In the run-up to the 1997 election, Tessa Jowell, the shadow spokesperson for health and a close ally of Tony Blair, sent her researcher to a key focus group. The session was run by the pollster Deborah Mattinson, who was then working for Gordon Brown (she will soon become Keir Starmer’s new director of strategy). Labour was ahead in the polls, but there was much in the group’s findings to alarm the shadow cabinet: lingering concerns about the party’s economic credibility; and the standing of various shadow ministers. Sitting beside Mattinson, Jowell’s researcher wrote it all down, tasked with reporting back to his boss. Another staffer from that era describes him as “handsome in that half-boyish, half-rugged way he still is”. He was loyal but not given to joining in the so called TB-GBs, the jostling between Blair and Brown supporters. He was less “obviously brilliant” than Ed Balls, but less combative, too, except on the football field. A Labour grandee once told me that a minister’s special advisers tend to reflect one aspect of their boss’s personality: “Tessa was nice with a core of steel.” As for the Cambridge graduate she had recruited: “He was just nice.”
The graduate’s name was Andy Burnham. When we meet in his glass-walled office in June, the mayor of Greater Manchester is, as I have always found him to be, polite and approachable. (I first met him as a sixth-former, of which more later.) Burnham made his first bid to lead Labour in 2010, standing against the Miliband brothers, Balls and Diane Abbott to succeed Brown. At the time, he told Andrew Marr he was “quite proud” to be running as the continuity candidate. Since then, Burnham has gone on what he describes to me as a “journey away from the mainstream of Westminster politics, the mainstream of even Labour politics”.
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