LONDON — Britain’s Labour Party has a new leader. Now for the hard part: the general election battle of his lifetime is less than three years away.
The entire premiership of Andy Burnham, the center-left former mayor of Greater Manchester, will be dominated by the looming election, which is due in summer 2029 at the latest. Five parties hover between 12 and 24 percent in POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. Labour and the Conservatives each trail on 19 percent, five points behind Nigel Farage’s right-wing populists Reform UK.
No wonder, then, that Burnham made clear he will run a more campaign-oriented 10 Downing Street than Keir Starmer. In his first speech after succeeding Starmer as party leader Friday, he promised a “distinctively Labour” program of reindustrialization and public control of key utilities, the “conviction to argue for our plans” and nothing less than “the most significant change moment in our politics for 40 years.”
Burnham plans to tour places where Labour’s vote has tanked this summer, including the steel town of Port Talbot in south Wales and the oil and gas city of Aberdeen, speaking to ordinary people in high streets and work canteens. He will also increase the role for political press officers in No. 10 — giving journalists more political narrative to supplement lines from the civil service — and focus more on broadcast and alternative media.
But beyond the vibes in the media, Burnham will have a mammoth task in trying to convert his message of hope into government policy. The clock is already ticking.
Just before he was ousted, Starmer set out a year’s worth of legislation to be worked through. Burnham will show which bits he prioritizes when parliament returns in September, but has no plans to ditch Starmer’s programme and bring his own king’s speech this autumn, said an ally, granted anonymity like others quoted in this piece to speak frankly. That means he will only have two parliamentary years of his own, at most, before an election.
His chancellor is expected to lead a difficult budget this October, deciding whether to raise taxes or cut other areas to fund higher defense spending. Burnham has promised to sacrifice “political capital” to reform care for older people, but has not yet set out how. May 2027 will bring more council election results; May 2028 will decide the next mayor of London. And all that is before the unexpected sidewinds that are inevitable in high office.
One Labour-friendly think tank leader, granted anonymity to speak frankly like other officials and politicians quoted in this piece, described a three-year premiership as the “worst possible” length of time. If it was one year, they said, Burnham could put all his focus on election pledges; as things are, he has to squeeze his agenda into a compressed period. He has already jettisoned some of his more ambitious promises before 2029 due to the lack of bandwidth, including scrapping the unelected House of Lords.
A former senior Labour Party official said what is effectively an American-style campaign of years — even though formally, a British general election campaign lasts five to six weeks — will change the pressures on Team Burnham: “Time is of the essence.”
An early election?
Gordon Brown was forever burned by his dithering over whether to call a snap election as prime minister in 2007. After lengthy media speculation Brown decided not to, and lost in 2010.
Three MPs and a Labour official all predicted Burnham — who was a minister under Brown — could go to the polls early if Labour gains a consistent lead in opinion polls for a few months. One of the three MPs said: “This summer, mental. Next year, definitely possible.”
“I don’t think he’s going to go all the way to 2029,” the Labour official agreed. “The psychology of Gordon Brown fumbling the bag lives quite long in people’s minds. The people around Andy lived through that.”
Only Burnham will decide whether to go early, and others disagree that he would move — especially if there is a chance of Reform, whose polling appears to have plateaued, slipping further by 2029.
A second Labour official with close links to the party headquarters said: “There are no preparations for an early election or anything like that. The working assumption is we’re going to 2029. Gambling it after two years would not go down well with the party.”
John McTernan, a former special adviser in Brown’s government, said any poll lead would need to be “crushing” for an early election to be likely. “The private polling is what decides whether to go early, and when Gordon became prime minister it was indicating Labour would get a slim majority,” he said.
McTernan believes Labour MPs would fight almost any attempt to call an early election — because the tide mark was so high in 2024, with 412 MPs, that almost any result will lead many to lose their seats. “There are more than 400 people who would be looking immediately at MRPs [constituency-level poll modelling] and saying, ‘how can we arrange for him to fall under the number 11 bus on his way to make the announcement?’”
Is the party ready?
Then there is the question of whether Labour’s headquarters is ready for an election; many party insiders believe it is not.
The party’s ruling body is due to hold its first meeting since Burnham’s ascent on July 28, at which he would likely attend. Then comes a battle for the role of general secretary, replacing Starmer ally Hollie Ridley at the September conference. Those likely to enter the race include the party’s former chief operating officer John Lehal, its stakeholder relations director Claire Reynolds and Co-Operative party general secretary Joe Fortune.
Before a general secretary is chosen, Burnham’s team will need to give direction to HQ about the shape of the party conference as deadlines loom for printed guides.
Whoever gets the role will be tasked with rebuilding staffing numbers, which have depleted in a way that is customary between elections. Ridley herself is also a “significant loss” given her experience in the party, said one official allied to her, adding that the party had been “damaged” by experienced Welsh and Scottish staff leaving after election losses in May.
One senior Labour activist said the party did not appear “anywhere near” launching a recruitment drive. By contrast, party officials took note of Reform posting 60 job adverts on the party’s website, including for network co-ordinators and campaign managers.
The first Labour official quoted above said there were “big financial problems” in Labour, caused by a combination of falling membership numbers, some donors retreating since 2024 and two big donating unions — Unite and UNISON — being led by general secretaries hostile to Starmer. The business day at Labour’s September conference is not yet sold out. “It’s all pretty grim on funding,” said the senior activist quoted above.
Officials believe membership is likely to be far lower than the last disclosed figure of 333,235 in December 2024, as many have left for the Green Party and other left-wing groups. The next membership figure is due to be disclosed in August.
