Is Andy Burnham Britain’s First 21st-Century Cultural Heavyweight Prime Minister?

Britain’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham – the country’s seventh in the last decade – is many things. But what has been exciting the cultural and literary cognoscenti in his home country far more than he is the first Roman Catholic inhabitant of 10 Downing Street, is that Mr. Burnham is the first premier to have read English literature at university, at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, no less. This not only marks him out in a post where many of its recent inhabitants read PPE at Oxford — a degree synonymous with ambition for high office — but also has suggested that he is probably the most cultured man to have become prime minister since Harold Macmillan, six decades ago.Calling Andy — never Andrew, of course — Burnham “cultured’” is not necessarily the compliment that it might seem. His privately educated predecessors Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson, David Cameron and Tony Blair all had their interests — Mr. Johnson’s Classics degree meant that he shared Andy Burnham’s appreciation of literature, albeit from the ancient rather than modern worlds – but all of them were cagier in public statements about their love of matters cultural, perhaps alert to the prospect of being rebuffed. In the case of Johnny Marr of The Smiths, this took the form of his saying on social media, when Mr. Cameron announced his love of the band, “Stop saying that you like The Smiths, no you don’t. I forbid you to like it.”Andy Burnham, crucially, has a distinct difference from the others. He is popular. He has undergone a strange and at times confusing political journey, from New Labour apparatchik to Mayor of Manchester, where he acquired the sobriquet “King of the North,” borrowed, of course, from George RR Martin’s “Game of Thrones” books, when he stood up to Mr. Johnson over the government’s Covid-era restrictions. Yet the persona he adopted back then — a fleece-wearing, no-nonsense Northerner with an appealing softness and a poetic streak — has endeared him to many who regard him as authentic.Andy Burnham performing ‘Wonderwall’ by Oasis while launching the Greater Manchester Music Commission in August 2021. Wikimedia CommonsUnusually for a politician, he was given permission from bands like New Order and Elbow to use their music to soundtrack his various campaign videos in his successful campaign to win the parliamentary seat of Makerfield in a by-election and thereby walk unopposed into 10 Downing Street a few weeks later.Not since the days of Red Wedge, when Paul Weller, Billy Bragg and Jimmy Somerville believed that music was the key to defeating the Thatcher government in 1987 — spoiler alert: it was not — has there been a Labour politician, or indeed a politician of any hue, who is so closely associated with popular culture. Mr. Burnham leans into this by quoting Morrissey — something of a daring thing to do these days given how much further to the political right the erstwhile Smiths frontman now sits than he once did and by having a gold disc of “The Queen Is Dead” in his office in the newly established Number 10 North.Yet he is as much a literary premier as he is a musical one, and it is through his love of books, rather than merely his presence at Stone Roses concerts, that other world leaders might attempt to understand him. Andy Burnham has stated repeatedly that his two favorite poets are Tony Harrison, who died last year, and Philip Larkin, who left this earth in 1985. Mr. Burnham was said to have been inspired by Harrison’s poem “V,” which he first encountered when he was completing high school. It revolves around Harrison visiting his parents’ gravestone, which has been desecrated by a skinhead, and reflecting on everything from the then-current miners’ strike, in which Margaret Thatcher successfully took on and broke the miners thereby ending their hegemony over British power, to the fashion in which the great Romantic poets of the North – Byron and Wordsworth, in particular – became nothing more than waste, centuries after their deaths.It’s an angry, allusive poem, discussing everything from politicians (“At the same time half a crowd was jeering/as the smooth Hugh Gaitskell, our MP/made promises the other half were cheering”) to Harrison reflecting on the way in which literature can be besmirched:“Find Byron, Wordsworth, or turn left betweenone grave marked Broadbent, one marked Richardson.Bring some solution with you that can cleanwhatever new crude words have been sprayed on.”Mr. Burnham spoke at Harrison’s memorial service earlier this year, and has repeatedly suggested that reading V changed his life, arguing that it both made him realize that poetry “can have a Northern accent” and that in its blend of confrontational four-letter words — which led the Conservative MP Gerald Howarth unsuccessfully to try and get it banned from broadcast on Channel 4 — and erudition worn lightly, it could offer a bright boy such as him a route into Cambridge and literature, and from there a path into somewhere even more elevated.A flyer shaped like a vinyl record advertising a speech by Andy Burnham as Mayor of Greater Manchester in June 2026. Christopher Furlong/ Getty ImagesYet Larkin, Andy Burnham’s other hero, is a more complex idol and not the kind of writer a politician trying to appeal to focus groups would have chosen. When he was younger, Mr. Burnham responded to some of the controversy that arose after Larkin’s posthumous reputation suffered, writing a letter to The Guardian in October 1991, shortly after leaving Cambridge, that “Wearing the odd cycle-clip and drinking a pint of beer or two doesn’t stop you from writing great poetry […] I hereby proclaim Larkin’s ‘Love Songs in Age’ as the century’s greatest poem.” The letter has the endearing hallmarks of a young literature graduate, even down to its blend of gaucheness and sweeping assurance. But it is telling that Mr. Burnham has continued to lionize Larkin — as he has Morrissey — when it would be far easier, and probably more politically expedient, to repudiate them.I share Andy Burham’s love of Larkin and regard him not just as a great conservative poet but as a great poet, full stop, whose evocation of a vanishing, perhaps even vanished, England and Englishness plays into the sentimental “Blue Labour” tradition of politics that the new prime minister may or may not be embracing. His continued affection for the “Hermit of Hull” suggests that Mr. Burnham’s literary interests are both sincere and carefully considered. While he has suggested in the past that he has similar affection for Shakespeare, the work of Dickens and “Middlemarch”– perhaps he sees something of himself in that novel’s reforming idealists, Will Ladislaw and Tertius Lydgate – these are relatively safe options, just as any American politician who wished to show cultural hinterland would praise “Moby-Dick” or Maya Angelou.Larkin and Morrissey are hardly marginal figures, but they are controversial. The poetry of the former is often scraped off the British national curriculum in favor of safer, more ethnically diverse options and the latter is embroiled in a perpetual culture war that is, admittedly, as much of his own making as it is circumstance. For Mr. Burnham to make his allegiance to them so clear suggests that he will be his own man, rather than buffeted by more fashionable associations.Mr. Burnham’s artistic tastes are broader than a liking for Mancunian pop stars and contentious poets would suggest. He was spotted at a concert by the southern English socialist folk singer Billy Bragg and, in 2024, performed a DJ set at Manchester club All My Friends, which later went viral after he became prime minister.Andy Burnham, flanked by then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Tottenham Hotspur manager Harry Redknapp, at a visit to Tottenham Hotspur Training Ground, January 2009. Via Arthur Edwards/WPA Pool/Getty ImagesIt remains to be seen whether Mr. Burnham, a longtime supporter of Everton Football Club, can retain his aura of personable cultural authenticity. Nearly 30 years ago, Tony Blair hosted his infamous “Cool Britannia” reception at Number 10, attracting the likes of Noel Gallagher of Oasis, Mick Hucknall of Simply Red, and Dame Helen Mirren. Over time, however, Mr. Blair came to be seen as something of a cultural pariah. The ridicule was exemplified by Ian McEwan’s later recollection that, at the opening of Tate Modern in 2000, Mr. Blair insisted to the bemused author that he was an artist and that some of his paintings were hung at Downing Street.At this moment, from an intellectual and cultural perspective — if not necessarily a political one — Andy Burnham’s tenure in office might make for the most interesting British premiership of modern times.

Is Andy Burnham Britain’s First 21st-Century Cultural Heavyweight Prime Minister?

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