Following last month’s disappointing council election results, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer faced pressure from his own party to resign. Meanwhile, Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham announced an ambitious plan of his own: to secure a parliamentary seat in the northern English constituency of Makerfield.

On Thursday, Burnham easily won a crucial by-election, opening the door for him to run against Starmer for the leadership of the Labour Party and the United Kingdom. Burnham defeated his closest opponent, Robert Kenyon, the anti-immigration Reform UK candidate, according to early Friday voting results.

Despite concerns that Reform would fight hard, Burnham received 24,927 votes, defeating Kenyon by 9,231 votes. The far-right party finished a solid second in the most recent national election in 2024. It overtook Labour in all eight of Makerfield’s municipal seats last month, according to a report by Al Jazeera.

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Now that the preliminaries have been completed, Burnham can concentrate on his true goal of becoming prime minister. Starmer is the least popular prime minister since polling started in the late 1970s, according to Ipsos.

One of the party’s most well-liked MPs, Burnham is a soft-left candidate from outside the London political establishment and is referred to in the media as the “King of the North”.

Burnham was born into a working-class family; his mother, Eileen, worked as a hospital receptionist, while his father was a telephone engineer for British Telecom. The village of Culcheth, which is situated between Manchester and Liverpool, is where he grew up. Burnham was the first person in his family to attend college, along with his siblings, and he studied English at Cambridge University.

Burnham relishes his outsider status, as evidenced by the numerous northern colloquialisms in his speech. However, he has also been a well-known member of both the opposition and the front bench of Labour.

Before being elected mayor of Manchester in 2017, he held positions as chief secretary to the Treasury and then secretary of state for health under Gordon Brown, where he was directly involved in handling the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and the discussions surrounding NHS reform during a time of reduced public spending. Additionally, he ran for the party’s leadership twice.

First, he entered the race in 2010 after Gordon Brown resigned in the wake of Labour’s defeat in the general election, but he finished fourth behind Ed Miliband. When Ed Miliband resigned in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn emerged victorious.

When he was culture secretary in 2009, he started to lose faith in traditional politics. He was heckled at an event commemorating the anniversary of the Hillsborough Disaster, which claimed the lives of 97 Liverpool supporters 20 years prior. This led to a call for an investigation.

Even though his break with the political establishment appeared to be final, his subsequent position as mayor has garnered praise from both supporters and onlookers.

Burnham has concentrated on extending devolved powers for the city region, including more control over transportation, housing, and funding for skills, from his victory in 2017 until his re-elections in 2021 and 2024. Along with attempts to address homelessness, his term has also seen the adoption of bus franchising reforms and the so-called Bee Network, which aims to restore public control over services.

His high-profile disputes with Westminster during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially regarding financing for local restrictions in Greater Manchester, led some media outlets to refer to him as the “King of the North”. This nickname initially surfaced in jest in 2020, but as his national profile has increased, it has come to be taken more seriously.

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