‘King of the north’: An English mayor fights for his neglected region

In suburban Manchester, a crowd has gathered at a disco to dance with an unconventional DJ: the mayor.

It’s an underground rave of sorts. Inside a community sports club, the subterranean space has been festooned with pulsing neon lights. The event, a fundraiser for a food bank and a local branch of the British Labour Party, is titled Dance for Change with Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham. Shaking a hand-held microphone as if it were a maraca, the Generation X mayor boogies to songs by northern English bands that he’s selected. 

“This goes out to all the politicians in the room,” Mr. Burnham jokes before spinning “I Wanna Be Adored” by legendary local band The Stone Roses. 

Mr. Burnham is accustomed to adulation. The former Cabinet minister has twice won election as mayor of a region of 2.8 million people and an economy larger than that of Northern Ireland. Some people believe that he has the potential to become a future prime minister.

“He’s a decent guy. He doesn’t seem so tribal as some politicians,” says Ian Davis, a patent attorney, shouting to be heard over the thumping bass in the disco. “One day, I hope he’ll return to national politics.”

During an interview in his office a few days earlier, the mayor said he hadn’t ruled out a return to Westminster. In the meantime, though, he is at the forefront of a historic initiative to spread political power more evenly across Britain.

For now, he’s at the forefront of a nascent initiative to decentralize power in Britain. In 2016, a devolution deal with the government created nine new regional power centers, led by metro mayors. The big idea? Devolve London’s traditional policymaking role in areas such as transport, economic development, and housing.

In practice, the national Parliament is often still reluctant to cede power. But the leader of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, as Mr. Burnham is formally known, has made enough of a difference to attract attention. Among his accomplishments: lowering homelessness rates and taking the city bus service back into public ownership, slashing fares. Last week, he notched up his biggest success yet, winning his city greater freedom over how to spend its £1.5 billion ($1.9 billion) grant from the British government. 

The tattoo means something ...

Mr. Burnham’s ethos is that it’s better to work with people than against them. To that end, the lifelong Labour man has forged genial working relationships with members of the ruling Conservative Party. He calls it a “place-first approach, rather than politics or party-first approach.” In Britain’s highly polarized political environment, it’s a novel style of leadership.

“Burnham has fashioned an identity for himself as a maverick since he came to Greater Manchester,” says Joshi Herrmann, founder and editor of The Mill, an online newspaper, based in Manchester. “I don’t know where that lies on the line between clever political positioning and an authentic, political sort of eccentricity.”

Since becoming mayor in 2017, Mr. Burnham has ditched the suits and ties he wore in Parliament. The boyishly handsome mayor, whose black hair gathers into a wave you could surf on, opts for smart-casual dark clothing. It conveys egalitarianism. In conversation, the politician touts the strengths of northern values such as humility and solidarity. It’s why he got an arm tattoo of the traditional Manchester symbol: a worker bee.

“My mother still can’t believe it,” says the mayor of that tattoo. But it is more than decorative, he insists. “That is a symbol of no one being more important than anyone else,” he explains. “Everyone has to work together.” 

Mr. Burnham jokes that it’s difficult, as mayor of Manchester, to admit that he was born in nearby Liverpool, long a rival city. He delivers the line with mock sheepishness. (It should be noted that Mr. Burnham is anything but parochial.) Last year, he engaged in a battle of the DJs with Liverpool metro Mayor Steve Rotheram. The two are collaborating on a book, coming out in January, titled “Look North! A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain.”

“It will argue that if the values of the north were more preeminent in the U.K., we’d have a fairer, more collaborative country,” says Mr. Burnham, rather than one dominated by power centers in London that tend to treat the north as an afterthought.

Mr. Burnham is well positioned to understand the economic and social inequalities between the north and south of the country. The working class northerner earned a place at the elite Cambridge University. There, he experienced a political awakening.

In 1989, overcrowding at Hillsborough Stadium in the northern city of Sheffield resulted in the deaths of 97 Liverpool soccer fans. The tragedy evinced very different reactions in the two worlds that Mr. Burnham inhabited.

“There was the Cambridge world, where I was studying, where nobody was talking about it,” he says. “And then there was the world at home where everyone was just in utter despair about it. I just couldn’t reconcile these two worlds. And it told me that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way things were.”

It wasn’t the last time that the Hillsborough disaster would profoundly shape Mr. Burnham’s professional path. Elected to Parliament in 2001, he rose rapidly through the ranks. By 2008, he had become minister for culture, media, and sport.

On the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough tragedy, Mr. Burnham was invited to talk at a memorial service at a packed Liverpool stadium – “a complete, total collision of my professional and personal worlds,” he says.

Liverpool fans had long been angry that Sheffield police had not been held accountable for poor crowd control decisions. The Labour government had done little to get to the bottom of the tragedy. It was a politically fraught issue, and Mr. Burnham says he felt at a crossroads, torn.

