Andy Burnham’s long coup: the chaotic year-long project to return him to Westminster

Efforts of campaign groups, supporters and party figures coalesced after May elections as MPs’ views began to change

The third coming of Andy Burnham began in earnest on the dancefloor of the Ministry of Sound. It was the annual conference of the centre-left pressure group Compass on an unusually hot spring weekend in May 2025. Keir Starmer , a year into his premiership, was deep in the trenches of the welfare battle, and the event’s keynote speakers were Burnham and Louise Haigh.

Under the hot pink lights, the mayor of Greater Manchester joked that he was doing the “rally the troops” slot, inappropriate for a pessimistic Evertonian. But he said there was one reason to still be cheerful.

The threat of Reform, he said, “means the left will now have to make changes that we should have made many years ago … something new is going to break through.”

The reception was as rapturous as a rave. But no one knew what it meant in practice.

It was the other name down to speak that night that was the crucial missing element. “We’ve had New Labour and Blue Labour. Now it’s time for Lou Labour,” said the Compass director, Neal Lawson, a close friend of Burnham’s, as he introduced Haigh.

It was her first critical intervention since her sacking as transport secretary. “Too often over the last few months, we have chosen caution and consensus over the boldness voters expect and made clear they want,” she said, to whoops and cheers.

Not many of Labour’s higher echelons were in that sweaty room to see the beginning. But at least one senior advisor said they had “stayed away - because I knew that someone would look back and write about this one day.”

This is the story of the year-long, chaotic project to return Burnham from Manchester to Westminster, which culminated on Monday with his reception by hundreds of beaming MPs in Westminster Hall.

“Every conversation I had with MPs from October to May was: Angela Rayner has flaws, Wes Streeting has flaws, Ed Miliband has flaws. And of course, Andy is not in parliament,” one senior advisor to Burnham said. “So then it becomes obvious that geography can only hold him back for so long.”

For Haigh, the welfare bill battle just four weeks after that pivotal spring weekend brought a closer alliance with Anneliese Midgley, the Knowsley MP who is close to Burnham and who was instrumental to the welfare climbdown.

Then came the summer dominated by Nigel Farage, with no response visible from the prime minister or government. Labour MPs were starting to doubt Starmer could “meet the moment” of threat from the far right.

It was not just the soft left who formed that view. Inside the Labour Growth Group of centrist MPs, dissatisfaction was growing so fast that Josh Simons, once the golden boy of Starmerism, was beginning to talk to friends about how to replace him with Burnham.

If Labour Together and Morgan McSweeney were the midwives of Starmerism, then there is no direct comparison. There were three separate operations.

The first was the launch of Mainstream, the Compass-founded campaign group that provided policy work and social media for Burnham to start to build a leadership campaign.

Lawson, the Compass director who had hosted the Ministry of Sound event, had decided that the party needed a vehicle that would argue for a change in leadership, ostensibly to campaign against toxic factionalism. “Everyone knew this was a front for Andy Burnham’s leadership,” one MP observed. “They didn’t try to hide it much.”

Lawson approached Burnham to publicly sign up to the group’s aims, with little expectation that he would. But Burnham signed the group’s opening statement.

Among those who are now making the key decisions around Burnham, there are mixed views on how successful the project was – in part because some of the MPs who signed up were seen by others in the party as too far left, like Clive Lewis and Nadia Whittome.

And then came the second phase, initiated by Haigh, Midgeley and Ed Miliband to make Burnham the consensual will of MPs. And the final piece of the puzzle would be Simons – who many close to Burnham initially thought was double agent of No 10. “I genuinely thought he was a spy. Well, it turns out he isn’t,” one friend of Burnham said.

When the rumours began in earnest that Burnham was serious about seeking a return, inside No 10 it was greeted with “here we go again.” Starmer had long distrusted Burnham, seeing him as an opportunist who sought publicity every time his leadership was on the back foot.

But September was the worst month yet of Starmer’s premiership. Elon Musk had addressed Tommy Robinson’s far-right Unite the Kingdom march. Angela Rayner was forced out over her tax affairs. A reshuffle infuriated hordes of now ex-junior ministers. And Peter Mandelson was sacked as US ambassador over the Epstein scandal.

Earlier that month, the Guardianrevealed Burnham was becoming the receptacle for MPs who were starting to plot the removal of Starmer in earnest. Then, before the Labour conference, he broke cover with a series of critical media interviews.“Andy was only saying what we were all saying, but everything he says is magnified several times over,” said Steve Rotheram, the mayor of Liverpool.

The media hype went into overdrive – including those fateful words where he said “we’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets,” in an interview with the New Statesman.

They were market-moving comments and they dogged Burnham through the conference, where he made multiple appearances. Many MPs left the Liverpool conference believing that Burnham was ultimately not serious, or at least, did not have a competent operation.

No 10 was buoyant, though one minister, digesting the fallout , said: “He’s said some dumb things and he done some dumb stuff, but the fundamentals are unfortunately absolutely correct. It isn’t working and we need a radical change.”

