There was a telling moment in Andy Burnham’s second bid to be Labour leader when he was put firmly in place by his own wife. The pair had sat down for an interview for one of Burnham’s own campaign videos, and Marie-France van Heel – known to her friends as Frankie – remarked that having met Burnham on her first day at Cambridge University, she asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. “What did I say?” the then MP for Leigh asked her. Frankie gave a mocking giggle, then said: “You said you wanted to be an MP.” Burnham, who has spent most of his long political career pitching himself as an outsider who somehow fell upon politics, looked rather crestfallen. “No, did I?” he asked. “Yeah!” replied his wife. “And I could have left the room at that point.”
That clip rather undermined Burnham’s anti-Establishment credentials. And as he gets going with what most assume will be his third time lucky bid to be Labour leader, Burnham is unlikely to rehash that interview with his wife now. Or, indeed, make her a feature of that campaign. There is a sense that both have been rather bruised by some of the media exposure and criticism that van Heel has faced in recent years – particularly over her business interests – and there is a desire to hold her back from any more. I’m told that van Heel, who is “genuinely a private person”, is going to try to maintain as much privacy as possible for as long as possible.
“Andy Burnham's wife Marie-France van Heel aims to keep her privacy as he pursues Labour leadership, but Downing Street may force her into the public eye.”
Yet the important phrase there is “as long as possible”, because all private politicians and their privacy-loving spouses end up having to give ground once they’re in Downing Street. How much they give often depends on how bad things have got for the prime minister in question. Gordon Brown recognised that his wife Sarah was far more palatable to the voting public than he was, and made use of her at party conferences to introduce him as “my hero, my husband” and humanise him. Rishi Sunak did similar in 2023, when his wife, Akshata Murty, took to the Conservative conference stage to praise – and gently mock – the then prime minister. Both women had already taken more of a public-facing role before these set-pieces. Contrast with Victoria Starmer, who like van Heel wasn’t particularly interested in politics and even less enthusiastic about her husband becoming Prime Minister.
However, Burnham’s path to No 10 also depends on his ability to hold together a fragile coalition north of the border. In Makerfield, a collection of suburbs and former pit villages near Wigan, Burnham managed to form a coalition that combined both urban progressives, of the sort that Labour has been losing nationally to the Greens, alongside soft-Conservative and Reform types. The most obvious factor was Burnham’s local popularity and easy going, affable manner. Had he been blocked from standing, as he was in Gorton and Denton, and replaced with another wooden Labour technocrat, the result would have been very different. Equally, Reform’s candidate, the local plumber and former army reservist Kenyon, was hobbled by his woeful performance on Question Time and a digital paper trail in which he came across as boorish and misogynistic.
As the sociologist Sacha Hillhorst has shown, Reform’s vote in the last general election was basically unstable. In 2024, the party’s base comprised both nostalgic ex-Labour voters and former Tories bruised by the party’s years in government, retired miners and flash property developers, all “brought into a shared political project by varying degrees of opposition to immigration, a sense of decline, and a desire for political renewal”. Despite the seeming glee with which the press and politicians have written off these voters, and many others in post-industrial areas, as either inherently or incipiently reactionary, Burnham’s victory shows otherwise. Of course, the desire for renewal can take many political forms — some reactionary, many not. All, however, have come to revolve around the symbolic void of Englishness, the gaping wound at the centre of our national self-conception.
For Burnham, the most reluctant inhabitant of his potential No 10 may well be his most important: his wife. The Starmers have never allowed their children to be named or photographed in public – a ship that has already sailed for Burnham’s three children, who’ve appeared at counts and other events. Whether van Heel can stay out of the spotlight as her husband eyes the top job remains an open question.