Andy Burnham, the UK’s 59th prime minister, began his premiership as he means to go on: as in touch with everyday life and its hardships as he can possibly manage. At 7am on 20 July, he was chopping vegetables with staff at The Passage in central London, an organisation that helps people sleeping rough or recovering from recent homelessness. He went on a walkabout, meeting people who had slept rough that night, reflecting that it felt like “the right way” to start such a life-changing day. Hours later, he was in Buckingham Palace, “kissing hands” and accepting King Charles’s invitation to form a government. Then he stood on the steps of Downing Street – no notes, no lectern – and announced that when he got through that famous door his first instructions would be to end rough sleeping.
This is who Burnham wants to be as Prime Minister: in touch with the people he represents, and demonstrating to them, to us, that he can really deliver change. He has spent a long time thinking about what he would do with power, and now he intends to act. He has heard the conventional wisdom about tackling rough sleeping, for example – a knotty policy challenge that could take decades, or even prove impossible. Yet “he’s responded simply by saying, ‘I’m not having that,’” as one insider puts it. He wanted to signal with his first announcement that, after years of failed governments and mounting distrust, politics “can actually do things to help you, and can move quickly”, a close ally told me.
Burnham also wanted to say something about his values and the kind of Britain he wants to live in. He believes he doesn’t have a moment to lose. Rough sleeping on day one, energy VAT cuts on day two, capping bus fares on day three – he has begun with a policy blitz aimed squarely at people’s day-to-day lives; “getting stuff done, sorting it out”, delivering hope fast. If this sounds a little different to Keir Starmer’s carefully caveated warnings, and Rachel Reeves’s fiscally responsible but politically disastrous cut to the winter fuel allowance, that’s because it is.
When Burnham shared a video of his newly appointed cabinet on his Instagram at the end of his first day in office, he accompanied it with the rock anthem “How You Like Me Now?” by the Heavy. The video showed Burnham hugging and shaking hands with his new top team, John Healey, Shabana Mahmood, Louise Haigh, Ed Miliband – all figures involved in the ousting of Starmer – to a soundtrack about being bad and getting away with it. “It’s almost like you’re just being cocky with it, because you know that you can do it,” the band’s singer Kelvin Swaby once said of the song’s meaning. It wasn’t a deliberate message, Burnham’s team insists, but for Labour’s newly dispossessed, it was rather on the nose.
If “how’d you like me now” is the question, the answer is that some of Burnham’s Labour colleagues like him rather less than they did when they still thought they were in with a chance of staying in government. At the Grafton pub in Kentish Town on the evening of 20 July, Starmer, Reeves and their former colleagues drank late into the evening, “a mixture of furious and sad” at Starmer’s treatment and the sheer, unexpected extent of the clear-out of perceived Starmer loyalists. Sacked cabinet members arrived one by one, to applause, with resentments towards Burnham and his team building as the night wore on and word of new appointments trickled through.
Burnham’s team, for their part, were delighted both by their cabinet appointments and that they had managed to keep them so tightly held, while much of the lobby incorrectly guessed that Mahmood was to enter No 11. Haigh – the right-hand woman who, along with Burnham’s chief of staff, James Purnell, oversaw the appointments planning with the incoming premier – received the most important job: Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and First Secretary of State, the de facto deputy position formerly held by George Osborne, Peter Mandelson and John Prescott. (The first secretary of state has not been a woman since the late 1960s, when the position was held by Barbara Castle, one of Haigh’s political heroes.) In her new role, running a beefed-up Office of the Prime Minister, there is little Haigh won’t be across, driving Burnham’s agenda from the centre, while also overseeing the redistribution of power around the country.
After initially favouring Miliband for the role of Chancellor, in the end Burnham delivered the great surprise of the day by appointing Healey, chosen because he has “the same outlook” as Burnham, one No 10 insider says. He is being described as a “split the difference” candidate between Mahmood and Miliband, sharing Burnham’s radical priorities but with the serious, “safe pair of hands” demeanour of a former defence secretary. Miliband now takes on yet another role once coveted by his elder brother, David, as Foreign Secretary. Mahmood, meanwhile, happily retains her Home Office brief with a vote of confidence from the incoming Prime Minister for her approach on immigration, despite concerns on the back benches.
Burnham’s team felt there were enough Starmer allies in the mix – Yvette Cooper and Emma Reynolds, for example – to ensure Labour unity. Burnham’s No 10 team, too, retains many Starmer advisers, alongside well-liked newcomers including Alison Phillips, the former Mirror editor, and Hayden Munro, Jacinda Ardern’s former campaign director. Yet Burnham’s cabinet appointments, favouring a wide range of people from across the Labour ideological spectrum, but mostly united by their shared efforts to get rid of Starmer, have been perceived as nothing short of a declaration of war. “They started a factional war on day one,” a newly fired senior adviser says, describing it as “absolutely nuts”.
Leon Neal/Equipe via GettyBurnham’s good news blitz was undermined on day two of the job by a newly sacked cabinet minister. Darren Jones, fresh from the pub the night before, pointed out on X that the incoming prime minister’s VAT cuts to energy bills were unfunded, because the digital ID scheme that was being scrapped to pay for it never actually had any money behind it. Jones had planned to remain quiet until September, but decided that Burnham starting with an unfunded tax cut, as he saw it, was too much. “It will be a red line to many of us in the Parliamentary Labour Party, given how hard we worked to regain the public’s trust on the economy,” one former senior figure warns.
