How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - Prime Minister Andy Burnham - ‘I’m a better politician for having failed.’

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

Andy Burnham is the first Prime Minister on How to Fail. Past leaders have run scared of doing a podcast with ‘fail’ in the title - but not this one. As he says in this conversation: ‘if you’ve not succeeded, you have to understand why it happened, and what you’re going to do about it.’ Wise words from a global leader. Burnham is now our 7th Prime Minister in 10 years, having won a decisive by-election in Makerfield and having received nominations from 94% of Labour MPs in an unopposed leadership contest. In this exclusive episode, recorded at No. 10 North, Andy talks about growing up, how his Catholic faith has shaped his outlook (and whether or not he snuck some communion wine as an altar boy). Plus: imposter syndrome, what he learned from his past failed leadership bids, friendships within politics, how his wife responded to his desire to run for PM, the meaning of ‘home’ and whether or not his dad, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, knows his son has become Prime Minister. A must-listen, even if we do say so ourselves. IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Introduction 03:12 Imposter Syndrome and Authenticity 06:13 Faith and Catholic Roots 08:32 English Degree and Power of Words 10:19 Failed Leadership Bids 16:50 Politics Friendships and Family 21:07 Post Cambridge Job Hunt 25:06 What Home Means 26:26 Hillsborough and Two Britains 27:36 Number 10 North Vision 28:43 Building Safety and Hope 32:49 Radical Yet Sensible Politics 35:35 Fixing Social Care 38:16 Roy and Alzheimer’s 43:10 Faith Power and Farewell LINKS + MENTIONS: Join the How To Fail community: www.howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content Elizabeth’s Substack: www.theelizabethday.substack.com WANT MORE? Ed Miliband - swap.fm/l/YTnZMo8h78DZNf7ZmKnF Sadiq Khan - swap.fm/l/FcuzDh396Ul76Sc46KRb Jess Phillips - swap.fm/l/EHHLbfGCH6oBDbOaMhbX LOVE THIS EPISODE? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts Leave a 5⭐ review – it helps more people discover these stories Follow How To Fail & Elizabeth: Instagram: @elizabday TikTok: @howtofailpod Podcast Instagram: @howtofailpod Website: www.elizabethday.org Guest bookings for How To Fail only come from official @sonymusic.com emails Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com Production & Post Production Coordinator: Eric Ryan and Jen Mistri Sound Engineer: Ed Gill DOP: Keith Gubbins Assistant Camera Op: Charlie Painter Assistant Producer: Shania Manderson Senior Producer: Hannah Talbot Executive Producer: Alex Lawless Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to How to Fail with me, Elizabeth Day. This is a very, very special episode. We don't often get politicians who are willing to admit to their mistakes and talk about failure, but today we have someone in an incredibly unique position. Before we get started on this conversation, please do remember to like, follow and subscribe, said that you never miss a single episode. Best thing that's ever happened to you financially, go.

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Okay, that's fair. It's like the lottery, except you always win. Not like the lottery at all, actually. Exactly. Inexplicably good. Offers worth bragging about, sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply. In his first speech as Prime Minister outside No. 10 Downing Street,

Andy Burnham promised a new politics of hope, saying it was time to invest in people's success rather than paying for failure. It was a line that could just as accurately reflect his personal trajectory. Born in Liverpool, raised in Cheshire and forged in Manchester, Burnham is the middle of three sons. His father, Roy, was a telephone engineer, his mother, Eileen, a GP's receptionist. He joined the Labour Party as a teenager after watching boys from the black stuff on TV and, encouraged by his English teacher, applied for a place at Cambridge.

He was rejected from his first interview, but was later picked out of the pool by Fitzwilliam College, where he met his wife, Mary France, and graduated with a two-one in English. Burnham briefly became a journalist on illustrious titles such as container management, but his heart was always with politics. He got hired first as a researcher

before being elected in 2001 under Tony Blair, later becoming a cabinet minister for Gordon Brown and going on to serve in the shadow cabinet under Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn for six years. Burnham ran two failed leadership bids himself before standing down from Parliament and being elected mayor of Greater Manchester with 63% of the vote.

By any metric, Burnham made a success of his mayoral terms, becoming so popular he was nicknamed King of the North. He probably prefers that label to Kemi Badernox-Gyb, that he was nothing more than a pair of eyelashes and a black t-shirt. Despite once claiming that Westminster makes a fraud of good people, Burnham is now our seventh prime minister in 10 years, having won a decisive by-election in Makerfield and having received nominations from 94% of Labour MPs in an unopposed leadership contest. So, third time lucky. Still, as Burnham said in 2022, I never relax. I always feel I'm having to prove myself. There's never a sense of, I'm here, I've arrived.

