LONDON — Just before 10 p.m. on election night in 2009, the Blairite Cabinet minister James Purnell phoned Gordon Brown to resign. His shock-and-awe attempt to topple the prime minister flashed up on TVs in No. 10 Downing Street before he had even finished the call.
In the frantic operation that night to save Brown’s premiership, there was one Labour ally the PM’s team could rely on for support: Andy Burnham.
The then-culture secretary was “my standout memory of the Cabinet minister who was most keen to come out with a pledge of loyalty to Gordon as quickly as possible,” John Woodcock, one of those No. 10 aides (now an independent peer), recalled to POLITICO.
A lot has changed since. Burnham is now Britain’s prime minister-in-waiting and plans to install Purnell as his No. 10 chief of staff if he takes office as expected on July 17. The two men’s reputations could hardly look more reversed.
Burnham went from arch-loyalty to disillusionment with Westminster, running for Labour’s leadership twice before casting himself as an outsider as mayor of Greater Manchester.
Purnell, meanwhile, settled into the high-flying London CV of a former machine politician — at a think tank, as a media executive, in a university vice-chancellorship and as chief executive of Flint Global, the advisory firm he ran until news of his appointment leaked this week.
POLITICO spoke to more than a dozen friends and current and former colleagues of Purnell to build a picture of the incoming chief of staff, should Burnham ascend to the top job as is now all-but-certain.
Depending on who you ask, he is a Blairite social butterfly, a cross-factional pragmatist, a metropolitan BBC hipster, a modernizer, a Whitehall machine operator — or all of the above.
Beyond all this, however, he is simply Burnham’s mate.
The Burnham and Purnell ‘double act’
The two men were born two months apart in 1970. They both became special advisers under Tony Blair. Purnell helped Burnham find a parliamentary seat in 2001. They lived in the same flat, played in the same Labour football team, shared the same small office in parliament as young MPs and harbored the same ambitions of a big Cabinet job.
One senior Labour figure who has long known both men called them a “double act.” The person, granted anonymity to speak frankly, described Purnell’s appointment as a strategy to have a chief of staff who knows the PM’s mind.
Such aides “force-multiply through the system because they know what decisions you want,” the same senior Labour figure argued. “Blair had this. He had this team of people where he made the decisions, and they went off and could transmit that.”
This emotional distance from his own top aides destabilized Keir Starmer, who announced his resignation as PM this week after burning through two chiefs of staff — ex-civil servant Sue Gray, then the political strategist Morgan McSweeney — and appointing two more co-chiefs in his final months.
One former official in Starmer’s No. 10 said: “When Sue was appointed they just didn’t know each other, and it didn’t work as a result. Morgan did know Keir very well, but [only] to become leader and prime minister.”
Burnham does have a close relationship with Kevin Lee, his aide for 16 years, to whom he used to download thoughts after his morning jog. However, Lee has not previously worked in Downing Street or across the civil service machine.
Anneliese Midgley and Louise Haigh — the “soft left” Labour MPs who ran Burnham’s successful bid to re-enter parliament — are tipped for Cabinet posts, but as elected politicians would not traditionally take the role of chief of staff.
It all means Purnell will be under enormous pressure to crank Whitehall into delivering an agenda that Burnham has not yet set out before an expected general election in 2029.
The Reagan strategy
Some in Labour have taken Purnell’s appointment as a sign that Burnham — who has admitted his own political skills are more “instinctive” than analytical — is already accepting his own limitations.
David Blunkett, a former Cabinet minister under Blair, compared the hire to the tactics of ex-U.S. President Ronald Reagan. “Reagan succeeded with the same folksy connectivity that Andy has,” said Blunkett. “But his great strength was the building of a team around him of great experience and political nous.”
Woodcock added: “[Purnell] is thoughtful and strategic in a way that Andy is not; it genuinely makes me look at the whole thing differently. Andy is smart enough to recognize what he needs and what he lacks.”
