Will Andy Burnham be a literary leader?
Burnham is a rare politician who reads books — but how will they affect his premiership?
So, after fevered speculation, Andy Burnham has cried havoc and let slip the dogs of war. He has now confirmed — to precisely nobody’s surprise — that, having been victorious in Makerfield and duly been sworn in as an MP (complete with well-timed riposte to the heckle “You’re not the messiah”, when he responded “No, I’m a naughty boy”) his intention is to stand as Labour leader, and thereby become Britain’s 59th Prime Minister: the seventh in just over a decade, too.
Yet he will not be Julius Caesar, suffering regicide at the hands of his former friend Brutus. (That would be Keir Starmer.) Instead, the ambitious Burnham is closer to Macbeth, brutally intriguing and, where needs be, stabbing his way into power. The question remains as to whether he possesses the necessary vaulting ambition that will see him become a successful inhabitant of 10 Downing Street, or whether he, too, will be undone by this ambition, which will o’erleap itself and fall.
Yet the question as to Burnham’s actual literariness remains
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Many politicians think of themselves in Shakespearean terms — even if their antics are often closer to the comedies than the tragedies or histories — but Burnham is rare, even unique, in that he will almost certainly be the first Prime Minister who should actually recognise the allusions in the paragraphs above, on the grounds that he studied English literature at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. When virtually every other party leader comes from a background of PPE (Sunak, Truss, Cameron), law (Starmer, Blair) or (checks notes) Computer Systems Engineering (Badenoch), this marks out Burnham as an unusual, even exotic, figure, who can tell his Chaucer from his Coleridge, and might be able to pepper his addresses to the nation with rousing quotations from Henry V and other great plays.
Yet the question as to Burnham’s actual literariness remains. As an anonymous “long-standing ally” observed earlier this year, “I can’t see Andy reading Jane Austen.” The persona that the “King of the North” has adopted, rightly or otherwise, is that of a beer-swilling, chip-munching man of the people: a world away from an effete bookish character who is most comfortable in libraries or at poetry readings. His “ally” speculated: “Maybe it would be the Morrissey type thing, the Oscar Wilde’s, that more romantic side of things.” It is one of the more intriguing contradictions in Burnham’s character that he has had to triangulate his great love of the Smiths, that most literary of bands, with Morrissey’s increasing unacceptability to large swathes of right-on opinion. His response was to suggest “I did drift away a little bit from the devotion part”, which, in turn, may reflect how his once-adoring Mancunians may feel about him now that he has quit the mayoralty.
Still, Burnham has not been shy in the past about his love of literature. In 2015 — the last time that he was running for Labour leader — he confessed (at a literary gathering at Soho House, of all places) to writing poetry, and suggested that he might do so again once his political career was over, although he promised not to write a memoir. (“What goes on in the dressing room stays there.”) He talked of how vital his study of English was for him, saying “I really do try and get some power into my words, particularly my Labour party conference speeches, I’ve always given them a lot of thought. Not just to the words but to the cadence and the build-up. I put that down to a love of Shakespeare — I read every single Shakespeare play at college, I always see that as my absolute grounding in literature.” Or, Starmer might ruefully say, expertise in wielding the knife.
Burnham’s two favourite writers are, supposedly, Tony Harrison and Philip Larkin. It’s easy to see the on-brand appeal of Harrison, a working-class poet from Leeds who wrote the controversial miners’ strike inspired poem “V”, amongst others, but Larkin is more surprising. For many — including this writer — he is the greatest poet of the postwar era, and perhaps earlier, but he has also suffered a posthumous decline in popularity thanks to the discovery of his supposedly bigoted views. These might be excused by his admirers on the grounds of his adopting a persona to amuse his similarly incorrigible friend Kingsley Amis, but Larkin was also someone who moved fervently to the Right, going so far as to tell The Observer in 1979 that “I adore Mrs Thatcher.” This might make him a controversial bedfellow for the determinedly left-wing Burnham, and it is hard to believe that Larkin would have had much truck with the man who would be PM, either.
Larkin was of course a great poet of British decline. In “Going, Going” and “Homage to a Government”, he lamented what he saw as the degradation of British landscapes and British power. It is interesting to wonder if Burnham sympathises with this perspective — and how confident he (unlike Larkin) feels that it can be reversed. After all, there is a defence spending review that will be one of his first tasks in office, should he be installed, and the opening lines of “Homage” — “Next year we are to bring the soldiers home/For lack of money, and it is all right” — have an apposite timeliness to them.
Should Eyelash Andy succeed in bringing Birnam Wood to London, and become our first English graduate PM next month, I hope that he carries a copy of Larkin’s Collected Poems with him. There are many that he might take advice from, but perhaps the enthusiastic pint-drinker might read Larkin’s late satirical poem “Party Politics”, and note, in particular, the ironic allusion to conviction-light politicians in its second verse:
Some people say, best show an empty glass:
Someone will fill it. Well, I’ve tried that too.
You may get drunk, or dry half-hours may pass.
It seems to turn on where you are. Or who.
Time will tell whether Burnham is an empty vessel, too — or merely a naughty boy.
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