Prime Minister, welcome to How to Fail. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. That was a very fair introduction. I'm glad, but surely is there a sense that you have now arrived? I never feel like that in any job. And I get the sense that if you do, you're not in the right frame of mind because you've always got to prove yourself, haven't you? You've always got to challenge yourself to prove people who doubt you wrong. I mean, I always carry that sense with me.

I don't think that will ever change. Well, I think that's the opposite of entitlement, which is precisely what we need right now. Yeah, there's not much entitlement here. I've always had a bit of that imposter syndrome that many people from these parts and other parts of the country, carry with them. You know, you walk in somewhere your first job or going to university, as you said, always struggled and waited for the tap on the shoulder. And it took a long time for that sense to leave me. But eventually you get beyond that. But even now, I still have that feeling of, no, I need to show the people who don't think I can do this, that I can do this. And I've

got that feeling right now in this job. And I've got the bit between my teeth. And actually, I go into this job probably differently than anyone before. A bit more like when I went in as mayor of Greater Manchester. I learned there just to be myself. I knew the city. I knew the people. Right, I'll just be myself in this job. I was free from Westminster.

And I'm carrying that forward now back to Westminster to say, you know what? All of you down here with the way you do things and your strange ways, well, I'm going to come in and carry a bit of Manchester back in here and show you there's a better way of doing politics. And it's why we're recording this in Number 10 North, so it's a joy to be here for the first time. You are my first ever Prime Minister on How to Fail, and I am incredibly grateful. We've got close in the past, but most politicians run scared of doing a podcast with the word fail in the title. Why did you decide to do it?

Because life's a journey, and mine certainly has been, and you have to be prepared to understand why, if you've not succeeded at a particular moment, well, why didn't that happen? And what am I going to do about it? How do I make myself better from that experience? And I've definitely done that throughout my political career because I've always had that degree of self-doubt or, you know, am I good enough? But I think that's a healthy thing, actually, and it can make you somebody who is prepared to sort of reflect and learn and come back stronger. I think probably in any walk of life, people who do that probably are more likely to stick around and, you know, be there for the longer haul. Yeah, not everything has

gone right in my journey, but I've always, you know, taken the moment to think, to challenge myself and, you know, really kind of go through it and then understand it and then come back that little bit better. Love to hear it. Now, not only you, the first prime minister who's come on how to fail, you are also. the first prime minister who did English at university. First ever, I don't know. I think you are. And I believe the first Catholic prime minister. Yes, I think that is true. Boris may have been baptized but never was raised in that way. But I was. I'm not going to claim that I'm the most observant. But once you are one, you're always one when it comes to Catholicism. You know,

you can't shake it out of you and I definitely would be in that space. And it shaped my views. You know, when I was at school, I'm old enough to remember something called the Catechism, Catholic social teaching. You know, it was a very big thing in my early days. I was an altar boy and I used to have to put the tape on every week at Mass on Sunday from Archbishop Derek Warlock who was a big. figure in the Catholic Church here in the Northwest and he would be speaking very much about the

80s and some of the challenges in the inner cities, Toxteth Moss Side and then the minor strike, and all of that, I absorbed all of that and couldn't and still don't actually differentiate faith and politics particularly. I think they're all part of the same thing. How do you live your life? How do you treat other people? Do you have a care for people at the heart of everything that you do? And if you do, I think basically you're going to be. be on the right lines. So I've tried to stick to that approach. Did you ever sneak any communion wine?

Definitely. Did you? You know what we're like. You know what Catholic, any Catholic would know, we all have that gene within us, you know, it's a, yeah,

the Catholic Church, I don't know, it kind of changes through time, but the Catholic Church of my youth was always quite irreverent, quite Irish in terms of the priests. We used to come into contact with, you know,

a big emphasis on humor. And it became a bit, more judgmental, I think, in the 2000s. And I was a big supporter of Pope Francis because I thought he brought back the humor, the humanity, the slightly live and let live approach that had been lost by his predecessor. What about your English degree? Has that shaped your political outlook? I think so. I had a job to persuade my dad that I should study English at Cambridge. He kept saying, well, what are you going to do with a job like that? As you said at the start, you know, he came from an engineering sort of background. And I kept saying to him, no, I like it.