There are hints of how Purnell will approach the job in a paper he co-authored in 2012 about the importance of the first 100 days in power. He urged ministers to focus on core priorities rather than looking busy, understand their financial limitations and “strike a balance — making a good start without creating hostages to fortune.” (Burnham’s team has been working on a 100-day plan, but the details remain cloudy.)
Purnell also privately regards welfare reform, divisions over which paved the road to Starmer’s downfall, as unfinished business. He suggested in 2011 that some pensioner benefits including winter fuel allowances and free bus passes should be deprioritized. The current Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden, another Blairite of the 1990s set, spoke to Burnham about youth employment policies during his recent by-election campaign.
Purnell has changed since his 2009 resignation, said Blunkett. “People thought it was premature and slightly foolish,” he said. “I thought it was very brave. But he’ll have learnt a great deal from that — namely you don’t do anything unless you have first mapped out the landscape and your likely support.”
Allies of Burnham are now putting faith in Purnell’s managerial experience as a chief executive and hoping he will be the Goldilocks chief of staff: part bureaucrat, part strategist.
“He understands that you can’t have good politics without good policy, and you can’t have good policy without good politics,” said one former minister under Gordon Brown.
As is often the case when a powerful fixer lands a new job, POLITICO has been inundated by Labour figures of all factions competing to heap praise on Purnell. He was most often described as “thoughtful.” Other descriptors included “unshowy,” “constructive,” “warm,” “pragmatic” and “smart.” “He’s got dimensions,” said one former colleague. Woodcock added: “He genuinely wants to assess the foundational facts of a problem, then constructs a political way through on the basis of that.” One former No. 10 civil servant messaged simply: “Someone who knows how it works! Finally!”
But as with Burnham himself, it would be unwise for Whitehall or MPs to regard him as the messiah. Another former colleague of Purnell pointed out that his focus, just like Burnham’s, has always been heavily on domestic policy — while huge questions hang over the incoming PM’s foreign policy at a time of war.
Purnell is close to No. 10 national security adviser Jonathan Powell, another Blair veteran who appeared in Purnell’s 2013 documentary film about gang violence. Purnell nodded along on camera while Powell compared de-escalating street wars to the 1998 peace agreement in Northern Ireland.
Two people with inside knowledge of the government’s foreign policy said they believed Powell was likely to leave his role following Starmer’s premiership. The former Foreign Office civil servant Olly Robbins has been in touch with Burnham’s transition team about a potential role in Downing Street.
The Blairites’ Blairite
Burnham’s friendship with Purnell is a reminder of the dressed-down incoming PM’s acquaintance with machine politics.
Purnell was part of the so-called “Guildford Three,” attending school in the same affluent town near London as Tim Allan and Liz Lloyd. All three became senior aides to Blair (and Allan and Lloyd were each brought back for brief stints in Starmer’s government).
He was best man at Allan’s wedding and friends with the Blairite aides Peter Mandelson and Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, who later co-founded the lobbying firm Global Counsel. Mandelson was sacked as Britain’s U.S. ambassador last year over his friendship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein; the scandal forced Global Counsel to close.
There were wobbles; Mandelson rushed into No. 10 on the night of Purnell’s resignation to save Brown. But the news of Purnell’s appointment has nonetheless delighted those on Labour’s centrist wing, who are suspicious of Burnham’s calls for utilities to be taken into public ownership and his crusade against “40 years of neoliberalism.”
Woodcock said: “It’s the first genuinely good bit of news in this whole affair, I’d say.” A centrist minister added: “He’s enough to please the centrists without triggering the left.”
One figure on the right of Labour added: “If you want to reassure someone like [Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister] Darren Jones, this will have done the trick … Andy’s got to show that it’s not this sort of left-wing, wealth tax, 40 years of failed neoliberalism [campaign]. That’s just all well and good when you’re trying to persuade the Labour party to make you the leader, but it’s no way to run the country.”
