Andy Burnham the Mayor of Manchester, arrives a fringe meeting during the annual Labour Party conference in Liverpool, England, Monday, Sept. 29, 2025.

Andy Burnham took a series of pot shots at both Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves during a lively interview today at the Labour Party conference.

The Labour mayor of Greater Manchester has been publicly challenging the prime minister’s leadership over the last week, sparking speculation he might be planning a coup.

He has been smacked down repeatedly by the government, but doubled down on his comments during a live recording of the Guardian’s podcast.

While insisting he had only launched a plan to attack Reform UK, the mayor took aim at Starmer again and again and again in the one-hour exchange.

Here’s a look at his main criticisms of the Downing Street plan...

1. Party management

Within minutes of the interview starting, Burnham was promoting the Blair-Brown years – and claiming he was “struggling to think of people who lost the whip then”.

He added: “There was a feeling that all people from across the party were important.”

But now, he claimed, “there’s too much of a narrow and factional way of running the party.”

He later added: “We shouldn’t be in this position that if you like a tweet by someone from the

© HuffPost