnham? How far will the new PM go to be liked? And what impact did losing to Jeremy Corbyn's popularity 'tsunami' have on his career - and confidence? Join Alastair Campbell and Steve Rotheram as they address all these questions and much more on Becoming Burnham Producer: India Dunkley Researcher: Miranda Crawford Video Editor: Josh Smith Social Producer: Celine Charles Executive Producer: Emily Kent Smith 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.

• 0:08Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to part two of the Rest is Politics series on becoming Burnham. He always was Burnham, but he's become the Prime Minister and we've been very lucky to be able to talk to Steve Rotheram, his close friend and Metre Mayor of Liverpool Region, about his rise from the young man we talked about at the end of episode one, who was just coming out of Cambridge University. And now in episode two, we're going to be talking about his political career. Where did he get the ambition and the drive to become not just an assistant to a politician, but a politician himself? How did he cope with losing? Losing his leadership defeats and also Labour losing and him suddenly finding

• 0:53Alastair Campbell?

  he was no longer in a winning environment? And what was it that made him in the end say Westminster is no longer for me, I'm heading north? Let's just go through where he went. So we had his two leadership elections. We'll come back to when he goes off back to the north with you. But do you think in either or both of those, you thought you could win?

• 1:12Speaker 01

  I think the first one was just a bit of a stab in the dark. You know, I want to put my name forward. You've seen that subsequently where people have just associated themselves with a campaign so they can raise the profile. I think that was what that one was.

• 1:27Alastair Campbell?

  So 2010, Ed v David is the sort of main focus and Andy was second to drop out, I think, after that. But then 2015, Ed Miliband goes and I don't think even Jeremy Corbyn thought he was going to win when he started. Andy was almost, was he favourite with the bookies at one point?

• 1:42Speaker 01

  So in my office in Westminster, in the Palace of Westminster, I had this whiteboard up and with all the names that we had got, we'd gone and gathered these names, all going to support Andy.

• 1:55Alastair Campbell?

  This is 2015?

• 1:56Speaker 01

  2015, yeah. And

• 1:58Alastair Campbell?

  You were running his campaign.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, well.

• 2:01Alastair Campbell?

  You were managing his campaign.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, managing. But like he had Michael Dugan and Noel Eames. He had like some people who understood how to win campaigns around them. And he was so far ahead. We'd run out of whiteboards and so we'd have to put stuff, pieces of paper with the names. And then the left chose their candidate. We thought it was going to be Diane again. So we weren't really fearful, not because Diane isn't a brilliant candidate, but because she hadn't ignited the left and the appetite for a change of politics. In the previous one, so we thought, you know, if it's Diane, if it was John, John, yeah, John's really canny, as you know, I've got a lot of respect for John McDonald. I think he's a brilliant political operator.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  We thought, more to it. But anybody else, we thought we wiped the floor. And then he come up with Jeremy Corbyn. We thought, no one's going to go for that. And one by one, I was rubbing or crossing off the names of people who were coming to me and saying, listen, I'm going to support Jeremy. And I was asking people, why? And for loads of spurious reasons, people were coming up with, I'd say, excuses really, rather than the rationale. And we were crossing them off.

• 3:13Alastair Campbell?

  What was the sort of thing he was saying?

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Well, some people, because they'd sat by him in Parliament and stuff like that, and they'd heard him, and he was a decent orator. So he could carry an argument. One, who'd actually started their political career working in his office. And so there's loads and loads of different reasons why they gave, but I don't think any of them were politically concrete enough to justify why they weren't now supporting Andy. Anyway, he still got miles more than the numbers that he needed. But I had somebody on the, at the PLP, when Jeremy was getting close to the final numbers. I'm trying to think of exactly what, it was a 30 something at the time?

• 3:57Alastair Campbell?

  I can't remember.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Well, 38, I'll just say that. And so he was on 35 or whatever. And so we were waiting for

• 4:04Alastair Campbell?

  This is when Margaret Beckett and Sadiq Khan and they came and said, we've got to get him on the ballot, have a proper contest. And so even then, people like Margaret would be thinking, it will be better for Andy if he's got Jeremy to fight.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they were thinking also that we needed to lance this boil, which was that sort of dichotomy between the left of the party and the rump of the party. And we thought the rumple obviously come out the top. And it wasn't until we heard that he'd got over the line, I phoned Andy and said, listen, Andy, he's got the required numbers and all that. And there was just a bit of a silence. And I knew and he knew that it was going to be a lot more problematic than we'd first thought.

• 4:51Alastair Campbell?

  How did, how did he deal with that sense of, so there he is, you've got your whiteboard and you've got your post-its and they're all going across the wall because you've got so many MPs backing you. And then suddenly they start falling off. And then suddenly he realises, oh, I thought I was in with a shout, but this is probably going away. How did he deal with that?

• 5:07Speaker 01

  At first, not brilliantly in regard to, you know, you almost go through the stages, don't you, with disbelief and all that. We, we were quite clear that there was still a campaign to win. But there were some things that happened that you just think, oh, everything's conspired against us. There was once where he was doing a speech in a church. And it was one of his better performances. Because I actually said to him at one stage, Alison, and I bet you've said this to people that you've worked with, and maybe to Tony Blair. But I said, you know what, I said, you're a very good Andy Burnham, but you're a shit phony politician. So don't try and be one. Try to be yourself and authentic

• 5:51Speaker 01

  and all that. And he did this speech and he was asked, he was allowed people to ask questions. And one of them said, Andy, I don't know whether it's sort of totemic, but you've delivered a fantastic speech for the last 35 minutes behind a sign, a big banner that says, repent for JC is coming. And we just went, oh my God.

