The one trait that will cost Burnham in No 10 - by those who know him

Andy Burnham’s leaving present from the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) was a personalised, Manchester-themed office chair, presented to him with a large, red bow.

The send off for Burnham – a £120,000 a year boss who will be replaced in a matter of weeks – speaks volumes about the high regard in which he is held.

“We are in a period of mourning,” one senior GMCA official remarked this week.

New EU border checks should be suspended before peak summer, aviation industry leaders have said, after Brits reported huge delays due to the new Entry/Exit System (EES). 

The system, rolled out fully in April, involves people from the UK having their fingerprints registered and photographs taken to enter certain countries.

The EES is used to enter the Schengen Area, which consists of 29 European countries, mainly in the EU.

For most UK travellers, the process is done at foreign airports.

Severe operational consequences disrupting passengers and putting border authorities, airports and airlines under unsustainable pressure.

Senior figures at three major aviation industry bodies wrote to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission warning waiting times at border control had “increased significantly, now reaching up to five hours”.

Since it’s implementation, the EES has caused travel chaos for Brits.

Russia launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with missiles and drones, killing at least 13 people and injuring dozens more.

Russia launched a series of strikes on Kyiv, hitting residential ⁠buildings and ⁠triggering ​a fire in a hotel on a central boulevard.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko has said 13 people had been killed, ⁠with about three dozen locations across the city damaged in the attacks.

Many residents took shelter at metro stations after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issued the first warnings of the attack.

Zelenskyy was forced to cut short a trip to Dublin on Wednesday, citing intelligence reports of a large-scale Russian attack.

Ukraine said on Tuesday it hit one of Russia’s largest satellite communication centers in north Moscow for the second time in just over a week.

Russian president Vladimir Putin also recently admitted Russia is facing fuel shortages after Ukraine launched repeated strikes on oil refineries, while Kyiv notably launched a large-scale attack on Moscow last month.

Sir Keir Starmer’s much-delayed Defence Investment Plan had one big bet at its heart: drones are the future of warfare.

American company Anduril makes the “Seabed Sentry“- a weighted cylinder that uses sensors and AI to monitor what is happening under the sea. They could be used to listen out for spying and sabotage by Russian submarines. They are far cheaper than crewed submarines using traditional sonar.

A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped onto the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listens out for undersea activity.

The UK is woefully unprepared with the Royal Navy in a desperate condition. Whoever sits in Downing Street come next September will need to address matters of defence, homeland and cyber defence especially, with urgency.

Officials have drawn up contingency plans to cut further green levies from energy bills if prices remain high this winter, The i Paper has been told.

Several options are now circulating among Burnham’s transition team who are believed to be weighing up how to deliver on that pledge. A Treasury source said work on a package was ongoing to help with rising costs.

Burnham could remove remaining green levies from energy bills, funded through general taxation instead.

One proposal would be to raise the bank surcharge from its current 3 per cent.

Replace stamp duty, loosen fiscal rules and tax the capital gains uplift on inherited assets.

A written statement published by the Chancellor said the remaining sum would be “confirmed at Budget 2026, in a fair and balanced way”.

The coronation of Andy Burnham is fraught with dangers. Never will a prime minister have arrived in Downing Street with so little scrutiny of what he wants to do.

Electric flying taxis could be above the streets of London by 2028, a manufacturer has claimed. Here’s what you need to know.

Vertical Aerospace is still testing the aircraft and it will need to be approved by both the approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). But the company says the aim is for air taxis to become as cheap and convenient as ordering an Uber to the airport.

Who knows, but it is indisputable that the man who looks most likely to replace him would bring a different style of leadership.

Sources who have worked with Burnham told The i Paper he will deploy his personal charm to get Whitehall officials onside and secure a ‘Burnham bounce’ of early policy announcements.

But others warn Burnham is also a people pleaser, with a habit of being reluctant to confront problems that are likely to make him unpopular until it is too late.

When Burnham left Westminster to become the Mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017, he had to win some hearts and minds.

