Andy Burnham may have big ambitions, but the team charged with propelling him to parliament is tiny and run on a shoestring. One person involved said it was operating in a “hand-to-mouth” way, staffed mostly by volunteers and MPs on the soft left who want to see Burnham return.
Those who know the Greater Manchester mayor say he has been thinking about re-entering parliament for a long time, and wants to bring his creed of “Manchesterism” to the national stage.
They say his ideas are well developed, the candidate having run in two Labour leadership campaigns previously, and have been put to the test in a major city.
However, the endgame is becoming prime minister – a job that needs preparation, a network of political allies and a close-knit team of advisers, which Keir Starmer has discovered to his cost.
It raises the question of who is helping Burnham with his quest for power – and how ready will he be to fight for the top job?
Inner circle
Kevin Lee is Burnham’s chief of staff and right-hand man. The pair have worked together for more than 15 years, including during Burnham’s time in the shadow cabinet, his campaign for the Greater Manchester mayoralty and then his nine years as mayor.
Josh Simons, the former Makerfield MP. Lee is considered indispensable to Burnham’s political operation and they come as a team – but the operation is expanding to bring in extra hands to help with an explosion of demand for communications around the byelection.
Another politico now by Burnham’s side is Josh Simons, the former Makerfield MP who stood down to make way for him.
He does not have a formal role yet but has been campaigning alongside Burnham in the constituency. He comes from a policy and academic background, and is not short of ideas on revitalising Labour.
However, some MPs who support Burnham have begun fretting that the close team he will need to mount a genuine challenge to Starmer is not yet strong enough. “There is not a big well-organised machine behind him yet,” says one MP.
Close MPs
Anneliese Midgley is an MP and organiser working as the campaign’s “political lead”, with a solid history as a trade unionist who worked as political director of Unite.
She is now central to Burnham’s operation to win in Makerfield and represents the nearly neighbouring constituency of Knowsley. A former adviser to Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn, she was also key to Starmer’s project before her election as an MP.
Louise Haigh, the former transport secretary. One of the most prominent members of the Tribune group in parliament is the former transport secretary Louise Haigh, with the group setting out a programme for economic renewal and a more active state earlier this month. She has been a key ally of Burnham among MPs and is helping with his campaign.
Other senior supporters of Burnham include Lucy Powell. As deputy leader of the party, Powell has been loyal to the government but she is also an ally of the mayor and a fellow Manchester MP.
She has been taking on a role helping with the Makerfield campaign and has previously run byelections as well as having directed Ed Miliband’s 2015 national Labour campaign.
Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, is another political friend of Burnham. He was in contention for a run at the leadership himself if an immediate contest had been triggered against Starmer last week.
However, now Burnham is back in the mix, he has swung behind the mayor’s effort to re-enter parliament and would be tipped for a big job in the event of a new administration.
Big thinkers
While Burnham’s campaign has got off to a slick start, those who know him say less work has been done on preparation for an actual leadership challenge to Starmer and what he would do once in government.
The Greater Manchester mayor has been clear in recent days on what he thinks about various issues from supporting proportional representation (PR) to backing the main thrust of Shabana Mahmood’s immigration reforms. But there is more thinking and organising to be done if he wants to be ready to govern, his supporters acknowledge.
Neal Lawson, the director of Compass. One of the people who is influential on his worldview is Neal Lawson – the director of the centre-left Compass thinktank. He is a proponent of closer working between progressives, with Burnham having said he would like Labour to go into the next election promising to change the voting system.
Lawson told the Guardian last week he believed Burnham had unique electoral appeal and was promising “real change, not cosmetic. This is deep political, democratic, economic, social change. I think he can win on that ticket and through his commitment to PR, to pluralism, to new politics, he can win over the Greens as well.”
Another key brain is Mathew Lawrence, the political economist and director of the Common Wealth project. He has been one of those to set out the philosophy of Manchesterism in a piece for the New Statesman.
He has also been critical of the government’s failure to make a muscular difference on the cost of living, writing in the Guardian: “Water, energy and transport should be brought back into public ownership and run for public benefit rather than private extraction. This isn’t just about fairness – it’s sound macroeconomic policy.”
Luke Hurst, of the Burnham-supporting Mainstream Group, is another important figure, while Miatta Fahnbulleh, a former minister who resigned last week, is said to be helping to work on policy.
“We hear talk of a first hundred days plan, so we just hope that is being done,” says one Burnham backer.
Unions
Burnham is expected to get significant union backing and has already been given a modest £20,000 by some of them. He could get endorsements and support from Unite and Unison, which have called for Starmer’s administration to be more true to Labour values.