The first England game of the World Cup kicks off at 9pm on Wednesday – prime door-knocking time on the eve of Makerfield’s knife-edge by-election.
In the most consequential by-election in modern history, candidates might be tempted to wring the night for every last vote.
But Andy Burnham, 56, has already called off the troops.
There will be no canvassing during the England versus Croatia match – just as there was none when Wigan reached the Challenge Cup final a fortnight ago.
“I issued an edict in this room, this very room, that there was to be no door knocking at all,” he says in an interview at a community club in Stubshaw Cross on Saturday.
By his own reckoning, Makerfield’s 77,000 voters are by-election weary and faintly sick of the sight of him. Lift the lid of any recycling bin in the constituency, he jokes, and his own face will be grinning up from the top of a pile of leaflets. He thanks the voters, more than once, for their patience. The least he can do, he reckons, is leave them to the football.
For this is a man who, as Mayor of Greater Manchester, took the buses back into public control, capped the fares at £2 and gave every teenager a free bus pass – a politics, his allies say, is built on knowing precisely what a place needs.
It is a knack that has earned him his title as the so-called King of the North and a rare personal following – an appeal he now hopes will translate if he succeeds in his audacious bid to return to Westminster.
Burnham, who has the tan of four weeks spent on doorsteps, is getting over a cold when we meet at one of his campaign centres in the constituency he soon hopes to represent as an MP.
Burnham will bring campaigning to a close on Wednesday night so voters can enjoy England’s World Cup opener (Photo: Anthony Devlin/Getty)On the day we meet, he has harnessed the help of an estimated 1,000 volunteers – including MPs and peers. Louise Haigh, the former transport secretary, and her dog Milo, a golden lurcher–whippet cross, is directing operations.
Following the resignation of John Healey as defence secretary, who quit over the Prime Minister’s refusal to provide more money for defence – Sir Keir Starmer is once again fighting for survival, with more than 100 Labour MPs already saying he should go.
It’s just the latest chapter in the psychodrama, which began to unfold in the wake of last month’s disastrous local election results and has turned this by-election into Burnham’s audition for No 10.
‘HS2 can be funded like Crossrail’
Burnham lives in nearby Golborne with his wife, Marie-France van Heel, with whom he has three children. Aintree-born and Cambridge-educated, he served as health secretary under Gordon Brown and twice ran for the Labour leadership, losing in 2010 and 2015 before quitting Parliament in 2016 for the fledgling Greater Manchester mayoralty. Widely seen as a consolation prize at the time, the job has become the power base now propelling him towards Downing Street.
Pressed on what he would actually do with the keys to No 10, Burnham sets out a prospectus that is unmistakably in the Manchester mould.
He wants to bring back the northern leg of HS2. The scrapping of the Birmingham to Manchester route still rankles, and he is blunt that it should be revived.
“I am absolutely clear, I’ve seen it myself in terms of expansion of our travel system,” he says. “If you put that infrastructure in, it lays the foundations for higher growth… The lack of high-quality rail infrastructure in the north of England holds back its growth potential.”
What lifts this above a pipe dream, given the eye-watering sums involved – the Manchester leg was due to cost £36bn at the time it was cancelled – is how he says it should be paid for. It’s an idea he claims would spare the Treasury much of the bill and he has done it before, at scale.
“There’s a cleverer way of funding this,” he says. “If you go back, I put the funding package together for Crossrail and it was actually a package that did have contributions from business and residents.”
The trick missed last time, he argues, was capturing the soaring value of land around new stations, as London later did on the Northern line extension to Battersea. “You don’t take all the windfall off the landholder, but you share the proceeds of that windfall, and the increase in land values created by the infrastructure is captured to pay back the cost of the infrastructure. So why shouldn’t we fund infrastructure in this country in that way?”
It is, he insists, the future. “A much more devolved approach to running this country. You cannot get growth in a top-down, silo-driven model of government,” he says.
For the uninitiated, Manchesterism is less an ideology than a method.
Greater Manchester’s ‘Bee Network’ has been touted by Burnham as a model to follow across the UK (Photo: Ian Forsyth/Getty)Since becoming the region’s first mayor in 2017, Burnham has used the powers prised from Whitehall to do a handful of concrete, visible things, including bringing the buses back under public control – the first English city region to do so in four decades.
Under the yellow “Bee Network” banner, he has incorporated buses, trams and soon, trains into a single network.
The politics is unashamedly interventionist and rooted in place – the opposite, he says, of a remote and short-termist Westminster.
It has made him a rarity in British politics: a Labour figure whose personal brand outstrips his party’s, re-elected with thumping majorities while the national party flailed.
The wager he is now making is that what works for Greater Manchester can work for the rest of the country – and that this model is the answer to the delivery crisis that is engulfing Starmer.
