Becoming Burnham: Thatcher, Hillsborough, and the Anger that Shaped Him | Part 1

To hear the full episode and the series as it drops, sign up up at therestispolitics.com Alastair is joined by Andy Burnham’s closest confidant, friend and former colleague, Steve Rotheram – the Metro Mayor of the Liverpool City Region to discuss… Who really is Andy Burnham, and how is he going to change Britain? How have events like Hillsborough, and Thatcher’s Northern neglect shaped him? And, how does he contend with his imposter syndrome, his ‘Catholic guilt complex’, and his restless desire to be liked? 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?

  Andrew Murray Burnham, known to most of you by now as Andy, our seventh Prime Minister in just over a decade. King of the North to some, all vibes to others. But what kind of leader will he be? What drives him? What does he actually want this country to do and to be? And how did he go from being a parliamentary assistant to Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in around a quarter of a century? I've known Andy Burnham for around 30 years. He crops up a fair bit in my diaries, often talking about his anxieties, his fears, his frustrations, also by his ideas and his ambition. So I do know some of the story.

• 0:52Alastair Campbell?

  I know quite a lot of the story, but today I've been sitting down, talking to somebody who probably knows Andy Burnham better than anybody outside his family. That's Steve Rotheram, Steve, former MP, left Westminster with Andy Burnham to go off and become Mayor's. Andy in Manchester, Steve in Liverpool City Region. So they've worked together, they've navigated Westminster together, they've left Westminster together, they've become mayors together. They fought for the Hillsborough families and victims together. And now they're probably as close as you can get as friends in politics. So here is what you're going to hear about in this series. You're going to hear from Steve about Andy Burnham's imposter syndrome. You're going to hear about his Catholic guilt complex.

• 1:37Alastair Campbell?

  You're going to hear about Andy, the family man, the DJ, the footballer and all that stuff. You're going to hear about the humiliation, that's Steve's word, the humiliation he felt on losing those two leadership elections, in particular the one to Jeremy Corbyn. You're going to hear a really deep rooted dislike of Margaret Thatcher, radicalised by her. You're going to hear how he responded to the Manchester Arena bombing in a truly extraordinary story about how he found out that it had happened. You're going to hear why he went absolutely ballistic with Boris Johnson during the Covid pandemic. We're going to talk about Manchesterism, what it is, and maybe more importantly, how it can be applied to the whole country. And you're going to get Steve Rotheram's pretty well informed predictions about what a Burnham government wants to do and will be like.

• 2:22Alastair Campbell?

  That's all coming up on Becoming Burnham. So Steve, thank you for being here.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Great pleasure.

• 2:28Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, let's start with his childhood. You, you were one of eight.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32Alastair Campbell?

  Right. So also a Catholic, I'm guessing?

• 2:35Speaker 01

  No, we were, no, we had no religion whatsoever.

• 2:39Alastair Campbell?

  But you've got eight kids.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:41Alastair Campbell?

  And you're growing up in a pretty, very well, an absolute working class part of Liverpool. Would you say your childhood was very different to Andy's?

• 2:47Speaker 01

  I'd say it was similar in many ways, but they had their own home, whereas we had a council house, which actually was my mum's home, believe me. It wasn't the council's. My mum used to decorate that, my mum decorated, not my dad. He was at the Labour Club, having a few drinks, of course, and enjoying himself. But I think the similarities of most people are that when you're brought up in that sort of a community, that neighbourhood, you don't know what other people are living like, because all you can see is the people around you and they're all living a very similar standard of life.

• 3:22Alastair Campbell?

  And so his dad was an engineer, was a telephone engineer. His mum Eileen was a GP receptionist. They're now in their mid 80s. And his dad, of course, has dementia, which is really sad to think. He doesn't know just how far Andy's gone or doesn't understand how far he's gone. Just on family, tell me whatever you feel comfortable saying about Andy's family, parents, wife, kids.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  He's a real family man. I'm not just saying that because we can all say we're family men, can't we all? You know, people who love our families, who doesn't love the family? Boris Johnson. But no, there's, there's some formative things, I think, in his childhood. You know, such as that moving from the first house in Aintree and then going to Colchester and then moving again and then going to the schools there rather than to a school in Liverpool. So I think all of that was formative. And he's got two brothers who he really is close to and two great lads. And if you think about the family from that background, two of them teachers, you know, head teachers and all that in schools.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  And Andy, who became a politician, obviously, but has done all right for himself as well. I think that's from his mum and dad. I think you get your values from your mum and dad. And Eileen, who's his mum, is just such a lovely woman. And before his dad got dementia, obviously, I used to have chats with his dad. His dad's a big Evertonian and again formed that sort of, you must follow in the family tradition of support in Everton. But he has carried that forward to his own family. And the closeness of him and his lad and the two girls, who he's immensely close to. And you can see that with the shows of affection.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  But behind all of that, just the way that they act as a family, it shows it that that is the basis of who he has become. It's that strong bond. And then Mary Frances, Andy's wife, who, by the way, if anybody out there is somebody who liked a tweet which was critical of her dress, I think shame on you. This is a woman who fought breast cancer, who, a woman who, again, is just from an ordinary background, okay? She's from another country, she's from Holland. But she came over as well to the UK and did very well for themselves

