A North Face

It wasn’t quite a procession. Remember when Starmer blocked Andy Burnham from standing as an MP, and then they lost the seat to the Greens? He really is a proper loser, isn’t he?

Anyway, Burnham couldn’t go straight from mayor to Labour leader - he needed a seat. Josh Simons, the Makerfield MP, announced on 14 May 2026 that he was resigning to “give up” his seat specifically so Burnham could stand, triggering the by-election. Simons is not an incidental figure in this story. He had been a Cabinet Office and digital government minister before resigning from government in early 2026, after it emerged that, in his previous role as director of the think tank Labour Together, he had commissioned a private investigation into journalists who had reported unfavourably on Labour Together’s undeclared donations. A PR firm was reportedly paid to look into Sunday Times, Guardian and other reporters, producing a lengthy report designed to discredit them. He was accused of naming the journalists to British intelligence and falsely linking them to pro-Russian propaganda. Apparently misleading the intelligence services and framing journalists as potential enemies of the state to hide your own corruption is not enough to breach the ministerial code - he did the rounds after resigning, claiming he had become a distraction.

A grubby fixer “donates” a seat to Burnham, and suddenly Starmer is timetabling his own exit. The deal had clearly been done - this would not be a contested election between two different directions for the party - this was merely a cabinet reshuffle, where the reshuffle included the Prime Minister. The Greens fell for it too - brow-beaten by the press to give him a clear run, and now practically in stasis until public opinion on Burnham’s Labour solidifies. Nevertheless, the Greens might win the long-term game, giving Burnham an excuse to drag the party left, should he want or need it.

If Burnham has a more progressive vision for the country, he is betting that he can disentangle himself from the machine that has taken over his party, believing he can talk over his cabinet and party officials directly to the country, and govern despite them. That’s the optimistic view. The pessimistic view is that Burnham - a man who claims to have joined because of Kinnock, then a Blairite, then a Brownite, then a progressive, but just not one that could stick around for Corbynism, then returned - believes very little other than his own immediate career aspirations.

Starmer used his resignation to write his own epitaph. Addressing reporters in Downing Street, he said he had inherited a Labour Party in 2020 that was “politically, financially, and morally bankrupt,” and cast his central achievement as having changed the party by “ripping out the poison of antisemitism, restoring trust on the economy, defence, and national security”.

In the world in which we live, Starmer leaves behind a financially bankrupt party with halved membership in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic result in the 2026 local elections in which Labour lost control of 35 councils and roughly 1,500 council seats. Nevertheless, Starmerism, as a project of bringing the Labour Party closer to the Conservative party on all political issues, and even closer to the British establishment in terms of civil liberties and foreign policy, was a success. The Labour Party will never be again be a vehicle for improving the lives of ordinary people, or a threat to British participation in American imperialism - so he leaves through the front door, to the applause of both benches, and into the rehabilitating arms of the broadsheet press.

So long, Kermit. Here comes the king of the north. Burnham’s own preferred label for his political brand is Manchesterism: a mix of “business-friendly socialism,” (what could that possibly mean?) regional devolution, and public control without public ownership of services like buses, built around tangible symbols, e.g. the yellow Bee Network buses and trams free youth travel, and a self-consciously vibrant, culturally distinctive Greater Manchester identity that Burnham has spent years cultivating. It’s a brand with real political utility: a story of delivery that lets him frame himself as arriving to fix a broken Westminster rather than as a lifelong party insider. This, of course, despite being a Cabinet minister under Blair and Brown and a 16-year MP before he ever became mayor.

Burnham loves being the amiable face of a project already running smoothly: critics point out that the growth model he’s now bringing to the national stage was largely built by his predecessors, specifically council leader Richard Leese and chief executive Howard Bernstein, who put the private sector at the centre of planning decisions and stayed relaxed about height, density and affordable housing targets long before Burnham took office. Big infrastructure and investment decisions (i.e., interest rates, national fiscal policy, immigration numbers driving labour supply, the broader trajectory of UK growth) were never levers a mayor controlled in the first place. Manchester was already booming, and to some extent, coexisted with neglected outer towns and the exacerbation of regional inequality. Manchester has become a London of the North, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. Burnham inherited momentum and packaged it as personal achievement, in much the same way Starmer packaged party discipline as personal virtue, despite having booted thousands out of the party for questioning his (unpopular and terrible) decisions.

The strongest evidence that Burnham represents change rather than rebranding will be in his appointments, and so far the signs point toward continuity. Reports suggest he has been persuaded to make Shabana Mahmood - an ally of Starmer’s former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and a Blue Labour favourite - his Chancellor, prompting one commentator to describe the prospective government as “McSweeneyism in an Everton top.” Beyond personnel, Burnham has indicated he’ll broadly govern from Labour’s 2024 manifesto: keeping the pensions triple lock, continuing to push migration numbers down, and pursuing welfare savings as disability costs rise; none of which represents a clean break from Starmer.

Most significantly, Labour Together, the think tank Josh Simons once ran (basically on behalf of Peter Mandelson and the donor interests he accumulated), has been actively polling Labour figures on leadership preferences and feeding results back to party leadership, suggesting its network remains embedded in how the party manages succession as much as policy. So we have a e by-election engineered by a Labour Together alumnus, a Chancellor from the McSweeney wing, inherited manifesto commitments - it’s Starmerism with a northern face, reheated neoliberalism for continuity managed decline, but enough cheery nostalgia for the Hacienda to keep Observer-reading suburban dads on side until the next election.