Andy Burnham could well find that his man of the people act wears thin, writes James Hanson

A Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynista walk into a bar. The barman says “what will it be, Mr Burnham?”. It may not be the most devastating of put-downs, but it does reveal an undeniable truth about Andy Burnham’s political career - namely, that he’s been prone to a remarkable amount of ideological shapeshifting over the years.

With his coronation as our next Prime Minister all but ensured, I’ve been struck by how little discussion there’s been around who Andy Burnham really is and what he really believes.

Is he the modernising Blairite who, while Health Secretary, became the only politician to ever privatise an NHS hospital? Is he a tribune of the soft left that he claimed to be while battling Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership in 2015? Or is he someone else entirely?

What seems undeniable is that Burnham has gone further than most politicians in cultivating a carefully crafted public image. With his black t-shirts and love for Everton, he wants us to believe he’s an authentic man of the people: plain old Andy, King of the North, braving a trip to big bad Westminster on our behalf. It’s a compelling story, but does it ring true? After all, he’s hardly a stranger to Whitehall.

In fact, he’s a career politician who followed an achingly conventional career path from special advisor to cabinet minister. The only reason he ran for the mayoralty in the first place was because he realised his prospects were dim while Jeremy Corbyn and his acolytes controlled the Labour Party.

Following his speech in Manchester yesterday, during which he laid out plans to transfer greater power to the regions and establish a Number 10 in the north, Burnham filmed himself returning to London. In the back of a taxi, he quipped, “I left the north again, I travelled south again”, paraphrasing a lyric from The Smiths song Is It Really So Strange?. While clearly a lover of music, Burnham’s constant quoting of Manchester bands is beginning to feel more than a little performative. Shy of making a cameo appearance in Coronation Street, he’d struggle to embody a more cliched vision of northernness.

Of course, he’s hardly the first politician to adopt a very deliberate public persona. Boris Johnson was known to intentionally mess up his hair before appearing on camera, so as to further his desired image of the lovable rogue. Harold Wilson smoked a pipe in public to accentuate his working-class roots, while preferring cigars in private. And while David Cameron professed to be an Aston Villa supporter, the pretence was exposed when he inadvertently claimed to be a West Ham fan instead.

As the American comedian George Burns famously quipped, “the key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” Every politician takes care to project themselves in the most attractive way possible, but the British public are experts at detecting inauthenticity. If voters don’t see tangible improvements in their daily lives pretty soon after he takes office, Andy Burnham could well find that his man of the people act wears thin.

In the end, it didn’t matter how many times Keir Starmer told us he was the son of a toolmaker; voters saw him not as the man he started out as, but the man he’d become: a north London human rights lawyer and knight of the realm.

So while Burnham has had success in recent years by presenting himself as the ultimate Westminster outsider, it may not take long for voters to conclude he was just another career politician all along.

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Listen to James Hanson on LBC on weekends between 4 and 7am.

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