Andy Burnham poised to become Britains next prime minister

Andy Burnham got to the top through a mix of patience and risk-taking.A decade ago, Burnham abandoned a 20-year climb up the Labour Party ladder in London to head north and run for mayor of Greater Manchester.A month ago, he returned to Parliament by winning a risky special election.

On Monday, he will become Britain’s 59th prime minister.The sudden downfall of Prime Minister Keir Starmer after just two years in office has swept the 56-year-old Burnham into office — unelected and largely untested.He will enter No.

10 Downing St.carrying the heavy weight of expectation, and big questions about how he will shoulder it.“A whole range of people across the Labour movement and in the country have projected onto Andy Burnham their hopes and their fantasies about how the country should be run and what Labour should stand for and what Andy Burnham stands for,” said Joshi Herrmann, founder of Manchester news site The Mill, who has covered Burnham for years.“He has got lots of people’s hopes up.”Burnham has made his name in Manchester, but he was born in Liverpool, and grew up in a commuter village between the rival northwest English cities.His father worked as a British Telecom engineer and his mother as a receptionist, and he was raised in a close-knit Catholic family.

Burnham has said he’s “not particularly religious,” but Catholic teaching, along with the center-left Labour Party, helped forge his values and sense of social justice.Burnham and his brothers were the first generation of their family to go to university.And not just any university — Burnham attended Cambridge, one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious institutions.“He needed a lot of persuading to apply because he felt that as a working-class boy, going off to Cambridge wasn’t for him,” Stephen Harrington, Burnham’s former English teacher at St.

Aelred’s Catholic High School, told the BBC.“He didn’t believe in himself.

But he did it, and the rest is hi...