To Enid Hill, aged 78, it is Andy Burnham‘s working-class hero shtick that, well, tends to stick in her craw.
Earlier this month she witnessed him parading with a dash of Mancunian swagger outside her two-up, two-down, hands dug determinedly in his pockets, reminiscing into a camera about how his ‘journey began in this area’.
This was news to Enid, who was born here on Park View, a modest street of red-brick homes in Ashton-in-Makerfield, Greater Manchester, and can remember when its working-class inhabitants toiled in the nearby weaving mill, now long gone.
Why the mayor of Manchester should choose her street to begin his campaign video is beyond her. He is standing to be Labour MP for Makerfield in next month’s by-election despite promising his city he would stay on for another term.
Nothing surprises Enid. She says she has learned over the years to be wary of politicians’ claims, particularly those on the hustings.
Yet even with this in mind, she says Burnham, 56, is ‘taking us for idiots’ and ‘stretching the truth’ with his declaration of affinity with the former mining town.
‘I might have been born in a council house but I’m not stupid,’ says Enid. ‘He is obviously not from round here. Where he’s from – where he grew up – is posh.’
Posh? Hang on a minute, Enid. Surely our Andy, modern-day folk hero, had it tough growing up? A local boy made good who, against the odds, made it to Westminster and rose to become a Cabinet minister, only to return to his humble roots, railing against the elitism he encountered down south?
Andy Burnham in a campaign video on Park View ahead of the Makerfield by-election. In the video he claimed ‘politics isn’t working for places like ours’
But Enid, a Park View resident, told Ian Gallagher the Greater Manchester mayor was ‘taking us for idiots’ and playing up to a working class image
Indeed, he would almost have us believe he was destined not for politics but the pit.
Only the other day he recalled how he was once forced to cut short a three-month work experience stint because he couldn’t afford the bus fare.
So if not in the flaming crucible of Ashton-in-Makerfield, where did this great ‘journey’ of his begin?
One of Enid’s neighbours points us in the direction of Culcheth, a village seven miles away in Cheshire. ‘A different world,’ he says with a knowing smirk.
Approaching the village from the north, we pass several farms, one bearing a sign urging passers- by: ‘Support local farmers – don’t vote Labour’.
A reference to the Government’s plan to clobber farmers with inheritance tax changes and perhaps something for Burnham to consider should he ever make it to No10.
On the edge of Culcheth, the road dissects a parkland golf course before giving way to Common Lane, canopied in part by beech trees and, as it turns out, the most sought-after enclave in the village.
It is so desirable, say estate agents, that it was featured in a story on the county’s main news website under the headline: ‘Warrington’s millionaires’ row: The five most expensive streets.’
And it is here on Common Lane, at the end of a drive behind an electronic gate, its pristine front garden shielded by a 5ft hedge, that we find socialist Andy Burnham’s childhood home.
Millionaires’ row, eh? Not exactly the humble dwelling where many would imagine he spent his formative years.
Not when they’ve heard him describe himself as a ‘scally’ in his teens, who had a ‘fairly ordinary’ childhood.
Enid was right. Posh, indeed.
Join the discussion
Should politicians be honest about their backgrounds, or is it fair to play up humble roots for votes?
Common Lane, Cheshire, where Andy Burnham grew up. The mayor of Greater Manchester’s family home is now worth £1.3million
To be fair to the mayor, the house has been altered much in recent years, as he would no doubt be quick to point out.
When Andy lived there – throughout the late Seventies and Eighties – with his mother, Eileen, his engineer father Roy and two brothers it was a duplex bungalow, the ‘nicest in the village’ according to a neighbour.
Today it is nicer still and with four reception rooms is worth more than £1.3million.
‘Quite a bit has been added on to it, but it was still a handsome property when the Burnhams had it,’ says Ian Riley, a retired maths teacher who once taught Andy’s older brother.
A little difficult, perhaps, to reconcile with the mayor’s ‘man of the people’ persona? Mr Riley, a genial man, laughs. ‘No comment,’ he says.
He goes on: ‘They are a good family. I bumped into Andy in Sainsbury’s when he was still in government and it was nice that he addressed me with “Hello, sir”.
‘I don’t agree with his politics, but I think he’s the right man to lead the Labour Party.’
Another neighbour recalls: ‘The Burnham brothers were hardly street urchins. I remember seeing Andy marching down to the village green with his cricket bat.’
Having lived there for 18 years, Burnham’s parents sold the house in 1996, eight years after he left home. None of his childhood contemporaries are still around.
