Becoming Burnham: People Pleasing, The Shadow Years and Losing to Jeremy Corbyn

**Alastair Campbell** (0:08)
Welcome to part two of The Rest Is Politics series on Becoming Burnham. He always was Burnham, but he's become the Prime Minister, and we've been very lucky to be able to talk to Steve Rotheram, his close friend and Metro Mayor of Liverpool Region, about his rise from the young man we talked about at the end of episode one, who was just coming out of Cambridge University. Now in episode two, we're going to be talking about his political career. Where did he get the ambition and the drive to become not just an assistant to a politician, but a politician himself?
How did he cope with losing, losing his leadership defeats and also labour losing, and him suddenly finding he was no longer in a winning environment? What was it that made him in the end say, Westminster is no longer for me, I'm heading north? Let's just go through where he went. We had his two leadership elections.
We'll come back to when he goes off back to the north with you. But do you think in either or both of those, he thought he could win?

**Steve Rotheram** (1:12)
I think the first one was just a bit of a stab in the dark. I want to put my name forward. You've seen that subsequently where people have just associated themselves with a campaign so they can raise the profile. I think that was what that one was.

**Alastair Campbell** (1:27)
So 2010, Ed V. David is the sort of main focus and Andy was second to drop out, I think, after Diana. But then 2015, Ed Miliband goes and I don't think even Jeremy Corbyn thought he was going to win when he started. Andy was almost, was he favorite with the bookies at one point?

**Steve Rotheram** (1:42)
So in my office in Westminster, in the Palace of Westminster, I had this whiteboard up and with all the names that we had got, we'd gone and gathered these names, all going to support Andy.

**Alastair Campbell** (1:55)
This is 2015?

**Steve Rotheram** (1:56)
2015, yeah. And you were running his campaign, in fact. Yeah, well- You were managing his campaign. Yeah, managing, but like you had Michael Dugan and all them, you had like some people who understood how to win campaigns around them. And he was so far ahead. We'd run out of whiteboards and so we'd had to put stuff, pieces of paper with the names. And then the left chose their candidate. We thought it was going to be Diane again. So we weren't really fearful, not because Diane isn't a brilliant candidate, but because she hadn't ignited the left and the appetite for a change of politics. In the previous one, so we thought, you know, if it's Diane, if it was John.
Yeah, John's really canny, as you know. I've got a lot of respect for John MacDonald. I think he's a brilliant political operator. We thought, more to it. But anybody else, we thought we'd wipe the floor. And then he come up with Jeremy Corbyn. We thought, no one's going to go for that. And one by one, I was rubbing or crossing off the names of people who were coming to me and saying, listen, I'm going to support Jeremy. And I was asking people why.
And for loads of spurious reasons, people were coming up with, I'd say, excuses really, rather than the rationale. And we were crossing them off.

**Alastair Campbell** (3:13)
What was the sort of thing you were saying?

**Steve Rotheram** (3:14)
Well, some people, because they'd sat by him in parliament and stuff like that, and they'd heard him. And he was a decent orator, so he could carry an argument. One who'd actually started their political career working in his office. And so there's loads and loads of different reasons why they gave, but I don't think any of them were politically concrete enough to justify why they weren't now supporting Andy. Anyway, he's still got miles more than the numbers that he needed. But I had somebody at the PLP when Jeremy was getting close to the final numbers. I'm trying to think of exactly what it was. It was a 30-something at the time.
38, I'll just say that. So he was on 35 or whatever.

**Alastair Campbell** (4:03)
This is when Margaret Beckett and Sadiq Khan, they came in and said we've got to get them on the ballot, have a proper contest. Even then, people like Margaret would be thinking, it will be better for Andy if he's got Jeremy to fight.

**Steve Rotheram** (4:19)
They were thinking also that we needed to lance this boil, which was that dichotomy between the left of the party and the rump of the party. We thought the rump will obviously come out the top.