Becoming Burnham: Thatcher, Hillsborough, and the Anger that Shaped Him | Part 1

Andrew Murray Burnham known to most of you by now as Andy our seventh prime minister in just over a decade king of the north to some all vibes to others but what kind of leader will he be what drives him what does he actually want this country to do and to be and how did he go from being a parliamentary assistant to prime minister of the United Kingdom in around a quarter of a century I've known Andy Burnham for around 30 years he crops up a fair bit in my diaries often talking about his anxieties his fears his frustrations also about his ideas and his ambition so I do know some of the story I know quite a lot of the story but today I've been sitting down talking to somebody who probably knows Andy Burnham better than anybody outside his family that's Steve Rotherham Steve former MP left Westminster with Andy Burnham to go off and become mayors Andy in Manchester Steve in Liverpool's city region so they've worked together they've navigated Westminster together they've left Westminster together they've become mayors together they fought for the Hillsborough families and victims together and now they're going to be as close as you can get as friends in politics so here is what you're going to hear about in this series you're going to hear from Steve about Andy Burnham's impostor syndrome you're going to hear about his Catholic guilt complex you're going to hear about Andy the family man the DJ the footballer and all that stuff you're going to hear about the humiliation that's Steve's word the humiliation he felt on losing those two leadership elections in particular the one to Jeremy Corbyn you're going to hear a really deep-rooted dislike of Margaret Thatcher radicalized by her you're going to hear how he responded to the Manchester arena bombing and a truly extraordinary story about how he found out that it had happened you're going to hear why he went absolutely ballistic with Boris Johnson during the Covid pandemic we're going to talk about Manchesterism what it is and maybe more importantly how it can be applied to the whole country and you're going to get Steve Rotherham's pretty well informed predictions about what a Burnham government wants to do and will be like that's all coming up on becoming Burnham so Steve thank you for being here great pleasure listen let's start with his his childhood you you were one of eight yeah right so also a Catholic I'm guessing no we were no we have no religion whatsoever but you've got eight kids yeah yeah and you're growing up in a pretty very well an absolute working class part of Liverpool would you say your childhood was very different to Andy's I'd say it was similar in many ways but they had their own home whereas we had a house which actually was my mum's home believe me it wasn't a council's my mum used to decorate that my mum decorated not my dad he was at the labour club having a few drinks of course and enjoying himself but I think the similarities of most people are that when you're brought up in that sort of a community that neighborhood you don't know what other people are living like because all you can see is the people around you and they're all living a very similar standard of life his dad was an engineer it was a telephone engineer his mum Eileen was a GP receptionist they're now in their mid-80s and his dad of course has dementia which is really sad to think he doesn't know just how far Andy's gone or doesn't understand how far he's gone it's not family tell me whatever you feel comfortable saying about Andy's family parents wife kids he's a real family man I'm not just saying that because we can all say we're family men aren't we all you know people who love our families who doesn't love the family Boris Johnson but um no there's um there's some uh formative things I think in it in his childhood you know such as that moving from the first house in Aintree and then going to Colcheth and then moving again and then going to the schools there rather than to a school in Liverpool so I think all of that was formative and he's got two brothers who he really is close to and two great lads um and if you think about the family from that background two of them teachers you know head teachers and all and schools and Andy who became a politician obviously but has done all right for himself as well I think that's from his mum and dad I think you get your values from your mum and dad and and Eileen who's his mum is just such a lovely woman and before his dad got dementia obviously I used to have chats to his dad his dad's a a big Evertonian and a game formed that sort of you must follow in the family tradition of support in Everton but he has carried that forward to his own family and the closeness of him and his his lad and the two girls who he's immensely close to and and you can see that with the shows of affection but behind all of that just the way that they act as a family it shows it um that that is the basis of who he has become it's that strong bond and then uh Marie-France who's Andy's wife who by the way if anybody out there is somebody who liked the tweet which was critical of her dress I think shame on you this is a woman who fought breast cancer who a woman who again is just from an ordinary background okay she's from um another country she's from uh Holland but she came over as well to the UK and did very well for ourselves and ended up in Cambridge so it's not like she had all of the the trappings of wealth they've created that by their intelligence and their determination and a really really good unit a solid unit and that's why I think Andy's been able to do some of these things I can remember actually having dinner with him this is when he was shadow education I think and Marie-France was having the operation and and I can remember him feeling guilt yeah that he was yes he was there as much as he could be but both for her and for the kids this sense of I've got to be in Westminster to sort of you know take on Michael Gove over some stupid new idea he's got when I've got all that going at home and everyone's got a bit of that haven't you I mean again anybody who's away with jobs in the armed forces or wherever he's away from family has got those contentions he dealt with it really well I think and whilst