Andy Burnham has suggested Britain might not have voted for Brexit if he had been Labour leader at the time. The former Labour Cabinet minister, a strong supporter of the EU, was heavily defeated by Jeremy Corbyn in the 2015 leadership contest. In an interview with the New Statesman on Thursday, Mr Burnham appeared to suggest that as Labour leader, he might have persuaded David Cameron to secure greater concessions from the EU that could have persuaded more voters to back Remain in the 2016 referendum. Lord Cameron had hoped to stave off a referendum entirely by securing significant reforms from Brussels but came back almost empty-handed.
Britain subsequently voted to leave the EU by a margin of 52 per cent to 48 per cent. Asked whether the Brexit referendum could have turned out differently if he had defeated the hard-Left Mr Corbyn for the leadership, he said: “I mean, this is gonna sound too much, and I kind of hesitate to say it, and maybe I shouldn’t, but I don’t know whether 2016 may have played out differently. “I was always a voice inside, saying look, I’m a Remainer, but we should be telling Cameron and Osborne, they’ve got to really get some serious changes. “Would that have played out slightly differently if I was the sort of…” Mr Burnham did not complete the sentence, which the New Statesman interpreted as meaning he was going on to say Labour leader. “My other half doesn’t give me credit for anything much in politics at all, she’s my fiercest – not critic, but, like, challenger – about things, and she thinks it might, yeah. She says, well, maybe it would’ve been different,” said Mr Burnham. Mr Corbyn won 59.5 per cent of the vote in the 2015 Labour leadership contest to Mr Burnham’s 19 per cent.
Mr Corbyn went on to play a semi-detached role in the Remain campaign, telling one interviewer he was “not a lover of the European Union”. Mr Burnham, however, said just before the referendum that a vote for Brexit would lead to social “fragmentation” and the break-up of the United Kingdom. In an interview last year he said he wanted to see Britain rejoin the EU in his lifetime.
However Mr Burnham has subsequently downplayed his support for rejoining as he campaigns to secure the Makerfield by-election, in a constituency which heavily voted for Leave in 2016. While scores of Cabinet ministers have joined Mr Burnham on the campaign trail and allies of the Greater Manchester mayor have advocated his coronation as Labour leader if he is elected Makerfield MP on June 18, one ally of the Prime Minister took a thinly veiled swipe on Thursday.
Speaking to journalists, Peter Kyle, the Business Secretary, said: “Entitlement is not a qualification for leadership.” Speaking at a press gallery lunch in Westminster, he said: “We [Labour] have not learned the lessons of the Tory party in Government, where every time there was a problem, there was only one solution, changing the leader of the top.” Comparing past Conservative governments with the current Labour Party, he went on: “There was never any acceptance in the Tory party at the time that the challenges that they had were related to a programme of government … and they always just felt that changing the person at the top would solve it. [But] leadership is not one person.” The Business Secretary also expressed his frustration at the “body politic” which he accused of rewarding the “wrong behaviour” including the press which focused on Westminster drama rather than quiet progress. “What the media report as positives is individual people that want to thrust themselves forward at moments of instability,” he said. “Entitlement is not a qualification for leadership, and until we ask the question of what is a qualification for leadership, and is a different one to that one, then I think we’re always going to end up in this cycle of change, because we simply reward the wrong behaviour. “This isn’t an issue that’s just affecting those of us who are in politics. “It’s an issue for people who report on politics, and it’s an issue for people who consume politics, who make the decisions when they send their tweets off and their emails off, and their own interventions with how to speak about politics in their daily lives.”