• 5:59Speaker 01

  and ended up in Cambridge. So it's not like she had all of the trappings of wealth. They've created that by their intelligence and their determination. And a really, really good unit, a solid unit. And that's why I think Andy's been able to do some of these things.

• 6:17Alastair Campbell?

  I can remember actually having dinner with him. This is when he was shadow education, I think. And Mary Frances was having the operation. And I can remember him feeling guilt.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:30Alastair Campbell?

  That he was, yes, he was there as much as he could be, but both for her and for the kids, this sense of, I've got to be in Westminster to sort of, you know, take on Michael Gove over some stupid new idea he's got, when I've got all that going at home.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  And everyone's got a bit of that, haven't they? I mean, again, anybody who's away with jobs in the armed forces or wherever, who's away from family, has got those contentions. He dealt with it really well, I think. And whilst he's doing all of that, trying also to have a bit of fun time, if you like, a bit of him time. So as you know, he's a lover of live music. And we've been going to gigs probably for 15, 16, 17 years, whatever it is. And he's going to find that almost impossible now as the Prime Minister, isn't he, to go to a live music venue?

• 7:20Alastair Campbell?

  Well, if he does go, he's got to do better than he did on his little dad dance.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  The Paul and dancing.

• 7:24Alastair Campbell?

  Is he?

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Oh, he's terrible.

• 7:26Alastair Campbell?

  Should he just better not do it at all?

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Well, his taste in music sometimes is just depressing. So we do these DJ offers, you know, we have a DJ battle. And I'll be playing, you know, something really upbeat. And then he'll put on The Smiths, you know, Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now, or Girlfriend in a Coma. And I'm like, yeah, that keeps the vibe going, doesn't it? Well done, that, yeah. So I'll put something else on then to get it going again. But if Frankie or something up it goes again. Yeah, he genuinely believes that we've had these DJ battles and he's won some of them.

• 8:01Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Not a chance.

• 8:03Alastair Campbell?

  I mentioned Catholicism. Did you ever have a sense that Andy's religion was important to him?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. He does have that sort of Catholic guilt complex, you know, that many people have. He's very similar to what may make to a Catholics as well in their attitude to life, their beliefs, their values, principles.

• 8:23Alastair Campbell?

  So what does the guilt complex mean? That he sort of feels if somebody's not doing as well as he should, he's got a responsibility of what?

• 8:29Speaker 01

  He's always got that sort of, you know, the Catholicism looms large. If he is believing that he should do something, then I think he'd be steered away from it because of his beliefs.

• 8:39Alastair Campbell?

  He once said, I used to, he read the Catholicism and he felt that the enfranchisement of it on earth was the Labour Party. Do you kind of feel that? Do you feel there's a moral, there is, you know, it's either a moral mission or it's nothing?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do. I think it's a crusade, yeah. I think that the Labour Party is the greatest organ for social change in this country since its inception. And religion, of course, can be often compared to that. Because if you truly believe in the teachings of the church, then it's about being good to other people and all that. That's what socialism is to me.

• 9:14Alastair Campbell?

  I mentioned in the introduction Liverpool back then. And I mean, you obviously. Lived it much more than than Andy, who's, you know, just outside and he's, but he's, he's looking on in. Give us a sense of it. You, we, you know, we, we did the stats there, but also the politics of it were brutal as well, weren't they?

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Oh, dear me, yeah. So the thing that he talks about is Boys from the Black Stuff. And actually that's through a conversation that we had that I teased out of him how fundamental that was to his belief that the North wasn't getting a decent enough deal from that particular government, the Thatcher government. But we all knew that it was writ large, wasn't it? Nearly a hundred thousand jobs gone. And those people, you know, left with no alternatives. So it was a seminal piece of television for lots of reasons, but also I think quite clearly formed that important instinct within him, which was about injustice. And he could see

• 10:15Speaker 01

  that the things that were happening to Liverpool were wrong in so many ways, but also the damage that it was doing to people's lives was something worth fighting for.

