Andy Burnham elected Labour party leader, to become UK prime minister on Monday and replace Keir Starmer
Jill Lawless
As Andy Burnham was officially crowned party leader on Friday, he vowed to bring hope to the British people and purpose to the country’s faltering Labor government by clearing the final hurdle to his inauguration as prime minister next week.
The former mayor of Manchester was the sole candidate in the centre-left party’s leadership contest to replace Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who was sacked over the Labor rebellion. Friday’s announcement was a foregone conclusion after Burnham secured the nomination of 379 of the 403 Labor MPs in the House of Commons.
“We will give them back their hope,” Burnham told an audience of MPs, party activists and union leaders in her first speech as leader. “This is a proud and emotional moment that you gave me and my family today, but I’m ready for it.”
“I have a plan,” he added, seeking to reassure a party whose popularity has plummeted since it won a landslide election victory two years ago.
Australian expat Catherine West, who was among 379 people to vote for Burnham and has been a Labor MP since 2015, received a nomination from Bermondsey and Old Southwark MP Neil Coyle.
“I’m flattered… but I’m rooting for Andy,” West said in a post on X. In May, West vowed to launch a formal challenge against Starmer in a bid to force cabinet ministers to choose a new leader.
When Burnham took the stage, she said: “I don’t need to offer my condolences to Catherine West because she supported me too. Thank you, Catherine.”
Burnham has been prime minister for weeks since winning a special election for a seat in Parliament a month ago but has revealed few details about her policy priorities. He will arrive at Number 10 Downing Street, largely unknown to voters outside Manchester.
In his speech on Friday, he outlined some priorities and promised to deliver “hope in every heart” and “good growth in postcodes”, in part by transferring power from the central government in London to local leaders in cities and regions.
“We will take the power away from Westminster and Whitehall and put it where you live,” he told the audience. “Have more authority over the basic elements of life so you can make them work better.”
Starmer announced he would resign last month after a two-year term in office marred by missteps and errors of judgment that damaged his reputation with his party and the public.
Labor regularly lags behind anti-immigrant party Reform UK in opinion polls, and the ruling party achieved disastrous results in local elections in May, triggering pressure for Starmer to resign that he could not resist.
Burnham offers a more relaxed leadership style than Starmer and is considered one of Labour’s best communicators. However, it faces many of the same problems as its predecessor; these include a stagnant economy, a cost-of-living squeeze fueled by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and overstretched public services.
And his promises of new, less divisive policy are not too different from what Starmer promised when he took office in 2024.
“I will work to build a new politics. The country is crying out for it,” Burnham said. “How can politicians point fingers when living standards are falling and politics as a whole is of no use to them? This infuriates them and causes them to shut down.”
He said he would have “the courage to fix the big things that politics has neglected”, such as tackling uneven access to social care for those who need social care due to age, illness or disability. This is a pressing issue in a country with an aging population, and one that has dogged previous Labor and Conservative governments.
He highlighted plans to focus on economic renewal, more public control of key sectors and creating new modern industrial jobs, arguing that Britain took “a series of wrong turns in the 1980s” when “political power was centralized and economic power privatised.”
This was the decade when Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher oversaw policies of privatization, deindustrialization and political centralization that transformed the UK economy.
Describing Britain’s change of prime minister as “the most significant moment of change in our politics in the last 40 years”, Burnham said: “For over forty years, slowly, at times imperceptibly, political and economic power has been withdrawn from our communities in every region and country of the United Kingdom.”
Starmer formally resigned from King George III. He will remain prime minister until Monday, when he will present it to Charles. The King will then ask Burnham to form a government.
Britain’s parliamentary democracy allows ruling parties to change their leaders and therefore their prime ministers without the need for a general election. The next national election is not due to be held until 2029.