he's doing all of that trying also to have a bit of fun time if you like a bit of him time so as you know he's a lover of live music and we've been going to to gigs probably for 15 16 17 years whatever it is and he's going to find that almost impossible now as the prime minister doesn't he to to go to a live music venue well if he does go he's going to do better than he did on his little dad dancer oh he's a napoleon dancer is he oh he's terrible should he just better not do it at all well his taste in music sometimes is just depressing um so it we do these dj offs I don't know whether you know we have a dj battle and I'll be playing you know something really upbeat and then he'll put on um the smiths you know heaven knows I'm miserable now or girlfriend in a coma and I'm like yeah that keeps the vibe going doesn't it well done lad yeah so I'll put something else on there to get it going again but if Frankie or something up it goes again yeah he genuinely believes that we've had these dj battles and he's won some of them okay not a chance I mentioned catholicism did you ever have a sense that Andy's religion was important to him oh yeah yeah absolutely he does have that sort of catholic guilt complex you know that many people have he's very similar to what we made to a catholics as well in their their attitude to life their beliefs their their values uh principles so what does the guilt complex mean that he sort of feels if somebody's not doing as well as he should he's yeah he's got a responsibility he's always got that sort of you know the catholicism looms large if he is believing that he should do something then I think he'd be steered away from it because of his beliefs he once said I he read the catechism and he felt that the enfranchisement of it on earth was the labor party do you kind of feel that do you feel there's a moral there was you know it's either a moral mission or it's nothing is that I do I think it's a crusade yeah I I think that the labor party is the greatest organ for social change in this country um since its inception uh and religion of course can be often compared to that because if you truly believe in the teachings of the church then it's about being good to other people and all that that's what socialism is to me I mentioned in the introduction Liverpool back then and I mean you obviously lived it much more than than Andy who's you know just outside and he's but he's he's looking on in give us a sense of it you we you know we we did the stats there but also the politics of it were brutal as well weren't they oh dear me yeah so the thing that he talked about is boys from the black stuff and actually that's through a conversation that we had that I teased out of him how fundamental that was to his belief that the north wasn't getting a um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um so I'm a little bit of a little bit but I'm not a little bit of a bit of a moment that I think that the North was a decent enough deal from that particular government the Thatcher government but we all knew that it was writ large wasn't it nearly 100,000 jobs gone and those people you know left with no alternative so it was a seminal piece of television for lots of reasons but also i think quite clearly formed that important instinct within him which was about injustice and he could see that the things that were happening to liverpool were wrong in so many ways but also the damage that it was doing to people's lives was something worth fighting for how do you think that whole liverpool demise of liverpool joblessness in liverpool social unrest in liverpool what lasting effect do you think that had in any way he thinks about politics a lot of the stuff that happened in the earlier years sometimes still comes out you know if we're having a conversation about something so it very much forms part of the the politician he's become and it's been very formative in some of the the bitterness that he feels against the way in which the state has conspired against certain areas i do believe that this is why when i was trying to persuade them to to be the metro mayor or stand as the metro mayor for greater manchester i think this is why devolution became really important so it's no good having a moan about things not going brilliantly well in westminster if that's all you do you're just there and not trying to do anything about it so i think that's trying to change it he looked from the outside at the mechanisms by which we can start to use devolution to change politics and i think that's why he wants to go back in because he can do that on a national scale now and he has spoken openly about using devolution as a way in which every area in the country can start to benefit from growth and thatcher was how do we put it anathema hey figure yeah i'd say another thing that you get taught off your parents my mom said never ever say hate because it's a it's a useless emotion it doesn't actually do anything so it was difficult for me to actually say that i hated thatcher but i disliked her immensely and she did so much damage to our area both to the the economy and the the the way which we operated but also to the reputation and would you say so when she won i think particularly the second election 83 and then meanwhile liverpool is electing you know a really really far left council yeah do you think to some extent that was a product of her a response to her or was it just that liverpool's always been more left-wing than the rest of the country no i think it's an absolute response to thatcherism and to what was happening there were people who joined labor party politics there he wouldn't have been associated with our party you know there was was a a broad church of everybody from communists and socialist workers party and everything all joined in with militants of course and then some people who were just mainstream labor you know they had the sort of the same values and principles that historically people would join our party with but it became really really toxic of course because that injustice burns brightly and i believe that at that time the politicians in liverpool wanted to take on the role of the aggressor against the government that they believed the whole country should follow them with and he said during the recent violation he said this i saw