• 10:26Alastair Campbell?

  How do you think that whole Liverpool, demise of Liverpool, joblessness in Liverpool, social unrest in Liverpool, what lasting effect do you think that had on him in the way he thinks about politics?

• 10:36Speaker 01

  A lot of the stuff that happened in the early years sometimes still comes out, you know, if we're having a conversation about something. So it very much forms part of the, the politician he's become and has been very formative in some of the bitterness that he feels against the way in which the state has conspired against certain areas. I do believe that this is why, when I was trying to persuade him to, to be the Metromayor or stand as the Metromayor for Greater Manchester, I think this is why devolution became really

• 11:16Speaker 01

  important. So it's no good having a moan about things not going brilliantly well in Westminster. If that's all you do, you, you're just there and not trying to change it. He looked from the outside at the mechanisms by which we can start to use devolution to change politics. And I think that's why he wants to go back in because he can do that on a national scale now. And he ha- he has spoken openly about using devolution as a way in which every area in the country can start to benefit from growth.

• 11:50Alastair Campbell?

  And Thatcher was, how do we put it?

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Anathema?

• 11:54Alastair Campbell?

  Hate figure?

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'd, I'd say, um, another thing that you get taught off your parents, my mum said, never, ever say hate because it's a, it's a useless emotion, doesn't actually do anything. So it was difficult for me to actually say that I hated Thatcher, but I disliked her immensely. And she did so much damage to our area, both to the, the economy and the, the, the way which we operated, but also to the reputation.

• 12:25Alastair Campbell?

  And would you say, so when she won, I think particularly the second election, eighty three, and then meanwhile Liverpool is electing, you know, a really, really far left council?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:38Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think to some extent that was a product of her, a response to her? Or was it just that Liverpool's always been more left wing than the, than the rest of the country?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  No, I think it's an absolute response to Thatcherism and to what was happening. There were people who joined Labour Party politics there. He wouldn't have been associated with our party, you know, there was, was a, a broad church of everybody from communists and socialist workers party and everything all joined in with militants, of course. And then some people who were just mainstream Labour, you know, they had the sort of the same values and principles that historically people would join our party with. But it became really, really toxic, of course, because that injustice burns brightly. And I, I believe that at that time, the politicians in Liverpool wanted to take on the role of the aggressor

• 13:33Speaker 01

  against the government that they believed the whole country should follow them with.

• 13:37Alastair Campbell?

  Andy said during the recent election, he said this, I saw Thatcher's government did to places like this, deindustrialisation, draining away of economic, social and political power. It left places like Make You Feel Behind and Britain's been on that path for the last forty years. Look, I like Andy and I've known him for a long, long time. I get a bit narked by this forty years thing.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it doesn't surprise me.

• 14:00Alastair Campbell?

  And, but, you know, the neoliberal, like, and it, it feels to me like, okay, Thatcher's this terrible, as you say, even though your mum doesn't like it, hate figure who comes along, damages places like Liverpool. But it always feels to me from this that Andy's saying, and then you have this long period of a Labour government and they did Naful as well.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think you'll admit this, what Labour tried to do is to repair the damage of the Thatcher years, but it didn't do it in a structured way. Often we had pilot schemes. So I remember the sort of the top down approach to this, that we'll tell you what's good for your area and we'll give you some money to do it. And I don't think they really worked. Most of the time that money wasn't spent in an appropriate way that you'd expect.

• 14:44Alastair Campbell?

  You're talking about the New Deal for Communities?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, there, there was a load of it, wasn't there? There was all the stuff that they did on housing and, and that was really good. But of course, it wasn't looking at the peculiarities or the individual needs of an area. It was a policy at a national level foisted on everybody and it, so it was a one size fits all.

• 15:02Alastair Campbell?

  So you had the Tory neglect of Liverpool, we then had the miners' strike.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:06Alastair Campbell?

