Who is Andy Burnham, the UK’s prime minister in waiting?

British Labour MP Andy Burnham looks set to be airdropped into Downing Street to replace Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He’s promising “renewal for our party and our country,” after the sitting prime minister effectively burned the greatest parliamentary majority in over a hundred years with scandals, a lack of empathy, and a notoriously belligerent line on the country’s relationship with Israel.

However, despite the premature hailing of Burnham as someone who could reinvigorate the Labour vote, all signs point to him delivering Starmerism without Starmer.

Starmer resigned on Monday as the most unpopular prime minister in modern British history, six weeks after the Labour Party lost almost 1,500 seats in local elections across England. His resignation opened a leadership contest that Burnham – a Labour veteran that served under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who re-entered parliament after winning a by-election in Makerfield, Manchester last week – is all but guaranteed to win. 

An endorsement by fellow Labour contender Wes Streeting followed, essentially sealing the deal. Burnham will likely be anointed prime minister later this summer on the back of fewer than 25,000 votes in Makerfield.

“The country expects stability, seriousness and a continued focus on the issues that matter most and that is what it will get,” Burnham wrote on social media. “The Labour movement has always been at its strongest when it looks forward with confidence…and we will make sure this transition is a positive process of renewal for our party and our country.”

The Andy Burnham aesthetic

At first glance, Burnham represents an aesthetic break from Starmer, who has been described as “wooden” and “lacking in charisma.” Speaking in a slightly working class northern accent and clad in a simple shirt and jeans, Burnham goes to great lengths to set himself apart from the “Westminster bubble” inhabited by suit-and-tie southerners like Starmer. 

The British media have largely accepted this framing. The Financial Times has described him as a man who bases his policies on conversations with voters in supermarkets, while The Times has described his views as shaped by the “class-conscious history of Catholicism in the north,” as well as his time as a church altarboy. 

Should he get the job, he will be the first Roman Catholic in British history to become prime minister. But scratch the PR-friendly surface, and Burnham starts to look more and more like the prime minister he’s set to replace.

Are Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer really that different?

Aesthetic differences aside, Starmer and Burnham are both products of the same political pipeline. Both were educated in England’s most elite universities, with Starmer studying at Oxford and Burnham at Cambridge. Both represent the centrist, managerial ‘New Labour’ of Tony Blair, not the left-wing Labour of Jeremy Corbyn. Back in 2015, both tried and failed to prevent Corbyn from wresting control of the party after Ed Miliband’s resignation, with Starmer endorsing Burnham’s failed leadership bid.

Starmer eventually succeeded Corbyn in 2020, using accusations of anti-Semitism to oust one of Britain’s most vocal supporters of Palestine. He has since reshaped the party as an Atlanticist, pro-Israel political force, and there is no indication that Burnham will abandon this course.

Labour’s losing message on Israel

Labour’s position on the Israel-Palestine conflict is existential for the party. Under Starmer, Palestine Action was listed as a terrorist organization, and the PM called for the “policing of language” and banning anti-Israel protests. As a result, Labour’s left-wing base has abandoned the party in droves, switching allegiance to the explicitly pro-Palestinian Green Party. Against public protests and complaints from his own MPs, Starmer refused to call for a ceasefire in Gaza in late 2023 and publicly affirmed Israel’s right to cut off power and water to the strip’s two million residents.

Burnham, like Starmer, is a member of Labour Friends of Israel – a group that only a quarter of Labour MPs have joined. He backed Starmer’s coup against Corbyn, describing the party as “embroiled in an anti-Semitism crisis.” And in his 2015 leadership bid, he promised that his first overseas trip as prime minister would be to Israel, which he praised for its “long history of protecting minorities and promoting civil rights.”

None of this will ingratiate Burnham with Labour’s left wing. Nor will it help him with Muslim voters, two thirds of whom say they will no longer consider voting for the party, according to a poll taken last month. 

Burnham backed the Iraq War

Starmer famously marched against the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 but prevaricated when the US and Israel began striking Iran in February. After an initial public statement in which he condemned Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempts to impose “regime change from the skies,” Starmer went on to allow the US military to conduct what he called “defensive” strikes on Iran from British bases.

For his part, Burnham voted in favor of joining the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a decision that he has since described as “agonizing.” However, he went on to vote against formal inquiries into Britain’s conduct in Iraq and has said little about the war on Iran, describing it as “not simple.” 

Like Starmer and every Conservative PM since 2022 – Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak – Burnham is staunchly pro-Ukraine, promising to “stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes.”

Can voters trust Andy Burnham on immigration?

Although immigration policy is largely a right-wing concern, more and more of Labour’s voters back tougher border controls in the wake of the so-called ‘Boriswave’: the post-Brexit surge in non-EU immigration that has seen more than 4 million migrants arrive in the UK since 2020. According to a YouGov poll, half of Labour’s 2024 voters now think Starmer is handling immigration badly, while 49% want overall immigration numbers reduced, according to a separate Ipsos survey taken last year.

Starmer managed to cut net migration in half from 2024-2025, and although Burnham has said the figures “need to fall further,” his past views suggest that voters will not take his current position at face value. Burnham called on the Conservative government to accept more Middle Eastern asylum seekers in 2015 and advocated for social welfare payments for newly-arrived migrants in 2019.

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has branded Burnham “open-borders Burnham” over these positions. With Reform winning as many seats in last month’s by-elections as Labour lost, and with the party’s tough immigration policies three times as popular as Labour’s, it is highly unlikely that Burnham will be able to turn around Starmer’s polling on the issue.

New prime minister, new taxes

Starmer took office during an unprecedented decline in British living standards and immediately began imposing new taxes to fill a £22 billion ($29.9 billion) hole in public finances. Spending increases on healthcare, education, and policing were limited, and between July 2024 and November 2025, Starmer’s government imposed a new tax or increased an old one every ten days, according to the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

Unlike Starmer, Burnham has promised a quasi-socialist surge in public spending. On the campaign trail in Makerfield, he called for a sweeping wave of nationalization, energy price caps, public housing construction, and defense spending hikes. However, his appointment of MP Miatta Fahnbulleh as economic adviser suggests that the end result will be the same for the British taxpayer.

In order to pay for this ambitious agenda, Fahnbulleh, whose father worked in the government of former Liberian President Samuel Doe, has proposed the imposition of a wealth tax and windfall taxes on oil and gas, hikes in capital gains and property taxes, and increases in property and dividend taxes. 

Nigel Farage demands elections

Burnham is on the cusp of becoming the UK’s sixth prime minister in seven years. Only three of these – Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Keir Starmer – actually won a general election, and none served a full five-year term. None have managed to turn Britain’s cratering economy around, none have offered any kind of shift in foreign policy, and none have reduced immigration to a level acceptable to voters.

“Andy Burnham knows this,” Farage wrote in a blog post on Monday. “He doesn’t care about our borders, our rotten high streets, our energy bills or our collapsing finances. That’s why he didn’t even try and campaign on his own ideas – because he doesn’t have any. His plan for government is to act as continuity Starmer, and hope the rest of us are too stupid to notice.”

Whereas Burnham has called for an “orderly and responsible” transition of power, Farage has demanded a general election, but Starmer has insisted on installing a successor “to ensure the Labour Party secures a second term in office.” With the party’s first term set to drag on until 2029, few expect Burnham to make it that far. All Starmer has done is to ensure that, whenever an election is called, it is Burnham’s, and not his, to lose.