Becoming Burnham: The Manchester Arena Call, Westminster Plotting, and Keir vs Andy

**Alastair Campbell** (0:09)
Welcome to Episode 3 of our mini-series, Becoming Burnham. We're now into the Manchester era. We're into the time when he's left Westminster, he's become Mayor of Greater Manchester, he has a baptism of fire, I think you might call it because the Manchester Arena bombing comes fairly early in his tenure. We have COVID, we have another big moment in Andy Burnham's rise when he directly takes on Boris Johnson's government and attacks the way that Johnson is handling the COVID pandemic. We're going to talk a little bit about some of the challenges he faced and the promises he made and the extent to which he delivered on them. We're going to try and analyse what is Manchesterism and what does it mean if he tries to translate that to the whole of the UK. And we're going to talk about how, as we all know, he got blocked from standing in a by-election, but then he managed to stand in the next one and he won it and he won it big. And that was the breaking point for Keir Starmer. Keir Starmer is gone. Andy Burnham is now Prime Minister.
And delighted, as over the last two episodes, to be joined by Steve Rotheram to talk about all this and more.
The next defining moment was COVID. And in particular, this very instinctive response when he's on the steps talking to the media and Kevin Lee, his advisor, comes up and shows him something that central government has announced that basically says, Manchester can leg it. That's when the whole King of the North thing started, wasn't it, really?

**Andy Burnham** (1:37)
This is no way to run the country in a national crisis. It isn't. This is not right. They should not be doing this, grinding people down, trying to accept the least that they can get away with. £22 million to fight the situation that we are in is frankly disgraceful.

**Alastair Campbell** (1:56)
What was he feeling and communicating in that moment?

**Steve Rotheram** (1:59)
The frustration of a prime minister, the political lead in this country, playing politics during one of the most difficult times that any of us have ever been through. There's not many people alive at that time who'd gone through a world war, and yet this was devastating for us. None of us knew when it was going to end. There was Boris Johnson trying to play me and him off against each other, stupidly believing somehow that we weren't phoning each other every night. Every time I had a conversation with Johnson, I'd be telling Andy and vice versa. We knew what the offers were. We knew what was on the table because I'd negotiated. I started with them offering 20 million because we were going to go into the highest tier.
I said, that's nowhere near for the compensatory payment that we need because the businesses that would have been affected. We had a figure in mind, but Andy and Greater Manchester had already been in the top tier for about eight weeks, and they hadn't had a penny. Quite rightly, he was saying, we need our chunk for being in the top tier. Liverpool City Region is now going into it. Steve Rotheram has told me that they're getting.
Every time we went backwards and forwards, he'd get a more substantial offer.
And I'd go back and say, well, hang on a second, because you're asking us to do it. Well, you're telling us that we've got to go in this top tier. But we don't know when it's going to end, so we need X amount. And it was that, that really, I think, scuppered Johnson, because he thought that he could play games. He actually went out in a Downing Street conference, press conference said, I've done a deal with Mayor Steve Rotheram in the Liverpool City Region, blah, blah, blah. Basically, Andy's on the naughty step. He's not playing fair. And isn't he a terrible person? And so the first thing is that Andy was getting credit, sort of withstanding the pressure off Johnson. But my social media feed went mental. And all of a sudden, I've got this voice, the impact with Boris Johnson, of all people, the person who wrote the Spectator article that I'd attacked all those years ago. And it looked as if somehow I'd betrayed people. So that's how vile Johnson had become, where he was prepared to use any tactic to try and position Andy, so that he had to accept less than what we would accept him.

**Alastair Campbell** (4:30)
Do you think by then, Andy's starting to think about labor, positioning? Because I met him a few times fairly early on, both when Keir was opposition leader, and afterwards when he became Prime Minister, where I got the feeling he wasn't impressed, and I got the feeling as well that he really didn't like the way that they did politics. He really didn't like the briefing stuff. He really didn't like the fact that he was constantly being...