Sharpening his dilemma, his televised speech was interrupted by chanting Liverpool supporters calling on the government for justice.

“In your life, you will come up against moments like this where there’s something you know to be right and just. And yet you might be in an organization where they’re taking a different approach. And the question is what do you do?” he remembers musing.

“Do I keep going in terms of my career, or be true to myself?” 

Mr. Burnham chose to take the fans’ side, pressing for a new inquiry that eventually found that the police had engaged in a cover-up.

King of the north?

Mr. Burnham’s activism on the Hillsborough issue raised his public profile. But his two subsequent campaigns to become leader of the Labour Party were unsuccessful. He grew weary of Westminster politics. So he ran for the newly created position of mayor of Greater Manchester.

“The virtue of taking power closer to people is that you can be on a level with people,” says Mr. Burnham. “You can exercise that power collaboratively rather than in a top-down approach.” 

It sounds good in theory. But the reality is that Mr. Burnham’s reputation as “king of the north” may be overstated.

“He doesn’t have that many concrete powers because devolution ... is still very incremental in the U.K.,” says Mr. Herrmann. “So he really has to rule via public messaging.”

In addition to regularly doing interviews, the mayor has also been canny about forging alliances. That includes collaborating with Michael Gove – the Conservative minister for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities – who is deeply unpopular in Labour circles. Mr. Gove joked that it would be fatal to the mayor’s political career if they continued to find so many points of agreement. 

Mr. Burnham heaped praise on Mr. Gove for pushing a new, updated devolution deal earlier this year, looking beyond party labels.

“I see more people caught up in the process of politics, the playing of the game of politics, and less interested in the actual use of the position you’re in to do something meaningful and beneficial to the people who need help,” Mr. Burnham says.

For all his magnanimity, Mr. Burnham has clashed with the British government. He contested its pandemic decision to place Manchester under the most severe level of lockdown restrictions. In October, he was aggrieved by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s decision, which cited cost overruns, to cancel construction of a high-speed railway to the north.

Mr. Burnham had argued that the railway upgrade, aimed at easing bottlenecks on a busy network, was vital for the region’s economic growth. The scaled-back route, ending in the midland city of Birmingham, is another example, Mr. Burnham says, of northerners being treated as second-class citizens.  

But that has not stopped him from “evolving the office [of mayor] to showing voters where it can make a difference,” says Georgina Blakeley, co-author of a book on the subject. “It’s gaining visibility among voters,” she adds.

Persistence, and pre-dawn walks

Mr. Burnham is proudly touting a brand-new agreement with the government that will provide Manchester with a block grant. Until now, the city’s £1.5 billion budget has come from 150 different sources, each with its own rules and regulations. The new so-called single settlement will give Manchester more freedom to allocate its money as it sees fit.

In September, the mayor notched up another hard-won victory, when the city took back control of Manchester’s privatized and deregulated buses, extending services and slashing fares by as much as half. This will make life easier and cheaper for a lot of people: Seventy-five percent of public transport journeys in the city are by bus.

“It’s a game changer for Manchester,” says Professor Blakeley, who teaches governance and democracy at the University of Huddersfield.

The bus reform, which she calls “a really successful plank of Andy Burnham’s tenure in office,” was delayed because Parliament dragged its feet for two years, she points out. “The characteristic that he needs the most, and that I’ve seen in action, is persistence,” she says.

The mayor has also expanded the remit of his office by going beyond devolution affairs and delving into issues that are primarily the jurisdiction of local councils. He has been known to go on 4 a.m. walks so that he can witness the scale of the homelessness problem, for example.

“When he came to Greater Manchester, he made his big campaign about homelessness and rough sleeping, even though that’s not actually an issue that mayors have any real control over,” says Mr. Herrmann. “But he used his convening power,” getting people from different government agencies together to try to find a solution.

In 2018 he launched his emergency A Bed Every Night campaign, which has brought down the number of rough sleepers.

The mayor is an effective retail politician because his heart-on-sleeve approach connects with people on an emotional level, says Mr. Herrmann. After a terrorist killed 22 people by detonating a bomb at an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena, Mr. Burnham ran the 2019 Boston Marathon to raise money for families of victims. 

“It goes back to that solidarity point,” says the mayor.

If Mr. Burnham harbors ambitions to become a national leader, he will have to wait his turn. Current polling suggests that the Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, will handily win the next general election. For now, Mr. Burnham is focused on winning a third mayoral term in May. He says he believes that role is the most functional level of British politics and where the most beneficial change is happening. 

“I would like the north of England to have a permanently louder voice,” he says. “I don’t think that in my political lifetime now I can do everything that I would want to do, in terms of the life that I think people here should have – the transport we should have, the jobs we should have.

”However, I would like to think I’ve helped create machinery that will allow the 21st century to be better.”