By contrast, Farage has long claimed publicly that he believes an election will happen in 2027 — and has called for an early poll.
A Reform UK official said Farage’s party has drawn up a list of between 350 and 400 target seats and will “ruthlessly” channel resources toward them. They are in areas where the party has won council seats, including in the north east and Midlands of England. “Anything we don’t feel is abundantly important for us to win the general election, we’re not going to target,” the official said, adding that the party plans to have hundreds of approved candidates on a central list by its September conference.
A message of hope
Officials believe that Burnham’s message of hope will lure back members, donors — and voters who have drifted left to the Greens and rightwards to Reform.
Stewart Wood, a former aide to Brown and now a Labour peer, said Burnham has “found a language that talks to Reform voters at the same time as the left” by talking to areas left behind by London’s wealth. He argued: “The narrative isn’t just about rich versus poor or business versus consumers — it’s about individual places that are neglected by those with political and economic power. It is a narrative of what has gone wrong and what needs to change that gets people nodding along from very different parts of politics.”
One of the three Labour MPs quoted above said Burnham’s premiership will feel like a campaign “from Day One.” They argued that his first step was to unite an anti-Reform alliance in Makerfield, where he won a parliamentary by-election, and his second must now be to win back people who left the party for Farage. “That’s what his premiership is about,” they said.
An ally of Burnham argued that he already won back Reform voters in Makerfield, while a minister said voters in that by-election “were saying they were voting Reform despite Farage, not because of him.”
And there are some early signs of hope for Labour; a YouGov poll of 2,200 residents of Greater Manchester, released Friday, gave Labour’s candidate a 14-point lead over Reform in first-round votes in the race to replace Burnham as the region’s mayor. (The Reform official quoted above said the party is not running a full campaign there.)
Burnham said Friday that he will not “try to out-Green the Greens or out-Reform Reform,” and set out his campaign messaging in more detail at a private hustings for Labour MPs this past Monday.
According to a person with knowledge of the meeting, Burnham argued for the party to adopt a more personal campaigning style that focused less on attack. At the same time, though, he argued that voters see Reform as a party that divides communities and poses a threat to the national health service. The Greens’ immigration policies, he told MPs, were out of step with the views of Labour voters.
Reform, in turn, plans to campaign hard on immigration, arguing that Labour is too soft on the issue. The party official quoted above predicted that Burnham’s pledges to reindustrialize Britain would be a “non-starter” without scrapping net zero climate targets and “could come back to bite him.”
A senior Labour figure suggested the party would zoom in on recent questions about an undeclared £5 million to Farage, in the belief that it punctures Farage’s air of authenticity. (Farage denies wrongdoing and says the money did not need to be declared. Parliamentary authorities are still investigating whether it did.)
But an aide to Burnham suggested that while the party machine will attack Farage, the prime minister will try to avoid doing so directly to keep his messaging positive. Meanwhile, Reform still has a lead in the polls.
‘Think about the manifesto straight away’
While trying to deliver in government, Burnham will also be thinking about a 2029 manifesto.
Officials expect him not to radically change the party’s approach to the slow and bureaucratic method of forming manifesto policies, known as the National Policy Forum (NPF). That is despite the fact that the four-year process (already in its second year) is structured around the ill-fated “five missions” Starmer outlined in 2024.
The second Labour official quoted above suggested the NPF process would bear little relevance to the final outcome anyway: “It’s a masterstroke in stakeholder management. It keeps everyone happy but influences very little.”
It will play on Burnham’s mind, though. “You do start to think about the next manifesto straight away,” said James Nation, who was the deputy director of No. 10 policy unit under Rishi Sunak — another prime minister who took office mid-term.
Nation said the lesson from Sunak’s time was that he had to move on policies early, before goodwill expired. “If you want to do things on the more radical side that you think are going to have an impact for you in government, do them now. Do them earlier,” he said.
Nation acknowledged that by the time Sunak announced a lifetime smoking ban for future children and compulsory math lessons to age 18 — generational, legacy-defining policies — the public “just weren’t listening.”
While he tries to do all this, Burnham will be buffeted by constant developments.
First will come the “welcome packs” from civil servants, who will compete for the new PM to pay attention to their priorities. Then there are the unknown unknowns — the horrors lurking behind top-level security clearance that he will only discover once he formally enters No. 10.
“Whatever you do you will be hit with these sidewinds,” said one former senior minister under Starmer. They recalled how within days of arriving in their department, they were pulled into a private room and told about a years-long secret scheme to airlift Afghan nationals to the U.K. following a data breach that had put them in danger. The minister was told they could not even tell their political special advisers, because they were not security-cleared yet.
Can Labour win in 2029?
With all these hurdles, the jury remains out on whether Labour can win that fight in 2029.
A fourth MP allied to Burnham said: “For the first time since [July 2024] I think we have a decent chance of winning the 2029 election … Andy Burnham is probably enough to get us over the line. People are feeling more optimistic.”
Others are more nuanced. A fifth MP told POLITICO in April that Burnham “could take us to a respectable loss. There’s a world in which we get about 230 MPs, it isn’t as bad as everyone’s expecting and we hold on in our core areas.”
Asked for their view again this week, the same MP argued that Burnham’s Makerfield victory had shown his appeal could go beyond other Labour politicians’ — but stopped short of saying Labour could win a majority in 2029.
“The honest truth is it depends on what happens in the next six months or a year,” they said. “The proof is in the pudding.”