  We've had all the hatred of Thatcher, you've got social unrest in Liverpool. And then he's off to Cambridge and then life and his anger about what's happening in the world gets even deeper.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Ninety-three soccer fans died in today's FA Cup disaster, Europe's worst ever sporting tragedy. Most of them were teenagers and children. They were crushed to death at the Liverpool Nottingham Forest semi-final held at Hillsborough in Sheffield. Two hundred more were injured. It happened when ticketless Liverpool fans surged onto terraces packed with genuine ticket holders. They'd been let in by police hoping to ease congestion outside the ground. No crowd trouble had taken place.

• 15:45Alastair Campbell?

  So this is fifteenth of April, nineteen eighty-nine. I was a journalist on the Sunday Mirror, watching this unfold. It was a Saturday. Ninety-seven football fans crushed to death, seven hundred and sixty-six injured. And there's a deliberate strategy by the government, by the police, essentially to say this is a bunch of pissed Scouse football fans that essentially have brought this upon themselves. And you and Andy would be part of what became a twenty-seven year-long campaign. Andy wasn't there. You were at, at Hillsborough. So, and, and I guess it's for both of you in different ways been an utterly defining event. So just, you know, say as much as or as little as you want to about that.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  The likes of the establishment found it easier to scapegoat fans who'd already been blamed for one disaster. They, it must be their fault, mustn't it? Things like in a locked room, videotapes went missing. And so this is not allegations, this all came out subsequently in the, in the court proceedings and the, the second inquest. The police and the police federation were straight in there to blame fans. And there's an old saying, isn't there? I think it was, it was Harold Wilson who said that the, a liking be halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on, yeah.

• 17:06Alastair Campbell?

  I'm trying, I'm trying to work out when a bit of iron entered Andy's soul. Because I've always felt, I've known him for a long time, and I've, I've, I've, I've been saying recently, I've, I've never, I've never seen that much steel in him. If you'd have said to me back then, oh, one day he'll be, he won't just be Prime Minister, but he'll become Prime Minister by defenestrating a guy who's got a three-figure majority to his name. And he'll arrange a by-election, he'll manage to get a by-election and he'll come in and he won't even have a contest and suddenly he's going to be their Prime Minister. Because that requires a level of politics and ruthlessness, you know, and come from me, this is not, I'm

• 17:51Alastair Campbell?

  not saying this is an insult at all. There is, you know, I never quite imagined was there. And I just wondered whether that was when a bit of iron entered his soul, or whether actually it was later when we had the famous booing and heckling when he was a minister.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  I, I do think that when he, uh, I asked him, we were at a funeral for another lad who was, um, killed in Spain and he wouldn't repatriate his body and the family had to buy his body back and all this sort of stuff. A horrendous story. Anyway, we were both at this funeral and I leant over to him and said, listen, you know, I'm gonna get you an invite into the twentieth anniversary of Hillsborough. And he just looked at me, he was like, what, what do you want me there for?

• 18:34Alastair Campbell?

  He's now Culture Minister, Culture Secretary.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's Culture Secretary, yeah. And I said, because we need somebody at the heart of government who'll, who'll take this fight forward. Because at that stage, the year before, we probably had, you know, five or six thousand at the nineteenth anniversary. Because all the doors had been slammed in the face and it looked as if that was the end of it. And I said, we need something, we need this catalyst so that we can get to truth and justice. Anyway, he did, as you know, speak at the twentieth anniversary. But the thing that I watched, because I, I was the Lord Mayor then, the one with the chain on. Um, I'm sitting at the front waiting to go on after Andy and I'm looking at the crowd and I could see that there was real anger because he wasn't Andy Burnham, he was

• 19:19Speaker 01

  a representative of the government and the government hadn't done enough at that stage.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Today I represent the Prime Minister and the government. Twenty years ago.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  And he talked about Gordon Brown had sent him, uh, with a message. And it was a one lone voice. And I don't know whether you'll get it on the tape, but it just shouts justice. And then it ripples through the crowd. And there were thirty-seven thousand people there and the four sides of Anfield all started singing, justice for the ninety-sixes it was then.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  But today, as the Prime Minister has asked me to convey, we can at least pledge that ninety-six fellow football supporters who died will never be forgotten. And he asked us to think at this time.

• 20:39Alastair Campbell?

  What were you thinking about his position at that time, standing there? He's somebody who likes to be liked. He's somebody who loves Merseyside, even though he's an Evertonian. He's somebody who feels responsibility quite deeply. And there he is representing the government and he's got thirty odd thousand people shouting at him. What, and you're the guys put him there. What, what were you thinking about him then? And what effect did you think that would have on him?

• 21:06Speaker 01

  The first thing I was thinking is.

• 21:09Alastair Campbell?

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