And then I found in a poem I got really interested in by a poet called Tony Harrison, who was a poet from Leeds. And he was quite controversial at the time in the 80s. He wrote a poem called V that was on Channel 4 and it was full of swear words. But to me, my English teacher said, you'll like this because you'll relate to it. And I put this video on of his poem. And I realized for the first time in my life that poetry could have a northern accent. And that was quite a thing.

But I kept pointing my dad back to the quotation at the start of V from Arthur Scargill, no less. And this quote said, my dad reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends upon your power to master words. So I went to my dad and said, look, article you liked that.

Arthur Scargall. Look, Arthur Scargill says this. You know, doing English is intensely political. It's about your power to get your point over and, you know, communicate well. And I like to think that even though, sadly, I can't have this conversation with him now, I'd like to think that even now he would accept that that was a good choice because I think a power over language and an ability to use language to make your point, I think has probably helped me quite a bit in my political career and getting the emotion into what you do and what you say and the connection with people. We'll talk more about your dad who has Alzheimer's later as it pertains to one of your failures. But let's get into your first failure, which is your failed runs at Labour leadership.

I'm so glad that you are going to talk about this. As we said at the beginning, so much of failure is learning. It's data acquisition about what to do differently. Do you think now you are Prime Minister, despite those fail, leadership wrongs or because of them? Probably because of them. I became a much better politician in the end for not getting the position at that time because I probably hadn't really thought things through enough.

And the Westminster world puts you on a certain track and makes you think a certain way, speak a certain way even. You quoted that thing that I said about Westminster making a fraud out of good people. but it does. You've got the whips telling you what to say in interviews and how to vote in the lobbies. And it's not about being your authentic self. You know, it kind of takes people away from that and makes them appear something that they're not. And it took me to lose in 2015, decide to come back home here and stand to be the first mayor of Greater Manchester and then really challenge myself about, well, what do I, when I'm thinking and,

speaking for myself without any party line because I didn't, I was quite clear when I left, I was going to do this myself, place first, not party first, do what's right for here. It really strengthened me, if you like,

as a politician. And it would be true of anybody in any organisation, isn't it? You know, people at work can think, oh, do I just do what the official line will be this and do I just stick to that? Or do I stand outside of it and say,

oh, I don't agree with that. I'm going to do something slightly differently. I think anyone who wants to go towards a leadership position in an organisation has to hit that moment in their life where they don't just look up and do what they think is expected, but actually then develop the ability to say, you know what,

what they're doing isn't right, I'm going to do it this way. And the fact of losing in 2015 and then coming into this role here made me a million times better as a politician. Are you worried? you might lose it again under the pressure of being Prime Minister? Yes.

Okay. Yes, definitely, because the world down there has that effect. It has norms and ways of working, and it expects people to follow that. And anyone who challenges it is seen as an outsider or gets, you know, sneering coverage and gets denigrated in one way or another. So yes is the answer, but I'm just going to do this job exactly as I've done the job I did here in Manchester. I've decided actually, and maybe this has come over in the early days. I don't know.

I hope so. I'm just being myself. I've relaxed into it. The only way to do it as far as I can tell is to go into it as yourself, come over as yourself, explain to people what you're doing and why you're doing it. and then I think you've got a chance of people connecting with it and saying, okay, well, I'll give this a chance. If you're going to go in and do the Westminster thing, then, well, I'll be the,

they'll soon be an eighth in 11 years if we're not careful. And I don't want that, obviously, to happen. I want to come in and, if I can, give the country something to tune into, to believe in, to get some hope going, and hopefully then some stuff. that might come from that. You're focusing on the 2015 leadership bid, but there was a previous one in 2010. Was the 2015 one more painful when you lost to Jeremy Corbyn? Is that why there's this particular focus on it?

Yeah, I was very much the outsider and the underdog in the 2010 election, and actually it probably went fairly well for me because David and Ed Miliband with a sort of, you know, took all of the story of that contest. But it allowed me a space to go over the line of standing in a leadership. election, which is a hard thing to do, but with a bit more freedom to just speak to the things I thought were important. So I look back on that as having really helped me, and I don't consider it particularly a failure because, you know, it moved me forward in terms of how I was as a, as a politician. It was just after, I would say, the biggest turning point in my political career,

which was when as Culture Secretary, I went to Anfield on the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster. And I'd had to make a choice that day whether I was going to tow the government line or be true to what I knew and the people I'd grown up with, which was that there was a major injustice.

