ASHTON-IN-MAKERFIELD, England — They seem an unlikely duo: The centibillionaire financial data tycoon, and the self-styled man of the people bidding to be Britain’s next prime minister.
Yet Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, has been an influence on Andy Burnham for almost a decade as the Labour politician built his profile ahead of his current tilt at moving into 10 Downing Street.
The Greater Manchester mayor met Bloomberg in 2017, weeks after he was elected to run the region in northwest England, when he flew to New York to attend a three-day leadership program with 40 mayors funded by Bloomberg’s philanthropic arm and run by Harvard University.
For a man from a country where mayors are often ceremonial, wearing chains of office and cutting ribbons on community centers, meeting his American counterparts opened Burnham’s eyes.
In his 2024 book Head North, he said the “life-changing trip” had showed him a world where city leaders had “gravitas.” And it wasn’t just about Bloomberg; Burnham has also stayed in touch after meeting ex-South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic presidential candidate who later became Joe Biden’s Transportation Secretary.
Burnham and Bloomberg stayed in touch, love-bombing each other on X and meeting occasionally in person. They last had a “little catch-up” in April at a summit in Madrid, said Steve Rotheram, the mayor of the Liverpool City Region, who was in the room and attended the 2017 program with Burnham.
That original trip to New York was “cathartic,” Rotheram, who co-authored Head North, recalled to POLITICO. “Some of the things that we wanted to do, these mayors were already doing it … [we learned] you can go outside of the boundaries of the constitution and the rigid strictures of what a Tory government believed the mayors were for.”
Learning how to build this U.S.-style profile has helped propel Burnham to where he is now, running in a June 18 parliamentary by-election which, if he wins, will allow him to launch a leadership challenge against Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
It is a striking relationship for a man so different from Bloomberg — or at least, one who presents himself as such.
Bloomberg evangelized data-driven policy as mayor while Burnham calls for a “names-not-numbers approach.” While Bloomberg has changed his party registration as he sought one office to the next, Burnham has said he used to be so tribal, he avoided Rotheram on early trips to Liverpool in the mistaken belief he belonged to a rival party. Above all, it is not hard to imagine Bloomberg’s horror at Burnham’s comments that Britain is too “in hock to the bond markets.”
Yet the differences speak to the tension in Burnham’s presentation of “Manchesterism,” his philosophy of devolving power and investment to local hands, and of his own record.
While Burnham dresses down and employs a human touch, he also spent two decades in the Westminster machine and has already run unsuccessfully for Labour leader twice. And while Burnham likes to pin his record in Manchester to public control of the bus network and work for low-income residents, others in his project say the city’s growth has leaned heavily on leveraging foreign private investment.
Then New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg attends the 20th Anniversary Ceremony for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing at Ground Zero on February 26, 2013. | Andrew Burton/Getty Images“The Greater Manchester approach is not that different to Mike’s economic philosophy,” argued Henri Murison, chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, a business-led advocacy group. “But it’s very different to Andy’s political narrative currently.”
Murison points out there is a distinction between Burnham taking inspiration from Bloomberg personally and from the Harvard-run course in his name — and as it happens, Burnham’s first invitation to the latter was brokered by George Osborne, the former Conservative chancellor.
Dinner with Whoopi Goldberg
Despite days spent in a lecture theatre, the 2017 visit appears to have been a glittering affair. Rotheram recalled a dinner at which he met the actor Whoopi Goldberg and Nancy Shevell, the wife of former Beatles singer Paul McCartney.
A surreal moment on a New York rooftop saw Rotheram searching for a Band-Aid for the late diplomat Henry Kissinger, who had cut his head and was dripping blood to the floor. Kissinger repaid the kindness by telling Rotheram his favorite soccer team was Manchester United — arch-rivals of Rotheram’s Liverpool FC.
Liverpool’s cultural fame preceding him, Rotheram found himself next to Bloomberg on the dinner seating plan. He recalled: “The hypothesis that he put forward was that more than 50 percent of the world’s population are going to be living in cities in the next couple of years, and we know it’s much more than that now, and it’s growing exponentially.
“And so it’s cities where the problem will exist, but it will be cities that have to find the solutions, and therefore, by sharing best practice across the globe, we can all enjoy the sort of ideas that come from that melting pot. That was where we were hooked.”
The program and subsequent work with other cities, said Rotheram, “is around how you can use data differently, how you can stimulate economies in a slightly different way, how you can use AI, how culture is an important part.” (Bloomberg’s team declined to be interviewed for this piece).
There were moments where Britain looked small by comparison, albeit in a good way. At one point Burnham stood up and told the 40 fellow mayors about the problem of homelessness in Manchester — but the numbers involved are far smaller than in the U.S., as the city had 268 rough sleepers on a sample night in 2017. Ben Houchen, the Conservative mayor of Tees Valley who attended the same course, recalled: “You could literally see every American mayor look at each other like, what the fuck?”
There are similarities between the Bloomberg and Burnham approaches — the former led public health crackdowns such as an indoor smoking ban, while Burnham has pushed for a more devolved health policy after the Covid-19 pandemic — but differences, too.
Rotheram said he and Burnham do not go in for what he called the “trickle-down economics shite” of the conservative right, for example. “It’s not a doctrine. It’s not an ideology that you have to follow — you can pick the bits for your area that you think are relevant, as we both have,” he said. “We’re both about inclusive growth.”
‘Mayors in America are a big deal’
While Burnham’s team declined to comment for this piece, he wrote in his book that Bloomberg has been a “friend and supporter” since the 2017 visit, which showed him a “less elitist and more expansive” political world.
Houchen is less charitable about the trip to New York. “It genuinely could not have been more opposite to that,” the Tees Valley mayor argued. Painting to course as “very technocratic, it’s very woke, it’s very left-wing,” he added: “There could not have been fewer non-elite people in the room. It was just full of bubble, liberal, very wealthy people who Mike Bloomberg surrounds himself with, who were inserted into meeting a whole lot of mayors and giving their twopenneth on how the world should be run.”
Burnham speaks beside Rotheram at the launch of his by-election campaign on May 22, 2026. | Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty ImagesYet Murison argued that the Bloomberg program — which coincided with a new wave of higher-profile English mayors — has helped usher in “a permanent change to how the British state works” across all parties, with more focus on regional power.
Burnham and the former Conservative West Midlands Mayor Andy Street each used their profile to push an agenda that exceeded their strict legal mandate, argued Murison. “It’s not just about Bloomberg, it’s about the U.S. cities model,” he said. “Clearly mayors in America are a big deal, and were a big deal long before we adopted this model.”
Burnham now wants to use his profile to shoot for the next job — prime minister. That’s where it gets difficult.
Bloomberg spent $1 billion on a failed bid to be the Democratic candidate for president in 2020. Burnham has tasted defeat before too; he failed to become Labour’s leader twice; once in 2010 and again in 2015. He may be hoping they don’t have so much in common after all.