He was viewed by some in the city as a Scouser who was reluctantly accepting second prize, having twice failed to win the Labour Party leadership in 2010 and 2015.

Only months into the job, he handled the Manchester Arena terror attack with compassion and composure at a time of immense emotional turmoil.

Burnham then grew into the mayoral role of Manchester’s cheerleader-in-chief, encouraging the region’s booming economic growth while pushing for tangible results voters would notice such as bringing buses back under public control.

A source who has worked with Burnham in Greater Manchester said they believe his “star quality” has helped push reluctant civil servants to do things they might not have otherwise.

“I’ve seen people say ‘OK this is the plan, this is the strategy, we won’t budge’, then Andy comes in, sits down and says ‘I’ve got a great idea’ and suddenly everyone agrees with him,” the source said.

“I don’t know if that will happen when he’s in No 10. You’ve heard of ‘the Blob’ – I don’t know whether he will come up against that resistance.”

Burnham’s ‘King of the North’ moniker, one which he neither endorses nor makes effort to disapprove, came about during the Covid-19 pandemic when he refused to accept stricter lockdown restrictions being imposed by Boris Johnson’s government without improved financial support.

How will Burnham the prime minister react when confronted with departments who don’t want to accept his decisions? What if a Defence Minister doesn’t believe they are getting enough money for their Defence Investment Plan, for example?

“That will frustrate him, that will really rile him,” the source said.

“But the best Andy is angry Andy, that’s when his passion comes out.

“I’ve seen it, if people aren’t engaging or are delaying for no good reason, he’s always up for a challenge. It’s probably better if he’s pissed off.

“We will probably see more of that, he will probably get angry a lot more.”

While Burnham has not been shy of setting out his vision for Britain in recent years, his arrival off the back of the Makerfield by-election could prove pivotal.

In his victory speech, Burnham pledged he would never see the constituency as a “stepping stone”, but rather a “touchstone”.

“A Makerfield test at the heart of British politics will make sure that the places Westminster has neglected will now get fairness,” he promised.

A source close to Burnham said his campaign in a seat which voted overwhelmingly for Reform in May’s local elections has focused his priorities.

“He’s got to speak to hundreds and hundreds of regular people telling him ‘this is pissing me off’,” the source said.

“It’s made him think of things he might not have before.

“He knows he has to look at immigration, he knows we might have to spend less on welfare and more on defence.

“It’s easier hearing it from these people – you get an unfiltered view.”

Others who have worked for Burnham have a less complimentary view on how he handles leadership.

Policing and crime is an area where his record in Greater Manchester came under scrutiny.

In December 2020, Burnham asked his chief constable Ian Hopkins to stand down after the force was put into special measures by inspectors.

It followed a slew of criticisms over performance, most notably the under-recording of 80,000 crimes in a year.

Hopkins and Burnham also came under pressure over iOps, a new computer system introduced by GMP in 2019 at a cost of £27m which collapsed leaving frontline officers in turmoil.

“It always came to the crunch before he finally did something,” another source who worked with Burnham said.

“[During the iOps scandal] there was story after story, officers hated it, it wasn’t working, it was going wrong, but it got critical before he did anything.

“I don’t think he likes to get his hands dirty.”

The toxic legacy of grooming gangs – which first ignited on Burnham’s patch in Rochdale – could also be a topic which comes back to haunt him.

Reform, and other campaigners, have long accused Burnham of failing to do enough to uncover the truth about the failures of police and council services, bring perpetrators to justice and admit the problem continues.

Burnham has always strongly refuted such criticism, insisting he used his role as mayor to initiate the first grooming gangs report.

But a source told The i Paper that as a national independent inquiry into grooming gangs gets underway, they believe the issue is “still hanging over him”.

Another Labour insider believes the leadership trait that will most trouble him as prime minister will be “not wanting to make difficult decisions”.

They referenced battles in Greater Manchester to secure agreements on housing and air quality which Burnham struggled to resolve, saying: “These are things people say to him down the pub that upset him.”

They added: “He can’t make out to be ‘saint Andy’, it can’t be the second coming, he’s a real person with real strengths and weaknesses.”