When Andy Burnham was shadow home secretary a decade ago, he was asked if he’d ever consider leaving Manchester and moving to London to be nearer Westminster. He replied: “Nope. Because my networks are here, my mum and dad, my brothers… my support system.” In 2024, the Makerfield MP – who grew up with his parents and his two siblings – wrote in his book Head North that he, his wife Marie-France van Heel and their three children, Jimmy, Rosie, and Anne-Marie, were “are as tight a five-strong family unit as mine was before us”.
So, as Burnham prepares for a potential move into No 10 Downing Street, who makes up this “tight” first family? The oldest of Burnham’s three children is Jimmy, 26, who was given the same name as Burnham’s grandfather. He was born in 2000, just as Burnham was starting to work as an MP. Jimmy left Manchester and moved to London to study circum-Caribbean and Latin American history at University College London, finishing his BA in 2021, before working in a bakery in Primrose Hill, North London.
According to his LinkedIn, he did some work experience at his mother’s former workplace, Heavenly PR, and then went on to be a caseworker for the Labour Party. Now, Jimmy is an International Policy Officer for the Royal College of Nursing and lives in London. Burnham has talked of sharing a love of music with his children, and how his son got him into bands The Strokes and Big Thief. He also mentions in an interview in music magazine The Quietus that he and his son went to Bluedot festival in Cheshire together to see Jimmy’s beloved New Order.
Rosie, 24, is the middle child. She studied criminology at Liverpool University and then worked as a shift manager at cafe chain Joe and the Juice. She is now a sales manager at drinks brand Jägermeister, and was with her parents when the Makerfield results came in. The youngest of his children is Anne-Marie, known as Annie, and at 21, she’s just finishing an English literature degree at Cardiff University. She’s been doing internships at PR companies and had a sales job in a shoe shop.
Burnham with his children and parents. ‘My wife has always been very good at giving me not just a three-line whip but a four-line whip,’ he says, ‘so that some weekend time is just carved out for family, and rightly so.’ (Photo: Oli Scarff/AFP)Burnham has talked about the conflicting roles of politician versus parent. In 2011, when he was shadow secretary of state for education, he said in an interview: “In the early days, I used to phone my little boy and tell him to put the Parliament channel on because I was voting in five minutes and I’d promise to wave to him. So I used to walk through the Commons and stop by the double doors and start waving like an idiot at the camera.”
He added, in the same interview with The Times: “There are a few events that I have missed because I was at Parliament or on some ministerial duty. Jimmy was in a play last year that I couldn’t get back for. And, when I was running for the leadership of the party, I remember I had to leave Rosie’s first Holy Communion a little bit earlier than I would have liked to. There were quite a lot of disapproving looks. My wife has always been very good at giving me not just a three-line whip but a four-line whip, so that some weekend time is just carved out for family, and rightly so.”
Burnham gave an insight into his domestic life in 2017 by saying that when he gets home, in order to relax, he’ll “lie on the kids’ beds for a bit and wind them up”. He added: “I’ll needle away at my daughters about boys. Annie went on a cinema date with her boyfriend recently and I went to collect her, only she’d said: ‘Don’t look at him in the rear-view mirror, don’t talk to him, don’t do anything.’ I thought, ‘I’ll just wear a cap and open the door, shall I?'” He has also mentioned taking his daughters to a Taylor Swift concert – “great” – and also a Katy Perry concert – “hell on earth”.
Although generally private about his wife and children, wanting them to get on with their lives away from the spotlight, Burnham has talked a lot about his parents. He lives near his mother and father, Eileen and Roy, who appeared in public with their son in 2017 when he was elected mayor of Greater Manchester. The couple met working at a Liverpool telecom firm, married, and set up home in Aintree, later moving to the village of Culcheth, near Warrington. Roy took a job as a telecoms engineer, and Eileen was a GP receptionist.
They had three sons; Andy was born in 1970, between Nick, born in 1968, and John, born in 1974, both of whom are teachers. John was the head of Birchwood Sixth Form College in Warrington for two decades until 2020, while Nick has been the principal of Cardinal Newman College in Preston since 2012. After studying economics at university, Nick worked at Peter Symonds College in Hampshire. In 2016, he became the Chair of the Council of the Sixth Form Colleges Association and according to the college website, his interests include food, travel and Everton.
Between them, the three Burnham sons have given their parents, Roy and Eileen, eight grandchildren. “The boys were always close,” Eileen said in 2015 to The Daily Mirror, “but they still knocked seven bells out of each other every day. Andy dished it out most. But then he’d just stop and go and do his homework. He was driven.”
Burnham leaves with his wife Marie-France Van Heel and their daughter Rosie after winning the Makerfield by-election (Photo: Jon Super/AP)There were even arguments about who got the best gig at the Roman Catholic primary school that the Burnham boys went to. “You should have seen the fights he and his brothers had on Sundays,” said Eileen. “They were all altar boys but Andy had to be the one at the front holding the Communion plate.” The brothers, it is clear, are protective of each other. Burnham revealed that years ago he had been “badly beaten up” in a pub during an East Staffordshire by-election, a bottle smashed in his face, and his cheekbone broken. “I had to stop my brother Nick going off with his football team to find them.”
Burnham has also talked about the influence his grandmother, Kitty, had on him. Kitty worked as a cleaner in the Liverpool brewery, and died in 2002, having spent her £35,000 life savings on care and ending up in a home where her wedding ring was stolen. His mum said to him after that: “If you get elected, bloody well do something!”
If Burnham becomes prime minister and shows any signs of becoming too Westminster, it appears his family will bring him back down to earth. In Burnham’s 2015 campaign video for Labour leadership, his mother says: “He’s always given us a laugh, Andy has… and driven us mad.” And when she heard in 2006 that former prime minister Gordon Brown promoted her son to Treasury Secretary, she says she was surprised. “They called our Andy’ Seven Eights’ at school,” she told The Daily Mirror, with a giggle. “He couldn’t remember that seven eights are 56.”
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