Do we really want this tremulous Piglet, who'd last about two seconds against Putin, as our next PM? asks QUENTIN LETTS after wading through Andy Burnham's book

By QUENTIN LETTS, PARLIAMENTARY SKETCHWRITER Published: 00:06, 12 July 2026 | Updated: 01:56, 12 July 2026 One of the jollier details about Andy Burnham is that his wife Frankie once appeared on TV’s Blind Date. Under the late Cilla Black’s guidance, couples who barely knew one another would head off on romantic assignations.  Single girl Frankie did not much like her beau and tried to whack him over the head with a cushion. Cilla flashed her front teeth and laughed: ‘Aw, chuck, never mind.’ We could do with Cilla now. In a week we will be shacked up with a prime minister little known to King and country. The next General Election need not be called until 2029. We could be lumbered with him for three years. So what lurks behind those lashes? For evidence of the real Andy Burnham, as opposed to the computer-generated cartoon used on posters in the Makerfield by-election, we have two obvious sources. The first is his time as a Labour frontbencher from 2005 to 2010, during his first stint as an MP. The second is a 2024 book he co-wrote with the mayor of Liverpool, Steve Rotheram. It is called Head North and it is a quick if hackneyed read. The strength of the book is its emotional intelligence. Andy’s childhood in Culcheth, a respectable area near Warrington, was ‘full of music, life, laughter, love and support’.  The next General Election need not be called until 2029. We could be lumbered with Andy Burnham for three years Do we really want this tremulous Piglet, who'd last about two seconds against Putin, as our next PM? asks Quentin Letts The book has some self-teasing stuff about a mullet hairdo and the trendy clothes he sported in adolescent days. He was politicised in part by Alan Bleasdale’s television drama Boys From The Blackstuff, set on Merseyside during the days of high unemployment in the early Thatcher years. The other thing that left its mark on him was the Hillsborough football stadium disaster of April 1989 when 97 fans died due to over-crowding at an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. Officialdom, the police and some parts of the Press wrongly blamed Liverpool fans for misbehaviour. It was a horrible slander that caused intense upset on Merseyside. As a politician Mr Burnham helped give vent to that anger. Repeatedly in the book he uses Hillsborough as an example of a ‘London-centric’ Establishment’s coldness to Merseyside. Sometimes he seeks to build a wider case that ‘feudal’ Westminster has it in for the whole North-West of England. For me, he jockeys this argument too hard but it has certainly worked for him politically. Regional indignation is a tremendous galvaniser of votes. For one whose main shtick is ‘London stinks’, Andy Burnham is in fact a pillar of the Southern system. He read English at Cambridge and, after a brief spell as a trade journalist in London, became an aide in the very Westminster that he denounces for being inaccessible. Without any apprenticeship as a councillor he became MP for the safe Manchester seat of Leigh. He was a fast-streamer, a chosen one, a Fauntleroy of the Labour movement.  His first ministerial job was junior minister in the Home Office in 2005. This was followed by a year at Health, a move to the Treasury in 2007, another year as Culture Secretary and a final year running the Department of Health from 2009-2010. It was a butterfly’s progress. In Head North, he somehow creates an impression of himself as a risk-taker who confronted Establishment prejudices and obliged snooty Whitehall to be fairer to the North. We are invited to hail him as a rebel, an iconoclast who got things done. True? The autobiographies of the two prime ministers he served, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, do not support this version of events. In each ex-PM’s memoirs Mr Burnham gains but a single, fleeting reference. Blair mentions him in a clutch of other young prospects who were promoted in a bungled reshuffle of 2006. Andy Burnham's then-girlfriend, now wife, Marie-France van Heel (right) - known to friends as Frankie - appeared in January 1992 on ITV show Blind Date, hosted by Cilla Black (left) Brown merely says that when Mr Burnham became Health Secretary the two of them had a discussion about ‘the next bold step in health modernisation, integrating health and social care’. It was not until 2018, in Theresa May’s premiership, that those two became a united Whitehall department. Whereas Blair and Brown’s memoirs have just one mention apiece of Eyelashes Andy, Cameron’s book has… two. They touch on his failed bid to become Labour leader in 2015 when the party was in Opposition. He is described as being ‘less quick on his feet’ than Yvette Cooper. Oh. Having been the Mail’s parliamentary sketch writer throughout that period, allow me to offer my own cobwebbed memories. I recall the Burnham of that time as an amiable, uncontroversial middler who disliked giving offence. I can still picture him shrugging apologetically across the chamber at one opponent, eager not to be blamed for some matter.  