The next prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is standing in a windowless changing room, listening intently, furrowing his neat and famous brow. These old benches don’t look like they can take the weight of 13 starters and however many subs for much longer. They could do with a partition wall along here, they’d get more teams in. And who kicked a hole in that door, by the way?
Outside, and into the blazing sun, a long metal fence separates six pristine pitches from the estate behind St Jude’s Amateur Rugby League Club. It went up last year — to stop the marauding quads and scrambler bikes from doing donuts around the posts. Don’t get them started on the dog walkers. The mess they left behind was even uglier.
Forget your fiscal rules, fantasy cabinets and proportional representation. Today, these are the only conversations that matter to Andy Burnham, the Labour
candidate for Makerfield. What else possibly could? We are, after all — despite the misleading, ancient name of what is now the most famous parliamentary constituency in the country — in Wigan. Not only that, but it is the afternoon of the Challenge Cup final, and the Warriors are at Wembley,
vying for their 22nd title against Hull Kingston Rovers.
Burnham, however, is here, in Worsley Mesnes, deep in paternal reverie, recalling what this flat turf once meant to his boy: abject terror. Rugby league is everything to the people who could soon send him back to the Commons – and to Downing Street, and that’s why he is here, supping lager from a plastic pint pot, having declined an invitation to Wembley’s royal box.
But there are strict limits in this pursuit of local goodwill. No doors will be knocked by Labour, who are focusing their efforts on the 17 per cent of voters their data suggests are still undecided, between 3pm and 5pm on this particular Saturday afternoon. They’d only go unanswered. And unlike Josh Simons, the MP who quit to clear his path, Burnham has not turned up in a Wigan shirt. The Paul Smith stays on. He’s a Leyther, a Leigh man. Westminster will say what it always says about Burnham’s U-turns, but he knows what really matters to people here.
And today as every day it is the rugby. Robert Kenyon, Burnham’s Reform rival, is down the pub. He isn’t knocking doors either. “I can’t miss it,” he’d told me, 24 hours earlier. “There’s no way. I’m watching that game. People are coming up from all over the country for this campaign, they don’t understand how big the Challenge Cup is. I say to them: Challenge Cup day is like your polling day.” He very nearly got tickets himself, but Simons and Burnham have put paid to that plan.
Go on then, pick one: Robert Kenyon wins this by-election, or Wigan win another Challenge Cup? He pauses, just for a second: “Both.” He might yet get his wish. If Burnham succeeds in stopping him, it will be because he has convinced this corner of rugby league country – towns, much like their sport of choice, almost totally ignored by London – that the Labour Party is still capable of understanding its soul. At the end of
This Sporting Life, David Storey’s great elegy for the industrial game, an entire town gathers for the funeral of a local factory owner. One mourner bemoans the passing of an old era of paternalism. “The only thing we’ll be known for,” he complains, “is the standard of our football team … we’ll have a football team.”
He was talking about league, of course, and might as well have been talking about Makerfield. They still have a team. Do they have a Labour Party?
A few miles up the road at the Labour club in Stubshaw Cross, a fifty-strong crowd of regulars carries on not bothered by the campaign circus of canvassers, visiting MPs including Angela Rayner and busy bag carriers that’s commandeered their local. They’re here for their (rugby league) football team.
Not long after kick-off, Wigan go a try up. Burnham, fresh pint of Cruzcampo in hand, agrees with this merciless assessment of the state of Makerfield from a wise but cynical local. These towns were shaped by three great institutional traditions: the Labour Party, the Catholic Church, and rugby league.
Now only the last fully resembles its former glory, and even then, with its perennial financial woes, only just. “You have to stay connected or you don’t succeed – you don’t exist,” says Burnham. “But the difference between the Labour Party and rugby league is, while rugby league has its challenges, it’s run by the northern set, and I don’t think the same can always be said of the Labour Party.”
Instead, he says, mainstream politics has come to embody the “unaccountable state”, a phrase he did not use in
his 1,500-word reply to Sir Tony Blair’s polemic on the state of the Labour Party in The Times last week, but now wishes he had. He sees the reformed state New Labour built and the Tories consolidated is a mess of “arms-length bodies, academy trusts, private entities”, all pushed out of “democratic control”, and away from the people watching Wigan in this beer garden. The result, he warns, could soon be a country as polarised as America: and then right on cue, an activist tells him of a woman who refused a poster for fear of a brick through her window.
