Five years into his job, the mayor of Greater Manchester is calling for a radical reinvention of the political system. He talks about his big ideas, confronting self-doubt – and the chances of him running for the Labour leadership
Just under a week after he returned home from the Glastonbury festival, Andy Burnham is still brimming with enthusiasm. “I loved every single waking second of it,” he says. “I just soaked it up.”
Burnham’s ebullience is at least partly down to the fact that he was a Glastonbury virgin – as proved by a classic first-timer’s mistake. With his wife, Marie-France, he camped in the Left Field, the area of the festival looked after by the activist and singer Billy Bragg, where they tried to put up what they thought was a two-person tent. “She’ll blame me and I blame her,” he cringes. “But the upshot was, it came out of the packet, and it was a beach windbreak thing. Billy’s brother came to the rescue: he lent us his tent.”