We traced one though, Julie Murray, who back in the Eighties lived ‘in a much more modest home a bit further down Common Lane’ from the Burnham residence.
She recalls their corner of the village as ‘a beautiful place to grow up’, saying: ‘We were all so lucky to live there. It’s one of the nicest villages in the area and attracts the Cheshire glitterati.’
Of the would-be PM and former altar boy, she adds: ‘He and his brothers were nice middle-class lads. This working-class hero thing is ridiculous. He’s a champagne socialist and changes his opinions like the wind. He wouldn’t get my vote.’
Burnham pictured with his Dutch-born wife, Marie-France van Heel, and daughter Annie, after winning the mayoralty in 2017
It is perhaps telling that Burnham neglects to mention the village’s appeal in Head North, his part memoir, part ‘rallying cry for a more equal Britain’.
Instead, he notes baldly that Culcheth is halfway between Manchester and Liverpool, where he was born. His family moved to the village when his father was promoted, and Andy was a year old. Initially the Burnhams settled in a detached property in Wellfield Road (now worth half a million) before trading up to nearby Common Lane in the late Seventies.
Oddly, if the mayor considers the village at all in his book it is as a kind of northern antidote to privilege. He recalls returning home as a 19-year-old to enjoy ‘some brief respite from a severe case of imposter syndrome which had been afflicting me during my first terms at Cambridge University’.
Burnham also sees Culcheth through the prism of football, his great passion, proudly recalling that the Burnhams were the only match-going Everton fans in a mostly Liverpool-affiliated village.
Former Liverpool goalkeeper Tommy Lawrence lived there, and Andy dated his daughter Jayne, once taking ‘her home to meet the family’.
Jayne still lives the area. Her partner says her romance with the would-be PM is ‘a bit of a running joke with us’. He adds: ‘I’ve met Andy a couple of times and he is a great guy who has done a lot for the people round here.’
Burnham and his wife during their university days at Cambridge, where the couple met
Might Jayne be willing to offer her observations on the young Burnham’s political thinking?
‘I’m sorry but she doesn’t want to talk about him.’ Pity, because it was around the time they dated that Burnham recalls ‘the first political seeds in my mind were planted’.
He was inspired by the 1984 miners’ strike and Alan Bleasdale’s drama, Boys From The Blackstuff, about life on Merseyside in the Thatcher era.
In Head North, Burnham paints a bleak picture, telling us that his home ‘needed to be a fortress given what was going on outside it’ during the Seventies and Eighties.
Surely not in the sleepy, semi-rural idyll of Common Lane though? It’s not exactly clear. But he does say that with unemployment high and industry in decline, it was ‘hard not to pick up the subliminal message that we couldn’t aspire to be very much’.
Mr Riley, who lived opposite the Burnhams, would disagree. He says those, Burnham included, who attended St Aelred’s Catholic High School, Newton-le-Willows where he taught, received a first-class education. Like Andy, many of his pupils made it to Oxbridge.
Over the years Burnham has referred to feeling insecure at Cambridge. But at least fellow undergraduates were envious of the fact that he had seen The Smiths live. And it is where he met his wife, Dutch-born Marie-France van Heel.
At times Burnham labours over his supposedly humble roots with unintentionally comic effect. Of the band’s singer, Morrissey, for instance, he wrote: ‘He seemed to be saying to us that we could be something.
‘We could dare to aim higher. Yes, we may be hidden by rags, but we have something they’ll never have.’ Quite what this is exactly is never spelt out.
He must have had some student fun though. He was a pillar of the Mornie Onion Society, a male-only drinking club for the sporting elite of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
Burnham’s campaign literature features slogans including ‘Change Labour’ and ‘Vote Andy for us’
The initiation ceremony consisted of drinking a yard of ale with an onion floating on top, while naked or wearing only a towel.
And last year he was less jaundiced about his Cambridge days when Fitzwilliam awarded him an honorary fellowship.
‘I loved every minute of my time there,’ said Burnham in his acceptance speech, adding that the college had in fact banished his imposter syndrome and gave him the courage to ‘walk through doors that I had previously assumed would always be off limits’.
Graduating in 1991, though, he discovered ‘it was not the degree that opened the doors into Britain’s powerful professions but the dinner parties people’s parents attended’.
Yet by his own admission he got into politics through a connection at a workplace that employed only Oxbridge graduates.
Back on Park View, Enid is fondly reminiscing about the days when ‘everyone round here had a job, and nobody was on benefits’.
She says she’s fed up with ‘Labour’s lies’ and has grown increasingly disillusioned with politicians in general.
Few round these parts will wonder why.
Additional reporting: Ian Leonard