On the cost of living, the £2 bus fare is his proof of concept. It “comes up on every doorstep,” he says.
Putting buses back under public control to “deliver more public benefit in the form of lower fares” has “changed life in a borough like this,” he claims.
He draws from this experience a wider mission: “similar reform of the big essentials that were sold off in the 1980s.”
Water is one of the issues that exercises him the most. He has previously said he wants to see Thames Water brought into public ownership. Customers “were asked to pay 23 per cent extra on their bills,” he says, “when the water company doubled its profits to £800m”.
His verdict on the industry is withering: “the shareholders never lose and the public never win.” He wants a “much more robust reform agenda for water, for energy,” and council house-building “on the scale of the post-war period”. He claims this will make homes “cheaper to rent but also to run.”
The pitch doubles as fiscal discipline. He argues that if you rein in the unregulated rents that inflate the housing benefit bill, you can then give the country “a grip on its costs”.
To those who say he is careless in his approach to the bond markets, he retorts that “the reverse is true”. He claims that his ten-year investment plan to “bring down the revenue budget” is precisely “something that the bond markets might appreciate”.
‘Young people aren’t hopeful about their futures’
His deepest preoccupation is the education system – and the near-million young people not in work or training.
Their plight, he argues, begins long before any Jobcentre. “The origins of the million young people not in education, employment and training… are to be found in the education system.” His charge is that it only serves the few and finds itself weighted towards “the obsession with the university route under all of the main political parties”.
He has long argued for an education system based on “parity between academic and technical”. Without that, he argues, the country has been “left with a situation where some young people get to the middle years of secondary school and they can’t see where school is taking them”.
He claims to have the evidence to prove it. “We do a survey of teenagers in Greater Manchester and year 10s across all of our 10 boroughs and you see some of them start to report a loss of engagement with school by year 10. It’s high when they come in year seven, but it drops right down by year 10.
“The most troubling thing is we ask the question: Do you have hope for the future? And in parts of this city region, and indeed parts of this borough…that number is way too low. They just cannot see what the opportunity is beyond school.”
His remedies are practical and already running in Greater Manchester. This includes the free bus pass for 16 to 18-year-olds he wants matched to “a guarantee of a work related opportunity at 16,” a “45-day work placement” and – a reform he announced on the day we met – using “full social value weighting” in public procurement so that every single state contract can be made to “require work placements for 16 to 18-year-olds or apprenticeships”.
He also wants to overhaul support for special educational needs, warning that children with additional needs “find their needs are not met and they drift away from the labour market” – a reform with obvious resonance in a constituency, and a country, where SEND provision is in crisis.
Burnham was dubbed ‘King of the North’ following his pushback against lockdown restrictions in the north-west during the Covid pandemic (Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty)On immigration, he hardens the message while insisting on balance. What he hears on the doorstep, he says, is not hostility but a demand for order. “People aren’t anti-immigration, but they say we want control of it,” he says. “At the moment, there’s a sense that isn’t the case.”
He claims the Channel boat crossings must be “gripped” as he praises Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, for bringing the numbers down “year on year” but insists “there is more to be done”.
Burnham’s allies have previously suggested he would back Mahmood’s package of immigration and asylum reforms, despite criticism from parts of Labour. Allies were quoted as saying he would seek to “reframe” the debate rather than reverse the measures, which include increasing the standard route to indefinite leave to remain (ILR) from five years to 10 years.
Drawing on his Home Office years under Sir Tony Blair – including dealing with the Sangatte refugee processing centre near Calais and conversations with the former home secretary David Blunkett, Burnham calls for greater use of detention for those whose claims have no “basis,” to enable “a quicker decision and a quicker return”.
But he is at pains to add what he calls “balance in my thinking” and wants to see “greater use of safe routes”. “Because what you want to do is break the business model of the gangs”, he adds.
For all the talk of Downing Street, it is Makerfield itself that animates Burnham most. The constituency has “too often” been “a forgotten part of Britain,” he says, neglected on everything “from flooding to infrastructure.” It flooded in 2015 and again, seriously, in 2025, when residents had no warning. “You didn’t even have river gauges to warn the residents,” he says. “That tells you something really wrong about the accountability of agencies to people in places like this.”
Whatever Thursday brings, he insists, the change must outlast the “circus”. He claims the voters “deserve nothing less” and vows to deliver for them either as their new MP, or if defeated, by continuing in his role as the Mayor of Greater Manchester.
But if he is victorious, his promise to them is unambiguous. “I will be on a mission to make this the most powerful constituency in the land,” he says.
By 9pm on Wednesday, the last of the leaflets will have been delivered, the foot soldiers will have been stood down and the television will be on.
For one night, even the most relentless campaigner in Britain will sit still and watch the football – refusing, as he has all week, to call the score, England’s or his own.
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