There was still the question of a seat. Graham Stringer, MP for Blackley and Middleton South, rebuffed early inquiries. But more promising was Gorton and Denton, where the suspended MP, Andrew Gwynne,had applied on grounds of ill health for medical retirement.

But then he suddenly changed his mind. It seemed, outwardly, like a huge blow. But in a Japanese cafenear Westminster, Burnham’s closest backers were sanguine. “This is not the end of the Gorton option,” one said. Another added: “There are others. Maybe half a dozen.”

Because many of Burnham’s allies still privately believed Gorton to be an option, several advisers began to suggest he should get a policy operation under way, which would define the organisation of a future government.

Burnham himself was uneasy about doing so. The result was many different supporters working in silos. “It was lots of different players on the pitch, and they were all running around in their own little circles, because he didn’t actually captain the team,” one said.

That lack of preparation meant that when the seat suddenly heaved back into view, the operation was not ready. The groundwork had not been done with the Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) or the trade unions to try to convince them to let Burnham return. Far fewer MPs than expected – about 60 – were prepared to sign a letter demanding he be allowed to contest.

“It had been on the cards for some time, but the right opportunity hadn’t presented itself. Then you thought: ‘Oh God, is the chance gone?’” said Rotheram.“Gorton and Denton was amateur hour,” one of Burnham’s team admitted. “Lucy Powell [the new deputy leader] was tearing her hair out because she was somehow expected to fix this.” Trade union leaders in particularly were scathing that they had not been properly sounded out. Labour came third in the seat, behind the Greens and Reform.

By March, it was clear that Labour’s local election results were going to be catastrophic.

MPs began to go, in small waves, to see Miliband, the energy secretary, suggesting he consider running for leader again. But Miliband emphatically told the groups that he would not – and that if there was a contest, they should instead put their efforts into making sure that Burnham was in a position to contend for it.

“It’s not a good enough answer to say, ‘Oh shucks, well I guess we can’t have this election-winning guy because he’s not here,’’’ one of Burnham’s backers said. “But there really were very few people apart from Lou and Anneliese and Ed who actually tried to change it.”

Miliband and Kevin Lee, Burnham’s chief of staff, considered presenting Starmer with a demand post-May to return Burnham to parliament. But MPs felt it was worthless. “What is the point if you do not have anything to threaten?” one MP said.

Others who went to see Miliband at the time believed he was close to preparing to run. “I think if Wes had triggered, we would have pushed the Ed button. And I think he could have been persuaded,” another soft-left MP said. “But everyone would have been very aware it was plan B.”

“Lou was the person who seized the initiative at that point,” one of Burnham’s team said. “It was her, more than anyone, who anticipated that May was the moment where the NEC would move..”

Haigh went to see Burnham again in March. “Andy had been saying, ‘well, if people want me then I’ll do it.’ And we had to be like, you have to meet the PLP halfway here,” one insider said.

Burnham agreed in those weeks that he would try again in earnest after May and that he would this time be “upfront about why he wants to come back and challenge the leadership to defy the party’s wishes”.

Angela Rayner was among those who were far more sceptical about whether Burnham’s path back to Westminster was realistic. “Angela was making people very aware that she was here and Andy was not,” one MP close to Burnham said.

Burnham met Rayner at her constituency home in Ashton in April, but the pair left without any agreement or pact. Rayner also went to meet Haigh, but again, no deal was reached.

On the night of the local elections, Haigh was at her local count in Sheffield watching Labour lose all but three of the seats it had held. Both she and Midgeley called for Starmer to go in the days that followed.

The operation began in earnest then to secure a seat for Burnham. A tight circle of only three or four people were involved. Multiple sources say the seat identified was Manchester Rusholme, held by Afzal Khan. But he denied it, when it began to leak.

“He was as good as it got. No 10 got to him that Sunday,” one of those involved in the search said. Inquiries were made of the St Helens South and Whiston MP Marie Rimmer, and multiple others. It was then that Simons entered the conversation..

Simons, who friends said was “radicalised” by his Makerfield constituency, knew the polls meant he would stand no chance of re-election himself. He believed Burnham was the only politician who could win in a seat like Makerfield. And by May, he was also in need of redemption after his ministerial resignation over the Labour Together scandal.

Burnham went to see Simons at his house in the constituency.

His wife Leah, a Harvard-educated economist, had only just given birth to their third child. But in the two hours he spent with the mayor at his home, the pair grilled him on economics – and how he would approach a potential bond market reaction.

The seat, next door to Burnham’s old patch of Leigh, was 29th on the Reform target list. Several of Burnham’s closest allies advised him not to do it – including Haigh. Multiple sources say there were at least two other safer seats on option.

“Andy really wanted that patch, he wanted to march into the heart of a Reform seat, and that would be the mandate,” one of his team said. “He would not have had that mandate if he had won Gorton and Denton.”