When the Labour party football team played a group of journalists at Loftus Road two years ago the hacks won 4-1. The politicians’ solitary goal came from a late penalty. When the referee pointed to the spot, the centre-forward stepped up, elbowing well-known names like Ed Balls, David Miliband and Sadiq Khan out of the way in his rush to grab the glory.

There was a notable absentee that day. ‘Keir [Starmer] had been due to play, but he didn’t turn up,’ a witness recalls. ‘If he had been there, he’d probably have grabbed the ball and there might have been a tussle.’ Instead, Andy Burnham said: ‘This is mine,’ and calmly slotted it into the corner. ‘It was a perfect penalty.’ For those who seek further clues to his direction of travel, Burnham kicked the ball to the right as he looked at it, to the goalkeeper’s left. Make of that what you will.

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The Makerfield by-election on 18 June will decide whether this was a metaphor for the moment a barely politically present Prime Minister makes way for someone more decisive. If Burnham does win the by-election, even Starmer’s closest allies admit he will have to seek an orderly departure from Downing Street by the autumn. ‘If Andy wins, it’s over,’ a cabinet minister admits. ‘Keir knows that.’

But who is the real Andy Burnham and what sort of prime minister would he be?

Everyone agrees he is a good communicator, as his launch video this week proved. But politically he is a figure of caricature – the self-styled King of the North whose political malleability casts him as the butt of one of Westminster’s most well-trodden jokes (‘A Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walk into a bar. The barman says: “Hello Andy.”’) Others cannot forget or forgive that when asked for his favourite biscuit, in a Mumsnet interview, he replied: ‘Give me a beer and chips and gravy any day.’ One former adviser to Brown says (only half-jokingly): ‘That alone makes him unfit to lead the country.’

The official story is of a working-class lad from Liverpool, who came to London but felt disconnected from the political establishment and was only too happy to leave ‘the Westminster bubble’ and make his political base in the second city. Burnham’s critics see this as the purest cant from someone who went to Cambridge and was one of a generation of special advisers – alongside Balls, the Miliband brothers and James Purnell – who were fast-tracked into cabinet.

‘Nobody’s ever going to doubt the fact that Burnham always wantedto be in No. 10,’ a key figure recalls

‘Nobody’s ever going to doubt the fact that Burnham always wantedto be in No. 10,’ a key figure........

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