Andy Burnham, newly appointed as the leader of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, will be waltzing into 10 Downing Street on Monday after an unopposed campaign to replace Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
The former Manchester mayor has presented himself as Labour’s savior after many grim months of public polling showed his predecessor was suffering the lowest approval ratings of any British premier in history. He is now making his final decisions about whom to scoop up for his Cabinet ministers.
“I am finalizing those decisions, and I will come to conclusions very shortly, and then I will announce those on Monday,” Burnham told reporters after a rally on Friday.
Acknowledging that there has been “much speculation” about his line-up, he said announcing before the “takeover” would be “somewhat premature.”
Burnham claims that Labour’s collapse in popularity can be attributed to its failure to live up to its own political philosophy. He is promising to take the party back to its fundamentals with an emphasis on the working class, public-private cooperation on the economy, and generous social spending.
He is contrasting this with the surging popularity of the Green Party — which has transformed from a climate-focused movement into one defined by anti-Zionism — and Reform UK, the national populist movement founded on the promise of closing the borders and deporting illegal immigrants.
“As your leader, I will set a direction that is distinctively Labour. We won’t try to out-green the Greens or out-reform Reform, or doing what we’ve done in the past of wearing too many Tory clothes,” Burnham said on Friday.
“We will be that Labour once again,” he said. “We are united today, and we put the power that comes from that unity at the service of people and places who have been waiting too long for politics to let them hope again.”
The incoming prime minister will take office on Monday after King Charles III formally requests that he form a government.
He gave a landmark policy speech last month in which he laid out his broad vision as presumptive premier for the first time. His pitch included gestures toward greater government intervention in housing and infrastructure, conscious reindustrialization of small towns, and a signature promise to establish a “No. 10 North” in Manchester.
He echoed those sentiments in his Friday speech, promising to “take power back from Westminster and Whitehall and give it to the place you live.”
“I will work to build a new politics. The country is crying out for it,” Burnham said. “How can politicians point fingers when living standards are falling, and politics as a whole isn’t working for them? It infuriates them and makes them switch off.”
President Donald Trump has not spoken particularly flatteringly of Burnham in the run-up to the takeover at 10 Downing. Asked for comment last month, the president dismissively replied, “I think I see that he was, I guess, the mayor of a town.”
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“I hear he’s extremely liberal, extremely, so that means he probably won’t open up the North Sea,” he added, reviving his previous complaints toward Starmer for failing to explore the possibility of oil extraction in the British waters.
Burnham has largely avoided direct comment on how he will handle relations with the White House, but has previously expressed a fear that the U.K. could descend into the “polarized, poisonous politics” of modern America.