• 6:17Alastair Campbell?

  I can't believe you didn't spot that. I cannot believe Lobos spotted that.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So

• 6:21Alastair Campbell?

  Wouldn't have happened in my day.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that was, that was a different

• 6:27Alastair Campbell?

  So you knew your luck was out.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  We were just thinking, oh, dearie me. And then we, we went around some places and it was almost as if a beetle had walked, a John Paul George or Ringo type beetle had walked into the room with the response for Jeremy. It was, it was one of the most bizarre

• 6:46Alastair Campbell?

  It was strange.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  things that I've ever seen.

• 6:48Alastair Campbell?

  And what did he learn from that? What did he learn from the, from people saying that actually somebody was, who none of us really saw coming, let's be frank. What did he learn from thinking, we've taken this for granted, that somebody like me is going to become the next leader? And this guy's come from left field. And not only has he come from left field, but he's genuinely exciting a lot of people in Labour Party.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:13Alastair Campbell?

  And beyond.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 7:15Alastair Campbell?

  So what did he learn from that?

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Well, I think it was that taking the message to people is really potent. Because what Jeremy was saying, and by the way, I went to work for Jeremy, as you know, so I didn't just hear this during the leadership campaign. I heard the same thing for speech after speech after speech, a speech with Jeremy. And he basically had a little book and he had some, and none of it excited me in regard to, wow, this is, I've just seen the light. And, and you know, it was like, what? But when he'd finished, I've never seen ovations like Jeremy got. And he really did connect with people, whether you like that or not. He did connect. I did a thing in Liverpool when you and Tony Blair were in

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Liverpool and he was in the Devonshire. And he gave the speech and genuinely, even I was going, I'd vote for him, just because he was able to connect at that level with people. And Jeremy was doing that with big chunks of Labour supporters. You know, we were miles ahead and then we were marginally ahead. And then you just think, oh dear. And then he announced in the QE2 theatre in the, in London, who the winner was. And I was still hoping that if Jeremy got 47, 48, that nobody who supported the other candidates would singly transfer to Jeremy. And then Andy somehow would, and I think he got 60 odd percent, didn't he?

• 8:44Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  We don't have to be unequal. It doesn't have to be unfair. Poverty isn't inevitable. Things can and they will change. Thank you very much.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Do you think the general public would choose Jeremy Corbyn as a Prime Minister?

• 9:04Speaker 04

  Well, we'll have to see, won't we? But you know, what they do want is politicians of conviction, people who say what they mean. They are sick to death of people coming on looking like they're reading off a script. Well, that's clearly not Jeremy Corbyn.

• 9:16Alastair Campbell?

  So what do you think that did to him? It's not just that he's lost, he's kind of lost to Jeremy Corbyn, who as you say, when he first, his name first started to get thrown in the ring, people thought, oh, this isn't going to be a problem. So what sort of soul searching went on with Andy after that?

• 9:30Speaker 01

  For a lot of people outside of the Westminster bubble, and it genuinely is a bubble, it was Jeremy who. And then all of a sudden, he loses badly to Jeremy. And I think there was a lot of soul searching from Andy, you know, how has it gone from being so far ahead to losing so badly? And, and everybody does a bit of naval gazing at those moments, you know, what did we do wrong? But it was literally a tsunami that we couldn't hold back. It started almost immediately that he got the required number of nominations for him to

• 10:10Speaker 01

  enter the contest. And, and we just found that it was, it was overwhelming.

• 10:16Alastair Campbell?

  As he loses 2010, he has this period where he's not very happy. He's also got this situation with his, his wife and her health challenges. And then we lose 2015 as well. And he loses that. And then we had Brexit.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:33Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think he ever thought of packing it all in?

• 10:36Speaker 01

  It must have crossed everybody's mind at that time.

• 10:39Alastair Campbell?

  Did you think of packing it?

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was thinking, well, what's the point in this? Because I've always believed in the European Union. And I just think that, well, my belief was, they shouldn't have asked that question. And he asked the wrong question anyway. If they had have asked, were people more likely to withdraw from Westminster and Whitehall than Brussels or Strasbourg? I think you would have got an equally negative response from the country. But the way in which our party was positioning itself was fairly nuanced. And I wanted just to go out there and I sing from the hilltops. Look, this is fantastic. A place like the Liverpool City Region, we got objective one monies when we weren't getting anything because of the

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Tory government at the time. We didn't get anything. And that objective one monies was a facilitator and a catalyst for massive regeneration in Liverpool. But the bit that I think the European Union did poorly was to communicate it. Do you remember eventually we started putting the stars around stuff? So we're getting million pounds or 10 million pounds project. And he had a little, I was like, get out there and tell people. It was too late. So I do think the whole European angle to this was a missed opportunity for us. Because there was certainly some light between the, the different parties. And you

• 12:07Speaker 01

  had the Tories and the Lib Dems then on either side. And we were trying to straddle two horses.

• 12:14Alastair Campbell?

  Totally. To hear the rest of the episode and the whole series as it drops, just go to therestispolitics.com.