And the whole city of Liverpool had been subject of a slur campaign for 20 years, orchestrated from the highest levels of the land. And I knew that. And I had to decide on that day, was I going to tow the line of the government I was in, or was I going to challenge it? And I did challenge it. And things started to change on that issue.

But it also then changed me as a person and a politician, because I realized that in the end, I hadn't come in to tow the lines of people in London that I just couldn't possibly, the 19-year-old me could never have agreed with. I remember saying at the time, if I wasn't the minister at Anfield on that day, I would have been shouting at the minister. And I knew that. I had to reconcile that thing inside of me. I did it in hopefully the right way. And then I went into that leadership election with a bit of that outsider energy. And I think I kind of learned a lot then. But that's why 2015 was so painful because I'd become the frontrunner by the time. That leadership election came around. And oh my goodness. In life, when you're the other,

front-runner for anything. It just, I don't know, it's hard. You know, you're in a, you're in a more difficult position in a strange way when all the eyes are on you and you're, I don't know, doing what you think everybody wants you to do, you're listening to advice that you really should reject. And definitely that was me in 2015. How difficult is it to maintain friendships in politics? So you mentioned there that you stood against at Minaband in 2010. He's now serving as your foreign secretary. Presumably you had to have a really honest and frank conversation with Kierced Arma when you announced you were going to stand and make a field. How does one maintain these friendships or do you? I do broadly because I don't thrive on personal campaigns

against people. I've never done my politics like that. But in the end, it's more than you, isn't it? You're kind of standing forward to represent a strain of thinking or opinion within the party. to give a voice to more people than you because people are not feeling represented. So, yes, it can get difficult in terms of personal relationships in politics. That will always be baked in. That's part of parcel of politics. The question is when those difficulties arise and those tensions come up, can you find a way of not making them the product of animosity

or, you know, really rancorous sort of relationships? I've never done that. It was hard earlier this year when I was blocked in terms of standing for the Gorton and Denton by election. But, you know, I will always say what I thought about that, but then I carried on working and did events with Kirstama after that. So politics, people in politics have to recognise

that when things happen, they are not necessarily personal. They happen because the political moods of the times are shaping things and people have to accept that, you know, sometimes you're on the wrong side of that thinking and those moods, and I've had to do that in my political career, and we all have to do that at times. Best thing that's ever happened to you financially, go. Easy. Sold my car on Carvana. Amazing offer. Really? I hit 200 on a scratcher. Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check? No. How many scratchers did you

hit to get that? I hit a button on Carvana.com once. Okay, that's fair. It's like the lottery, except you always win. like the lottery at all, actually. Exactly. Inexplicably good. Offers worth bragging about sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply. What was the conversation like with your wife, Mary Franz, when you said, listen, I know I've tried twice already to be leader of the Labour Party, but I've got this plan now to become Prime Minister. As a wife myself, I just don't think I could cope with that. I mean, she seems amazing, don't get me wrong. But what's What are those conversations been like?

Oh, goodness me. It's why I kind of find this podcast easy because, you know, she's quite blunt in telling me about my failures in past endeavors and she doesn't hold back. And yeah, there's no soft landing there. Yeah, she was like, oh, not again. They've told you twice they don't want you.

What are you doing it again? Yeah, we know, we've always just had honest conversations about it. You know, she knows why I'm in politics and what I'm trying to do. it is about changing the country to make it fairer. I know that sounds a bit sort of corny to say that, but it's exactly why I'm doing it in the same way that I stood to be mayor of Greater Manchester.

So she took some persuading, to be honest, because I guess she didn't want to see me go through it all again and then end out on the wrong side and at the end of it. But she gives me good advice. The funny thing that everyone laughs at in the early stage of my political career, just to give you a flavor of the famous Mary France Van Heel, as she now is. I would be as a young politician. I'm talking, you know, sort of 31, 32 when I was elected in Lee in the early 2000s.

And I'd go in and do these interviews and thinking I'd done really well because I had taken the sort of the handout from the whips office and I'd done an interview where I'd not strayed from the line at all and I would come out. And I'd turn my phone on, you know, the old Nokia mobile phone. and first text in block capitals from said person would just say, this is what it would read, answer the F star, star, starting question is what she. That's amazing. Yeah, well, that's the kind of feedback I've had from her.

