ANDREW NEIL: Never has a PM come to power with such a lack of democratic legitimacy. When it all goes wrong, voters will cut him no slack

When I’m leader,’ Andy Burnham said to me in a brief late-night exchange on BBC TV during one of his two previous failed attempts to win the Labour Party leadership, ‘you’ll have the first interview.’

When he walks through the door of 10 Downing Street on Monday, he won’t just be party leader, he’ll be our 59th prime minister – and I fear this will be his first broken promise. Indeed, it’s already bitten the dust.

This week, his elevation secured, he shunned me to succumb bravely instead to an ‘interrogation’ by Gary Lineker, the football pundit and potato crisps promoter, who shares the same soft-Left political vibes Burnham has exuded during his successful coup to depose Keir Starmer.

Fair enough. I’m used to being avoided by politicians these days. But Burnham (bar one tenacious interview on BBC Newsnight last month, which did not go well for him) has managed to avoid any rigorous journalistic scrutiny from anybody on his fast track to No 10.

He is not, of course, the first to become PM in the middle of their party’s parliamentary term, without the inconvenience of a general election. That, sadly, has become a prevailing feature of modern British politics.

In the 20th century, eight PMs passed the baton to a successor mid-term without the people being consulted. Burnham will be the sixth to take the top office in this unelected manner in the first 26 years of this century.

If we maintain this rate in the decades to come, 24 PMs will secure power in the 21st century without first winning an election.

Far from being the poster boy for change he claims to be, Burnham is the beneficiary of a political procedure people have come to despise: governing parties changing prime ministers on a whim for their own convenience, without consulting the rest of us.

Burnham has exuded soft-Left political vibes during his successful coup to depose Keir Starmer, writes our columnist Andrew Neil

It is bad enough that Burnham has come to power by this route. What makes it worse is the unique lack of scrutiny to which he’s been subjected.

Unlike nearly every other politician in modern times who became prime minister mid-term he wasn’t even a candidate in the general election which brought the government to power.

A by-election in his own northern backyard had to be contrived for him – and he didn’t fight it on Labour’s 2024 manifesto.

Nor did he have to face a contest for the Labour leadership. That was handed to him on a plate. No hustings, no questions from party members or the wider public, no probing interviews with the media.

As a result, we still have no idea of the policies he will deploy in power on the most important matters of state – the economy, defence, foreign policy – at a time of acute economic and geopolitical peril.

Nor, only 48 hours from taking office, do we even know for sure who will populate his Cabinet or dominate his praetorian guard in No 10, which would at least give us an idea of the direction of travel.

‘I have a plan,’ Burnham told the Labour faithful when he was formally anointed party leader yesterday. But he still refused to share it with the rest of us.

Instead, he went on a pedestrian walk down memory lane, wallowing in Labour’s past ‘glories’ from the industrial age, repeating many of the hackneyed lines from his by-election campaign (‘lifting every postcode’), promising a return to ‘authentic’ Labour – whatever that means – committing to ‘be better’ (try taking that to the bank).

Rarely, if ever, have the British people been forced to accept a new prime minister in such ignorance of their intentions or the composition of their government. It means Burnham will take office with an unprecedented lack of democratic legitimacy.

This is important because if it all starts to go quickly wrong – and it usually does these days – voters will cut him no slack. They will feel let down by a PM they played no part in choosing. Homilies about ‘being better’ won’t cut it. The backlash will be ferocious. Just ask Liz Truss.

Sooner rather than later, people will find out that the man who’s become their PM is not quite as he’s been billed – or has billed himself. His success in avoiding scrutiny has obscured much of the truth.

The official narrative is that of a northern outsider from the mean streets of Lancashire, having transformed Manchester into a modern powerhouse after years of decline, coming down to Westminster to work his same magic on the rest of the nation, reconnecting politics with the people in the process.

This story, much touted by Burnham himself, is largely fantasy.

For much of his adult life Burnham has been a bog-standard Westminster careerist. Straight to London (not back to his beloved North) after graduating from Cambridge in 1991 and, after a brief stint as a trade journalist covering transport, researcher to a leading Blairite MP, special adviser to a Blairite Cabinet minister, MP at 31, junior minister under Tony Blair, in the Cabinet at 38 under Gordon Brown.

It was a swift ascendency up the greasy pole, propelled by nurturing powerful contacts among Labour grandees, espousing the Blairite verities of the day and by being smart, affable, even charming. Unlike his predecessor, Burnham speaks human, which will bring blessed relief to our political discourse.

But his trajectory, far from being that of the outsider, has been little different from the classic, well-worn political career paths followed by David Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg, Ed Balls and the Miliband brothers.

After graduating from Cambridge in 1991, Burnham became a researcher to a leading Blairite MP, then an MP himself at 31 and junior minister under Tony Blair

Unlike his predecessor, Burnham speaks human – which will bring blessed relief to our political discourse, writes Andrew Neil

Burnham’s background was not as privileged as theirs and he was not as rooted in London as them from the start. But he was soon as much a Westminster insider as any of them.

Even the ‘poor boy made good’ stuff has been overcooked. Yes, he was born into modest circumstances in Liverpool 56 years ago. But he was not brought up on the grim streets or grinding poverty of Merseyside.

He spent his childhood reared by two caring parents who held down good jobs. He was brought up in a duplex bungalow at the end of a pleasant lane in a leafy, prosperous north Cheshire village (somewhat enhanced, it recently sold for £1.3million).

A neighbour describes him and his two brothers as ‘nice middle-class lads’. He did well to get to Cambridge (to study English literature) from his local state school.

