The first week is always the strangest. You’ve won, the keys are yours, and suddenly the weight of the thing lands all at once.
Laura Kuenssberg was given rare access to Andy Burnham during those extraordinary opening days in Downing Street, and what emerges from her behind-the-scenes portrait is a man who is, by turns, energised, exhausted, and quietly astonished to actually be there.
Burnham, who spent eight years reshaping Greater Manchester as its metro mayor, arrived in Number 10 with a reputation for rolling his sleeves up. True to form, Kuenssberg caught him in his first 48 hours poring over briefing papers at 6am, a half-drunk coffee going cold beside him. “There’s no version of this job where you coast,” he told her. “You either go at it full tilt or you get buried by it.”
The access reveals a core team that is tight-knit and deliberately small. Burnham’s chief of staff, a figure well-known in northern Labour circles, is said to have insisted on a flat structure from day one, with no sprawling layers of advisers between the PM and decisions. Whether that holds under pressure remains the real test.
Kuenssberg also captures the quieter moments. A brief phone call with his kids. A walk around the Downing Street garden at dusk, almost certainly the last time he’ll do it unobserved for a very long time. There’s something almost poignant about it, the last few minutes before the full machinery closes in.
On policy, Burnham used the Kuenssberg interview to signal that the NHS and regional investment will define his first hundred days. He was characteristically blunt: “London has had its turn. That’s not bitterness, it’s arithmetic.”
It’s a line that will play well north of Watford and raise eyebrows in SW1 in roughly equal measure.
What the documentary can’t answer, of course, is whether the Burnham who thrived running a city can translate that energy into running a country. The scale is different. The scrutiny is different. The enemies are better organised.
Week one looked good. Week fifty-two will tell us far more.