And it's probably relevant to this podcast, isn't it? Oh, I hope she listens to this podcast. It will be up her street, for sure. Great. Yeah, she's quite forthright. and she's Dutch and they don't hold back. They're pretty plain speaking. And yeah, I've been on the receiving end of a lot of that over the years.

Well, talking of your wife brings us to your next failure, where we're going back in time. And it's not being able easily to get a job in the north or at home after you finished at Cambridge. Can you talk to me a little bit first about the experience of Cambridge and how it felt to you? So I loved my time at Cambridge. I really did.

Loved it. it was, well, it still is a magical place. That's how I felt about it. It was like a land that was so different to hear, you know, a blessed place. And I so much wanted to be accepted there. That took a while. But in the end, you know, I did feel that I was accepted.

And I did well. I mean, I, you know, obviously met Mary France there, played a lot of football there, didn't do the student politics. I enjoyed university life to the full and enjoyed the subject. And I consider myself really lucky to have gone to Cambridge. The chip on the shoulder was there to begin with, but it kind of left really as I just understood what an amazing place and what it had to offer was.

The hard thing was leaving and coming back here. That was the hard thing because you've just had a glimpse of a different world and people who've got different connections in their kind of world and their social life. And I came back here, and it was the summer of 1991. There was loads going on in this city at the time, music-wise. You know, it was a great place to be. But the reason the music scene was booming was because it had kind of come through into the empty factories and the empty warehouses because the rest of it had gone.

The jobs had gone and everything had gone dark, you know, and the music scene was the thing that kind of was coming through to try and pick the place up. And I spent months here sending CV after CV trying to find a job and I just could not find anything. And it sticks in my mind because back to that conversation with my dad, he tried to persuade me to go to Cambridge because I was initially a bit reluctant, you know, thinking I wouldn't fit in. It would be awful. And, and, and, and, and, I, He was right that I should have applied, but when he was trying to persuade me, he kept saying, oh, when you graduate, all the doors will fly open. You'll have no problem at all. And it wasn't like that. But people I've been at university with, who had, let's say, well-connected parents, they were walking into internships at the Times and placements at the BBC and this, that and the other. And here was me sort of trying to find a foothold in journalism. And there was just nothing. My first job came in November 1991, but it was unpaid, unpaid reporter on the Middleton Guardian in North Manchester, and that was where I started, and it felt incredibly hard and tough. And in the end, I gave up. I'd said to everybody who knew me that I wouldn't be moving to London,

but I then did. And there were so many people of my generation born in the Northwest in the 1960s or 70s for whom that was what were the reality. You know, if you wanted to get on in life, you had to go south. But it felt like a failure. It felt like a big failure, actually, when I left and took a job on container management, as you correctly said, it's the reason why I've never been on, have I got news for you?

Because I just know, they've asked me about 20 times, I just know they would make container management, the guest publication of the week. And they would read out my old art. I couldn't bear the humiliation. But those trade publications are absolutely great because I started out as a print journalist and I used to get so many stories

from trade publications like that. Yeah, they're great. You mentioned in the wording of this failure to me, your failure to get a job at home. Home clearly is an extremely resonant concept for you. It's very important. What do you think home means? home means safety in that you know where you are you know who you're with you just feel supported and secure

so i always had that feeling coming home in term time from cambridge home just meant you're back in your comfort zone and you don't have to worry about being somebody you're not you can just be yourself again and it's been a bit of a theme of my life really. When I left Westminster and came back as Mayor of Greater Manchester, it felt like being home. I often describe walking in my very first morning as Mayor of Greater Manchester at the Greater Manchester Combine Authority. And all the people were there clapping and came in.

It felt the opposite of going into my first job in a Whitehall department where he felt half the place was working against you and trying to sort of find you out or trip you up. You know, it felt very different being back here in the city when I left, when I left Westminster. And it was definitely part of my university days. I remember being at home back to Hillsborough in the Easter of 1989 in my first year. And I was at home and I went to the other semi-final on the day of Hillsborough. All my school friends were at the Liverpool game at Hillsborough.