But that school had a decent track record in getting its pupils into Oxbridge and other top universities, indicating that the Thatcher Britain he affects to despise was not quite the hell hole of social despair he depicts.

Nor was his beloved Manchester. Indeed, the renaissance of the city, for which he claims so much credit, ironically has its origins in the Thatcher years and their immediate aftermath.

Economic redevelopment began in the 1980s and gathered pace in the 1990s. The revival of the city centre, which saw derelict warehouses and filthy canals converted into residences and leisure venues, plus a new tram service, the splendid concert venue The Bridgewater Hall and the burgeoning Media City, all pre-dated Burnham. When he became Mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017, he inherited a resurgence plan in full swing, created by two legends of local government, Richard Leese, the Manchester council leader, and Howard Bernstein, the city council chief executive.

A £300 million investment fund had already been negotiated with the Treasury to pump prime city-centre development.

‘Burnham surfed an economic wave rather than generated it,’ the New York Times rather acutely put it. He became the figurehead for a regeneration strategy already three decades old.

This is not to diminish his contribution: cities on the remake need vibrant, visible leadership. Burnham provided that and more: he built on what he inherited.

There’s been a sevenfold rise in Manchester tower blocks since he became mayor. The city now boasts 28 skyscrapers, with seven more under construction.

The revamped bus service, which Burnham brought under public control, helps lower-paid workers get to work at modest cost. Manchester attracts more foreign investment than any other UK city (bar London, of course), including giant US banks such as JP Morgan.

Just to wander round Manchester city centre is to soak up a dynamism unlike any other British provincial city. It is clear things are happening there. Four decades ago, only 500 folk lived in the centre; now it’s 100,000, including many students.

In the absence of any indications from Team Burnham, people have naturally looked at his Manchester record for what might be in store for his premiership. In truth, for all his penchant for more public ownership and control, there’s been nothing very socialist or even ‘authentic Labour’ about it.

Deals have been done with a handful of private developers, making many of them rich –crony capitalism in action.

Their luxury residential tower blocks are well beyond the financial reach of most Mancunians. Affordable housing remains in short supply.

The city-region’s impressive economic growth has been distinctly uneven, concentrated largely in its core (Manchester centre, Salford, Trafford), leaving the outer boroughs pretty much untouched.

Burnham’s Manchester is very much a tale of two cities: a resurgent centre surrounded by still struggling post-industrial towns. You could argue that, over time, the prosperity of a burgeoning centre will spill over into the surrounding boroughs and pull them up too.

American urban developers call it ‘spreading the jam from the centre of the doughnut’. But there’s nothing very socialist about this approach. Indeed you could call it ‘trickle down economics’, though I doubt Burnham would.

His Manchester record also suggests we should prepare to be disappointed: promises made, promises broken. He was elected in 2017 on a pledge to end rough sleeping in the city. After an initial fall, by the end of last year, with Burnham’s eye now on 10 Downing Street, it was back to 2016 levels.

Tents are pitched in central Manchester due to homelessness as affordable housing remains in short supply in the city this year

He was re-elected in 2024 on a pledge to build 10,000 new council houses by 2028. He steps down as mayor with only a few hundred to his credit. If Manchester is any guide, his promise as prime minister to launch the biggest ever council house building programme since the post-war years will never happen.

Burnham has had a tendency to make promises he can’t keep – doesn’t even have the power to keep. He ran for mayor on a promise to ‘nationalise social care’. Of course, he didn’t. As mayor he had no power to do so.

Way back when he last ran for Labour leader he told me he had big plans for social care. But he couldn’t tell me what they were or how they’d be financed. He also has a tendency to shy away from the difficult decisions.

When he became mayor, the reputation of Manchester police was already in the dirt. It proceeded to get worse. Yet for much of his first term he looked the other way, even renewing the contract of the incompetent chief constable.

It was only when the scale of its failures became impossible to ignore – over 80,000 crimes hadn’t even been recorded – that he was forced to act.

At other times he’s been able to blame Westminster when things went wrong in Manchester. He won’t be able to do that as prime minister.

We are not entirely in the dark about what a Burnham premiership has in store. We know he is keen to devolve power from Whitehall to the regions. But that is mere process. It does not guarantee better governance or rising prosperity. Just ask the Scots and the Welsh.

We know he wants to ‘level up’, spreading growth and wealth more equally across the nation.

But all governments have been committed to that since the 1930s. None has much succeeded.

He thinks it can be done with a ‘new drive of re-industrialisation’. But that risks the wrong prescription from the get-go. Manchester has not been revived by a resurgence in manufacturing but by becoming a world-class centre for services: financial and legal, life sciences and healthcare, digital and creative.

We know that he believes in a bigger, more active state, financed by higher taxes (when he’s worked out which ones), with greater public control and ownership spreading further into energy, utilities, housing and transport.

But the British state is already bigger and better funded (by the highest tax burden in 70 years) than it ever has been in our peacetime history. If more government was the holy grail for a more prosperous society we’d already be rolling in it.

And there’s the nub. For, even as he currently restricts himself to only the vaguest of generalities, with much of the pablum he utters soon to be just tumbleweed drifting across Whitehall, he has not a word to say about wealth creation. Maybe he should consult Thatcher’s memoirs.

After the hapless Theresa May, the shambolic Boris Johnson, the disastrous Liz Truss, the technocratic Rishi Sunak and the robotic Keir Starmer, we could do with a prime minister who can lift our spirits and give us hope.

Burnham showed in Manchester he can do that.

But if he fails to unleash a new age of dynamism and enterprise, continuing to suffocate both with the leaden hand of the state, then our spirits will be quickly dashed and we’ll soon be back in the doldrums. As the Burnham age begins, the omens, alas, are not propitious.