The UK is set to get a very different PM. How different? Well, the new guy has a personality

June 21, 2026 — 1:50pm You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add more. In normal times, a byelection swing of nearly 10 per cent to the government would be joyous news for a struggling prime minister.

But these are far from normal times in Britain. Andy Burnham’s stronger-than-expected result at the Makerfield byelection last Thursday was received with anything but delight at 10 Downing Street. It was almost certainly the final nail in the political coffin of Sir Keir Starmer, less than two years after he led Labour to its greatest victory.

By returning Burnham – Starmer’s declared leadership rival – to Westminster, the public made an emphatic statement that they wanted the prime minister replaced. Within hours of the result, Starmer defiantly reiterated that he would not go quietly; he would fight the expected leadership challenge. But even as he spoke, Labour MPs were lining up like llamas at a petting zoo to tell TV interviewers that their leader should go.

By lunchtime, 98 of the 403 Labour MPs had publicly called on Starmer to stand aside. I’m told many more, who kept silent, thought the same. As Boris Johnson said about his own downfall, when the herd moves, nothing can stop it.

The Labour herd was stampeding. Had his rival’s victory been a narrow one, the prime minister might conceivably have been in a position to fight on. But the size of Burnham’s win turbocharged the political momentum beyond the capacity of Starmer’s rapidly shrinking band of loyalists to arrest it.

Burnham secured 54 per cent in a field of 14 candidates, a 9.6 per cent swing to Labour from the general election. That is three times Labour’s current standing in nationwide opinion polls (19 per cent) and twice what it was able to achieve in the same area at local government elections just six weeks earlier.

Importantly, he showed he could not just beat Labour’s main challenger, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, he humiliated it. It remains to be seen whether Burnham’s local popularity, based on his successful tenure as mayor of Greater Manchester, will translate nationally. Certainly, he is a very different kind of politician from Starmer.

For one thing, he has a personality. Initially, being boring worked for Starmer. After the scandals, crises and episodic buffoonery of the final years of Tory rule, he seemed reassuringly calm and stable: “No Drama Starmer”.

But, as the unforgiving scrutiny of government soon revealed, the blandness concealed not inner depths and quiet competence, but an empty suit. He never got a grip on his own government. New scandals arose, most egregiously, the Mandelson affair.

He failed to command the House of Commons. His preachy, wooden style was ill-suited to the performative demands of political leadership. Burnham has the professional politician’s easy, voter-friendly affability.

He is also more intellectually interesting. While obviously intelligent, Starmer has no intellectual depth. His only apparent interest (which he shares with Burnham) is football.

When he appeared on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, asked which book he would take to a deserted island, he nominated an atlas. (It wasn’t a joke.) Burnham is widely read.

While most aspiring politicians study law or the social sciences, Burnham’s university degree is in English literature. He loves Chaucer, Orwell and Shakespeare; his favourite novel is said to George Eliot’s Middlemarch. He would be the first Cambridge man to become prime minister since Stanley Baldwin, a century ago.

(Of the prime ministers since Baldwin who attended university, 14 of the 15 went to Oxford.) He would also be the first Catholic prime minister (Boris Johnson was baptised a Catholic but converted to Anglicanism. Tony Blair converted to Catholicism after he left Downing Street), and the first northerner since the Yorkshireman Harold Wilson.

Most importantly, Burnham is a very experienced politician – a junior frontbencher in the Blair government, cabinet minister under Gordon Brown, and a successful big city mayor. His roots in the Labour Party and links with the trade unions are deep. Starmer – who was 52 when he became an MP – had no prior political experience, and it showed.

Although a successful barrister who rose to be Director of Public Prosecutions (hence the knighthood), conspicuous achievement in other fields is no predictor of success as a political leader – as Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull both demonstrated. Those who, like John Howard and Anthony Albanese, have uninteresting professional hinterlands, but spend long years honing their political skills as they climb what Disraeli called “the greasy pole”, come much better prepared when they eventually reach the top job. Burnham describes himself as a socialist.

But he is an ideological chameleon – once a Blairite who denounced left-wing economics, then an acolyte of Brown, he now sits on the “soft left” of Labour. As mayor of Greater Manchester, he favoured pub