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

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 rotherham 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 and 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 labor losing and him suddenly finding he was no longer in a winning environment and what was it that made him in the end say mr is no longer for me i'm heading north let's just go through where he went so we had his two leadership elections yeah 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 i think the first one was um just a bit of a stab in the dark you know 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 so 2010 ed v david is the sort of main focus and andy was second to drop out i think after that but then 2015 well i had miller bang goes and i don't think even jeremy corbyn thought he was going to win when he started and he was almost was he favorite with the bookies at one point so in my office in um westminster in the uh 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 and i was like oh my god i'm going to win i'm going to win i'm going to win i'm going to win andy this is 2015 2015 yeah and you're running his campaign yeah well you're managing his campaign yeah managing but like he had michael dugan and all m's he 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 happen to put stuff pieces of paper with their 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 she's 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 john yeah john's really canny as you know i've got a lot of respect for john mcdonald i think he's a brilliant political operator we thought more to it but anybody else we thought we thought we wiped the floor and then they come up with jeremy corbyn we thought no one's gonna 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 um i'm gonna 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 what the sort of thing he was saying well some people um because they'd sat by him in parliament and stuff like that and it's heard him and he was a decent orator um so he could um he was a decent orator um so he could uh 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 to justify why they weren't now supporting andy anyway he still got miles more than the numbers that he needed but i had somebody uh on the uh at the plp when jeremy was getting close to the the final number and i was like oh i'm trying to think of exactly what it was a 30 something at the time well 38 i'll just say that and and so he was on 35 or whatever and so this is when this is when margaret beckett and all of sadiq khan and they came and said we've got to get him on the ballot have a proper contest and yeah so even then people like margaret would be thinking it would be better for andy if he's got yeah jeremy to fight yeah and they were thinking also that we needed to lance this boil which was that so i was like oh my god i'm not going to do that i'm not going to do that i'm not going to do that sort of dichotomy between the left of the party and the rump of the party and we thought the rumple obviously come out the top and it wasn't until we heard that he'd got over the line i i phoned andy um and i said listen daddy um he's got the required numbers and all that and there was just a a bit of a silence and i knew and he knew that it was going to be a lot more problematic than with first thought how did how did he deal with that sense of so there he is you got your whiteboard and you've got your post-its and they're all going across the wall because you've got so many mps backing you and then suddenly they start falling off and then suddenly he realizes oh i thought i was in with the shout but this is probably going well how did he deal with that at first not brilliantly in regard to um you know you almost go through the the stages don't you with disbelief and all that we we were quite clear that there was still a campaign to win but there were some things that happened that you just think oh everything's conspired against uh us there was once where he was doing a speech in a church and it was one of his better performances because i i actually said to him at one stage alison and i bet you've said this to people that you've worked with and maybe uh to tony blair but i said you know what i said you're a very good andy burnham but you're a shit phony politician so don't try and be one try to be yourself and authentic and all that and he did this speech and he was asked he's allowed people to ask questions and one of them said andy um i don't know whether it's sort of totemic um but you've delivered a fantastic speech for the last 35 minutes behind a sign a big banner that says um repent for jc is coming and we just went oh my god i can't wait to hear what you have to say and he was like oh my god i can't wait to hear what you have to say um and then we we went around some places and it was almost as if a beetle had walked a john paul george or ringo type beetle had walked into the room with the response for jeremy it was it was one of the most bizarre it was strange things that i've ever seen and what do you learn from that what do you learn from the from people saying that actually somebody was who knows none of us really saw coming let's be frank what did he learn from thinking we've taken this for granted that somebody like me is going to become the next leader and this guy's come from left field and not only has he come from left field but he's genuinely exciting a lot of people in the labour party yeah and beyond absolutely so what did you learn from that well i think it was that taking the message to people is really potent because what jeremy was saying and by the way i went to work for jeremy as you know so i didn't just hear this during the leadership campaign i heard the same thing for speech after speech after speech a speech with jeremy and he basically had a little book and he had some head and none of it excited me in in regard to wow this is i've just seen the light and and you know it was like what but when he'd finished i've never seen ovations like jeremy got and he really did connect with people whether you like that or not he did i did a thing uh in liverpool when you and tony blair uh were in liverpool and he was in the devonshire um and he gave the speech and genuinely even i was going i'd vote for him just because he was able to connect at that level with people and jeremy was doing that with big chunks of labour supporters you know we were miles ahead and then we were marginally ahead and then you just think oh dear and then he announced in the qe two theatre and he uh in london um who the winner was and i was still hoping that if jeremy got 47 48 that nobody who support the other candidates would singly transfer to jeremy and then andy somehow would and i think he got 60 percent in here we don't have to be unequal it doesn't have to be unfair poverty isn't inevitable things can and they will change thank you very much do you think the general public would choose jeremy corbyn as a prime minister well we'll have to see won't we but you know what they do want is politicians of conviction people who say what they mean they are sick to death of people coming on looking like they're reading off a script well that's clearly not jeremy corbyn so what do you think that did to him it's not just he's lost he's he's kind of lost to jeremy corbyn who's you say when he first his name first started to get thrown in the air in the rain people thought this isn't going to be a problem so what sort of soul searching went on with andy after that for a lot of people outside of the westminster bubble and it genuinely is a bubble um it was jeremy who and then all of a sudden he loses badly to jeremy and i think there was a lot of soul searching from andy you know how has it gone from being so far ahead to losing so badly and and everybody does a bit of naval gaze and that those moments they'll you know what did we do wrong but it was literally a tsunami that we couldn't hold back. It started almost immediately that he got the required number of nominations for him to enter the contest. And we just found that it was overwhelming. As he loses 2010, he has this period where he's not very happy. He's also got this situation with his wife and her health challenges. And then we lose 2015 as well. And he loses that. And then we have Brexit. Yeah. Do you think he ever thought of packing it all in? It must have crossed everybody's mind at that time. Did you think of packing it all in? Yeah, I was thinking, well, what's the point in this? Because I've always believed in the European Union. And I just think that, well, my belief was they shouldn't have asked that question. And they asked the wrong question anyway. If they had have asked, were people more likely to withdraw from Westminster and Whitehall than Brussels or Strasbourg, I think you would have got an equally negative response from the country. But the way in which our party was positioned in itself was fairly nuanced. And I wanted to just go out there and sing from the hilltops. Look, this is fantastic. A place like the Liverpool city region, we got objective one monies when we weren't getting anything because the Tory government at the time, we didn't get anything. That objective one monies was a facilitator and a catalyst for massive regeneration in Liverpool. But the bit that I think the European Union did poorly was to communicate it. Remember, eventually we started putting the stars around stuff. So we're getting a million pounds or 10 million pounds project. And he had a little, I was like, get out there and tell people it was too late. So I do think the whole European angle to this was a missed opportunity for us because there was certainly some light between the different parties and you had the Tories and the Lib Dems then on either side and we were trying to straddle two horses. It was difficult. To hear the rest of the episode and the whole series as it drops, just go to therestispolitics.com.