He cites a Cameron-era reform that abolished the requirement for council representation on housing associations. “How can something that’s as fundamental as housing not have any democratic oversight? This whole thing of weakening council powers and funding? If you can’t fix a pothole, no wonder politics is in the gutter.” How, though, does Burnham propose to pull it out? And wasn’t he, as a younger cabinet minister, at the very least one of the supporting cast of guilty men and women? “I would say I was somebody typical of these parts … unity, you’ve gotta be a team, you may not like everything the manager says, but you’ve got to play for the manager.”
As they’d say round here, he’s on one now. “The sneering commentary that sometimes I get, I’m Corbynite, that…” Sarcastic air quotes: “Joke”. He’s talking about Westminster’s favourite gag, about a Corbynite, Blairite and Brownite walking into a bar, and the landlord asking what Andy is having. “I don’t to sound too touchy about this, but rather than ridiculing me, I think it says something about the people that tell that joke: that they are factional. That they are not team players, that they are factional, and they revel in their factionalism within Labour, whereas I’ve tried to support
Labour.”
Ironically, at least some of those people are now trooping up to this very Labour club. For now, at least, everybody wants to be on Andy’s team. Luckily for them, he insists his only grudges are for Premier League referees, VAR and whoever else “damages the fortunes of Everton Football Club”, where he has renewed his season ticket. I see at least a dozen MPs in my couple of hours in the beer garden, not all of whom I can imagine sampling a pie barm.
Just after half time – Wigan 10, Hull KR 4 – our conversation is enlivened by a gang of weary canvassers from Hertfordshire, traumatised by a bloodbath of Labour councillors in Stevenage. I ask whether this new Burnham might not be a little too, well, regional for the London commuter belt. They think that question ridiculous: Labour has to change, or die. And besides, you can get away with being a northerner in the south, one says,but not a southerner in the north.
How, though, can Brand Burnham, northern, demotic, anti-political, relentlessly
normal, survive prolonged contact with Westminster? As we talk, he shows me his new campaign logo, soon to be printed on beermats for distribution throughout the constituency’s pubs. Around a clenched fist are the words: CHANGE LABOUR, KEEP THE FAITH. I recognise its inspiration immediately: the northern soul badges once sewed on the jackets and jeans of the men and women who’d come from around the country to dance away their youth at the Wigan Casino. Like the collieries that give their names to the rugby league and social clubs, it has long since closed.
I wonder whether the Burnham of this campaign will be chewed up by forces beyond his control, just like the old Wigan. But his mission, as he describes it, is to reverse the
Starmer revolution as well as Thatcher’s. “The negative energy, I have to say, that has come out in recent times in the way Labour has been run, has been corrosive … it’s just been toxic and damaging to the unity the party needs.” He goes on: “I would 100 per cent be going back to change the culture, 100 per cent.”
More than once he bemoans the “straitjacket of the whip”, which he blames, in part, for creating the old, ill-at-ease Burnham, that self-doubting neophyte recalled with lofty condescension by Westminster’s greybeards. Does he still want to abolish whipping altogether? Some in Labour find the very suggestion hysterically naive, but he does not resile from it. “I look back at the times when I was in the PLP … if we’d gone with what the PLP was saying – and I am talking about Iraq, but I’m talking about other things as well – the conscience of the PLP will guide the government, that’s what I believe.”
Indeed, it’s dragged Starmer kicking and screaming, if anything. Another pint arrives. “Where it goes wrong is if a small group of people at the top use the whip as an instrument of threat. I think the government will be better served by the collective wisdom of the PLP, personally … the main thing I would come to is authenticity. Let your representatives be authentic representatives of their places. Don’t punish them for taking a position that actually connects with people they are serving. Don’t send them into TV studios with lines to take on everything.”
It will be music to the ears of a parliamentary party that for a long time complained of cruel and unusual punishment at the hands of Morgan McSweeney’s No 10. “The loosening of the whip system would raise the status of members of parliament. It would let them appear more authentic to their constituents. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It’s like tablets of stone in Westminster, but to me it’s not: if a sizeable number of Labour MPs can’t support the government, then it’s probably the wrong thing.”
Still, there will be one concession to convention should the voters send him to Westminster: a suit and tie. “I’ll guess I’ll have to. It’s the rules, isn’t it? It’s the law!” Blame the Speaker. “The Lindsay law! He’s old school, I’m old school. I’ll always do what’s required. I’m not a complete rebel like that. I will do what’s required.” The Commons doorkeepers and the bond markets will be relieved to hear that.
Soon the whistle blows: Wigan 40, Hull KR 10. Before long Burnham is away, gladhanding, posing for selfies kicking a football in the Labour club car park. It’s a margin the locals hadn’t quite expected – but that’s the Wigan they always knew. Burnham’s bet is that he can make them recognise the Labour Party, too.