An MP in Burnham’s camp, however, said Purnell has “really bought into the project” of Burnham and would carry it out as a staff member.
Another person who has worked with Purnell said he is “not factional, despite being on one side of the party historically.” They added: “If people characterize James as some sort of cliche of uber-Blairism, they’re quite wrong. Like most people his politics have evolved and changed.”
A further person who has worked with both Purnell and Burnham said: “They don’t regard being ideologically exactly the same as the most important thing.”
Not just ‘pies and gravy’
Purnell is protean like Burnham — but while Burnham has wrapped himself in the north, Purnell has done the same with London.
After studying politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University’s Balliol College — a course regarded as a fast-track to joining the Westminster elite — Purnell became a researcher to Blair in 1990. He later worked with the future MP Liam Byrne on the party’s policy for the internet (then called the “information superhighway”), studying work by Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party in the U.S.
His days as a young minister were peppered with tabloid press stories about his girlfriends and broadsheet reads about his rising star status — until his 2009 resignation from Cabinet, and his 2010 decision to stand down as an MP.
He then transitioned back into the rarefied world of the media executive, re-joining the BBC following a stint there in the 1990s. Instead of taking colleagues for coffee, they would go to a trendy juice bar and chat over ginger shots.
He led the launch of BBC Sounds, the broadcaster’s radio app, although colleagues would sometimes joke that his internal memos needed translation from U.S.-style media speak. (One senior figure who worked under him at the BBC remembered him looking like an “agonized figure” who had been through a “midlife crisis;” colleagues took note when he grew a beard.)
While Burnham grew up near Liverpool and has railed against the north-south economic divide, Purnell spent part of his childhood in France (he has said he dreams in French) before moving to London. He was on the board of the National Theatre and lived in the central district of Covent Garden, then the capital’s trendy east end.
Woodcock said: “He does, I think, have an ability to understand and connect to the sort of liberal, metropolitan strand of Labour support that are looking at Andy now and thinking — ‘Hang on, is he just going to be talking about pies and gravy?’”
One Blairite former minister argued that while Burnham had the popular touch, Purnell — like Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, who is contending to be Burnham’s finance minister — was more “cerebral.” They added: “In a more populist world, it’s the one with the popular touch who’s ended up as the leader. But he’s got all the contacts with the cerebrals as well.”
After a few years distant from Westminster, allies say Purnell re-engaged in recent years, coaching Labour figures in opposition.
He has links to those still in the Cabinet; Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper knew him at Oxford and Chief Whip Jonathan Reynolds was his staffer before taking over his seat in Greater Manchester in 2010. A senior Labour figure said Purnell has attended dinners at the home of Labour donor Gary Lubner.
Private sector goes public
Purnell’s first challenge will be putting his lucrative private sector work behind him.
A former government adviser who has worked for Flint said Purnell was regarded as serious and policy-heavy, professionalizing the firm and seeing morale improve.
A former Downing Street advisor now in public affairs, however, pointed to media coverage scrutinizing Flint’s work advising the controversial utility firm Thames Water along with BP, Apple and Amazon and a bidder for Heathrow’s Airport’s proposed third runway. “There’s going to be endless amounts of this,” they predicted.
Purnell has given up his shares in the company and will have no ongoing financial interest in it, a person with knowledge of the arrangement said.
Another senior lobbyist who has previously worked in government advisory roles said: “Skillset, network and temperament all make him an excellent pick.
“But — and it’s a big but — Mandelson has left the public very uneasy about any crossover between public affairs and politics. The cynical view is they announced early knowing it wouldn’t pass the smell test, but will be drowned out by events.”
The bigger challenge in the long run will be to avoid crashing out of No. 10 like Gray or McSweeney.
Purnell did not return an offer to speak to POLITICO for this piece, and friends are advising him to keep his head down and not to become the story. For a figure with such a long Labour history, he’ll have to work at it harder than most.
Anne McElvoy, Esther Webber and John Johnston contributed reporting.