what thatcher's government did to places like this de-industrialization draining away of economic social and political power it left places like make you feel behind and britain has been on that path for the last 40 years look i like andy and i've known him for a long long time i get a bit narked by this 40 years thing yeah it doesn't surprise me and but you know the neo-liberal like and it it feels to me like okay thatcher's this terrible as you say even though your mom doesn't like it hate figure who comes along damages places like liverpool but it always feels to me from this that andy's saying and then you have this long period of a labor government and they did naff all as well yeah but i think you'll admit this what labor tried to do is to repair the damage of the thatcher years but it didn't do in an instructed way often we had pilot schemes so i remember sort of the top-down approach to this that we'll tell you what's good for your area and we'll give you some money to do it and i don't think they really worked most of the time that money wasn't spent in an appropriate way that you would expect things like the new deal for communities yeah well there was loads of it wasn't it there was all the stuff that they did on housing and um that was really good but of course it wasn't looking at the peculiarities or the individual needs of an area it was a policy at a national level foisted on everybody and it so it was a one-size-fits-all so you know the tori neglect of liverpool we then had the miners strike yeah we've had all the hatred of thatcher you've got social unrest in liverpool and then he's off to cambridge and then life and his anger about what's happening in the world gets even deeper 93 soccer fans died in today's fa cup disaster europe's worst ever sporting tragedy most of them were teenagers and children they were crushed to death at the liverpool nottingham forest semi-final held at hillsborough in sheffield 200 more were injured it happened when ticketless liverpool fans surged onto terraces packed with genuine ticket holders they'd been let in by police hoping to ease congestion outside the ground no crowd trouble had taken place so this is 15th of april 1989 i was a journalist on the sunday mirror watching this unfold it was a saturday 97 football fans crushed to death 766 injured and there's a deliberate strategy by the government by the police essentially to say this is a bunch of pissed scouse football fans that essentially have brought this upon themselves and you and andy would be part of what became a 27 year long campaign andy wasn't there you were at at hillsborough so and and i guess it's for both of you in different ways being an utterly defining event so just you know say as much as or as little as you want to about that the likes of the establishment found it easier to scapegoat fans who'd already been blamed for one disaster it must be their fault muslim things like in a locked room videotapes went missing and so this is not allegations this all came out subsequently in the um in the court proceedings and the second inquest the the police and the police federation were straight in there to blame fans and there's an old saying isn't i think it was it was a harold wilson who said that the aligning be halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots boots on yeah i'm trying i'm trying to work out when a bit of iron and entered andy's soul because i've always felt i've known him for a long time and i've i've been saying recently i've i've never i've never seen that much stealing i've never seen that much stealing in him if you just said to me back there no one day he'll be he won't just be prime minister but he'll become prime minister by defenestrating a guy who's got a three-figure majority to his name and he'll arrange a by-election he'll manage to get a by-election and he'll come in and he won't even have a contest and suddenly he's going to be their prime minister because that requires a level of politics and ruthlessness you know and come from me this is not i'm not saying this is an insult at all there is you know i never quite imagined was there and i just wondered whether that was when a bit of iron entered his soul or whether actually it was later when we had the famous booing and heckling when he was a minister i do think that when he uh i asked him we were at a funeral for another um lad who was um killed in spain and he wouldn't repatriate his body and the family had to buy his body back and all this stuff and he was like i don't know i don't know this sort of stuff a horrendous story anyway we were both at this funeral and i lent over to him and said listen you know i'm gonna get you an invite into the 20th anniversary of hillsborough and he just looked at me he was like what do you want me there for and i said he's now culture minister culture yeah he's culture secretary yeah and i said because we need somebody at the heart of government who'll take this fight forward because at that stage the year before we probably had you know five or six thousand at the 19th anniversary because all the doors are closed and we've been slammed in the face and it looked as if that was the end of it and i said we need something we need this catalyst so that we can get to truth and justice anyway he did as you know speak at the 20th anniversary but the thing that i watched because i i was the lord mayor then the one with the chain um i'm sitting at the front waiting to go on after andy and i'm looking at the crowd and i could see that there was real anger because he wasn't andy burnham he was a representative of the government of the government of the government of the government of the government the state government hadn't done enough at that stage today i represent the prime minister and the government 20 years ago and he talked about gordon brown had sent him with a message and it was a one lone voice and i don't know whether you'll get it on the tape but it just shouts justice and then it ripples through the crowd and there were 37 000 people there and the four sides all started singing justice for the 96 as it was then but today as the prime minister has asked me to convey we can at least yw bod 96 o'r cefnogwyr bwyd-bwyd sydd wedi marw byth yn cael eu cofio. 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