Another time I saw him dash behind the Speaker’s Chair to thank a Tory minister for something he or she said about Hillsborough. Decent sort? Yes, when not playing to a North-West gallery Mr Burnham was undoubtedly that, although he once had to apologise to human rights campaigner Shami Chakrabarti for suggesting, wrongly, that she and the Conservative MP David Davis conducted ‘heart-melting’ telephone calls late at night. That is not mentioned in his book. Instead he waxes at length about his aversion to political disagreement, despite having capitalised so adroitly on the inflamed emotions of the Hillsborough fallout. Two weeks ago he spoke of creating a ‘more collaborative politics’ in which there would be no ‘finger-pointing or point-scoring’. But if, as a citizen, you are unhappy about the Government giving free housing to immigrants while increasing our taxes, or forcing Net Zero on us while importing fossil fuels from abroad, you probably want MPs such as Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage to represent your views with gusto. Being a mayor is one thing. You campaign for money from Whitehall and, when it arrives, you claim the credit for it. If it is refused, you say your city is being abused by the elite. To be PM is a more complicated business. You need to be tougher. Three times in the first 50 pages of his book, Mr Burnham admits to suffering ‘Impostor Syndrome’, the psychological condition of feeling you do not deserve your station in life.  Modesty may be attractive in normal life but do we want our nation led by a hand-wringer who frets that he might be ‘found out’ as an impostor? Such a tremulous Piglet would not last long against Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. Frankie was paired with future Conservative Party marketing director Will Harris. The two were told by Cilla they would go on a dating trip to Gibraltar - although both agreed on the following week's show that it had not gone well Time and again in the book he adopts positions that are unrealistic. It is like listening to an idealistic teenager. He denounces ‘unelected cliques’ and repeatedly wails about ‘the 50 or so people who run the country’. He himself is seizing power with an even smaller clique of Left-wing allies. And although he rails against nepotism he writes that when he was a journalist on Tank World and Container Management magazines he gave a job to the daughter of Tessa Jowell. Labour grandee Jowell then gave him his first break in politics. As Treasury Chief Secretary in the Brown government he needed to cut the budgets of MI5 and MI6. They got round him by saying ‘you need to tell us how much risk you are prepared to expose the British people to’. He surrendered to their demands. Does this mean that, as PM, he will give our Armed Forces what they need to defend our country? If so, which budgets will he cut to balance the books? There won’t be a supply of money from other politicians in London. He’ll be boss now. Will he be up to it? In Head North he takes a Marxist view of education, enthusing about ‘bog-standard comprehensives’. But once he is PM he will discover that parents in Middle England rather like the choices introduced to state schools by Tony Blair and Michael Gove. His book is riddled with jejune contradictions. He wants greater autonomy for the regions but simultaneously supports the European Union, whose decision-making is much less accountable than that of Westminster. He claims to be pro-aspiration and writes proudly of being put in an O-Level English set at school, where his inspirational teacher urged him to work harder; and yet he is so in favour of bog-standard comps, he could be Bridget Phillipson with hairy legs. And although he disapproves of the sort of celebrity political endorsements that made US presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s campaign look ‘elitist’, he himself had the actors Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan – and, good grief, former Speaker John Bercow – campaign for him on the doorsteps of Makerfield. A purist might also note that the book is, for a Cambridge English graduate, badly written. Injustices are invariably ‘entrenched’, sewage is ‘raw’, interests are ‘powerful’ and ‘vested’. The text is polluted by conversational fillers such as ‘don’t get me wrong’ and the entire thing has more than a whiff of gammon. Andy Burnham, with his ability to connect at an emotional level, will be a more formidable electoral force than the bloodless Sir Keir Starmer. At first he will have a certain novelty. But once that has worn off, Middle England may wish Labour’s panicked parliamentarians had never opted for this blind date. NICK CANDY: I've spent a lifetime building a property empire worth billions. But this is how even I fell victim to a £10m scam