Even some behind-the-scenes appointments are causing division. Kate Groucott, who stood prominently behind Burnham in his speech on Downing Street, has a role in No 10 ensuring connectivity between No 10 and No 10 North. This is despite Groucott publicly supporting her husband, Conor McGinn (a former Labour MP who was suspended from the party in 2022), after he was charged with sexually assaulting a woman in January. (He has “vehemently denied” the allegation.) Nevertheless, the appointment is a cause of upset for Labour figures who have taken it as a sign that Burnham and his team don’t believe or care about McGinn’s accuser. As one Labour insider expresses it, “50 per cent of cabinet members being women is purely tokenism if Andy Burnham’s team can’t take seriously sexual assault charges” against a friend. “Surely memories are not so short about what happens when prime ministers ignore warning signs about people who align themselves with alleged abusers?” (Burnham’s team did not respond to a request for comment.)
If you want a visual metaphor for the position Burnham now finds himself in, it is him standing on the steps of Downing Street, declaring his intention to do politics differently, moving bystanders to tears, while behind him stands a figure whose presence at the heart of his team hurts some in his party and nods to a factionalism they believe hasn’t gone away.
Burnham hates briefings, infighting, and the divides that so often tear Labour apart. But he is already finding out that while he focuses on delivering for people and communicating to the nation, the problems that dogged Starmer have not yet gone away.
[Further reading: Why did Andy Burnham pick John Healey?]
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This article appears in the 22 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Take Over
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Subscribe here to commentThere is no evidence Kate Groucott has acted improperly. And, there is no reporting that she has influenced or been influenced by her husband’s case.
I find it incomprehensible that a husband and wife, both in the public sphere, each do not know what the other is up to.
Nicola Sturgeon springs to mind here. Is the woman a hero for defending her husband whom she knows to be innocent, or is she a sad fool carrying past-life karma which renders her blind to her husband’s misdemeanours … ?
He has not been convicted (the trial is later this year), unlike Pete Murrell. So not a fully valid comparison.
The Angry Dispossessed (who aren’t a Starmerite faction, since there isn’t one) should remember that if Burnham fails, Goodbye Labour.
If he fails, there isn’t a replacement. Labour is now in the last chance saloon.
Petulant ex-ministers must remember not to work on behalf of the Tories. Darren Jones is now even more yesterday’s man than he was before he gave the Mail a good headline.
Jones knew that the digital project was unfunded when he was in No 10 as First Secretary to Starmer. How many other unfunded projects were on the books on July 20th?
He was trying to look strong after proving too weak to stand against Burnham and trigger a leadership contest. Not so much Mr Charisma as Mr Cipher.
Sound and fury signifying nothing. Labor is still stuck in a vortex surrounded by what people on the street care about and failed social and economic programs directed at popular niches.
Burnham’s actions related to the cost of living strike me as very much linked to “what people on the street care about”. And it’s important to not stereotype those people, in the inaccurate way which Lee Anderson and the Daily Express do.
An excellent article, brave enough to be plumbing the depths on DayTwo. And yet … can we at least allow Burnham time to have a sleep before we all get stuck in … ?
The Media Bubble metrolibs really hate Burnham, don’t they ? As this article proves.
They are desperate for him to fail, having failed so ignominiously themselves.
Ever heard of Innocent Until Proven Guilty ?
Conor McGinn may or may not be guilty.
His wife is assuredly innocent. Unless, like the Nazis, Britain now practises Kindred Guilt.
The baleful, hate-mad screams of the Islington Radical Feminists can’t alter this.
Burham’s actions, his cabinet and the few policies he has declared are aimed at the Labour Party and perhaps those who fled to the Greens, not the wider public. Using ‘ending rough sleeping’ as his first commitment was naive. It is easy to show this didn’t have long-term success in Manchester, and it doesn’t feature in the public’s concerns, as shown by opinion polls. Then the reducing tax commitment by cancelling digital ID – surely they realised that if an ex-Starmer minister hadn’t raised the issue that it was unfunded, the media would. I doubt if anybody in the Labour Party, or its supporters, cares about any of this; however, it provided his enemies in the media with free ammunition. He is being careless with his limited political capital.
I think the ‘end rough sleeping’ idea came from a personal reflection that he now occupies two houses and that if the Number 10 North idea amounts to anything, he’ll occupy three. Little bright ideas like this can only get you so far.
‘I’m not having that,’ said Andy Burnham when advised that getting people off the streets is a “wicked” problem, ie one that has many complicated causes and no simple or quick solutions. It is wishful thinking to imagine that you can wave a magic wand and make the issue go away, and it is more than a bit insulting to the charities and other organisations who have dedicated years and years to picking up and dusting off street sleepers. The numbers of people on the streets go up and down, and at times it did look as if all the initiatives were working. But it is a hostage to fortune to guarantee you can prevent it, and it is disrespectful to imply that the persistence of the problem has been down to lack of willpower and effort in the past.
Starmer was the poster child for a very extreme and sectarian right-wing Labour faction (and I say that as someone who is on the right of the Labour party) which is best understood by reading Paul Holden’s book The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy. It puzzles me that this book receives so little attention. Darren Jones giving headlines to the Daily Mail is very much in line with the actions of that faction in 2015-2019, when they were hand-in-glove with right-wing newspapers to undermine the Labour party.
The reality is that Labour is not a single Party but a collection of disparate parties who would have split decades ago if the UK had a proper (PR) democracy. The same applies to the Tories.
If Burnham gets his way on PR the parties who make up “Labour” can go their own way and the electorate will be able to choose which version of “Labour” they support: no need for Tactical Voting.
I suspect though that the FPTP supporters in the Labour party will do their all to stop the change to PR even if it means a Neo Fascist government voted in on 30% of the vote.