Andy Burnham has won on his third attempt to be Labour’s leader. In 2010, as a rising star associated with the Blairite wing, he made his first bid for the leadership. In truth, he had little prospect of success: he was merely placing a marker. Five years later, he stood again but could do little to derail the Jeremy Corbyn bandwagon.

Yet fast-forward 11 years and his ascent seemed unstoppable. Next week, he will become the UK’s 59th prime minister.

To understand why and how this happened, the circumstances that created this opportunity for Burnham are key. In 2024 Labour returned to power with a thumping majority, but with little more than a third of the total vote. Within months the new government was lurching from crisis to crisis; its standing in the polls collapsed and Keir Starmer became the most unpopular prime minister since modern records began.

At the same time, the party faced powerful challenges from opposite ends of the political spectrum – the radical-right Reform UK and the left-wing Greens. Labour’s electorate was visibly disintegrating, its plight made stark by the disastrous local and devolved parliamentary elections of May 2026 when it shed huge numbers of local councillors and lost Wales for the first time in over a century. The message for the parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) was stark: virtually all of them were at risk of losing their seats.

In these circumstances speculation around a challenge to Starmer mounted. But why should a man twice rejected by........

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