And then they came back to the same pub where we've been the night. before traumatized and, you know, some didn't come back at all. And that never left me that experience because then when I went to Cambridge, nobody was even talking about it or to the extent that they were talking about it, they were blaming the Liverpool supporters. And this kind of idea of Britain as two worlds has always been a sort of feeling and a theme in my life when I went to Cambridge, you know, it felt like I'd gone to a different world and I would come home to feel that feeling of

connection again or when I worked in London in the 90s I would come home to go and watch Everton and again I'd feel like I was connected again and it was true in my days in Westminster you know it was always out of my comfort zone trying to live in someone else's world and then back here and I don't know now I kind of feel I've moved beyond some of that that feeling as I go into this this role but it's never left me this feeling that Britain is two worlds and There's a theme that I want to define my time as Prime Minister. It's making this country not to feel like that, not have a sense that some areas are favoured and some are not.

And then the feeling that comes to young people growing up in those areas, that's what Number 10 North is about getting growth, good growth, going in every postcode, making Whitehall look after Middleton, as much as it looks after Marlowe in the South. You know, that's... what I'm about, really. I've always been about that. And it's why I feel relaxed in this role. I know what I want to do with it. I know what I'm trying to achieve. I know how Britain was when I was growing up. It did feel too much like two worlds, how are people living parallel lives?

And that's what I want to change. Good English degree alliteration there, Middleton, Marlowe. I appreciate that. I'd have to struggle for a place with an M in the south there very quickly. Home is resonant for so many of us. And I think that so many people struggle to feel that sense of safety that you so eloquently portray there in the UK at the moment, whether they are the victim of a racist attack, whether they are marginalized because they are a trans person. How are you going to embed this feeling of home? Because I know a lot of people felt so let down and angered by Kirstarmer's statement about the island of. strangers. And these are naughty and complicated issues. But I imagine that you want to foster a greater sense of safety for those people to feel at home. Yeah, absolutely I do. And the answer is quite a

simple one. And I started it really on the doorsteps of Makerfield. Bring back hope, bring back a sense of possibility to the country, that things aren't in a inevitable decline and that your place isn't shut out of having some good things happen. That, I think, is the best antidote to the negativity and the hate that we see in places across the UK. Give people a sense that, you know, you can do something about the cost of living. You can make people's life better. You know, we can all together feel that things are moving forward.

I think we've lost that feeling. I go back to this country at the moment of living. London, 2012. That feeling was there in abundance, wasn't it? You could kind of almost touch it. It was brilliant. And yet, over that decade or more since then, it just drained out of the place, didn't it? And who knows, social media, but also the failure of politicians has a big part in it. You know, politics just wasn't working, connecting. And then that kind of feeling of hopelessness, pessimism seeps in. And then you get the division that comes from. from that. So we've been in that place for a long time now as a country and I don't want to

be too simplistic about it. It's hard to turn that around. But I am determined in this role to talk about hope, bringing it back, giving people a sense that they're being heard, listen to, we're doing something about it. We can be better. The place where you live can be better. Your kids can have better prospects. It's why I talk about an education system that balances technical education with academic education for too long. It goes back to my theme. This country has appeared as though it's for some people rather than all people or for some places rather than all places. And in education, you've got a prime example. And I go back actually to the government I was connected to, the Blair government. We talked about a 50% target of young people going to

university. But what did we say to the other 50%? It was deafening silence there. And that I think that approach to politics has been part of the problem. It's not felt like it's for people in all places. And that parents were like, okay, they're talking about the life chances of my kids, not just someone else's kids. And I've really thought about those things over the years. And that is the way back to it, I think, a more hopeful country where we're not pandering to sentiment

that is fostering on social media, but actually we're kind of, you're saying, no, no, I'm going to do the opposite of that. I'm going to stand on your doorstep in Makerfield. I'm going to talk about what I'm going to do, what I'm about, not point scoring against anyone else,

what positive things I'm going to do to try and change your lives. Do you know, politics, Elizabeth, just isn't like that. Everyone spends their time, pointing fingers, scoring points, and no wonder it drives people mad, but that creates a negativity then, that politicians with more sinister intent sort of feed off that negativity and throw more negativity into the mix and then we end up in a really bad and divided place.

Talking of Tony Blair, I heard him say this thing recently, which really struck me, that in the political climate at the moment, the sensible people aren't radical enough and the radical people aren't sensible enough. How do you combine this big vision that you have with your stated ambition for, for more devolution, growth in every postcode.

Is there attention there? There is, but Tony Blair's right about that. I think radical people do need to be more sensible at times, and sensible people need to get out of the sort of incremental change and start talking again about how does politics fix the big things. So social care, you know, perhaps we're going to come on to this. I feel that my generation of politicians is, guilty of a shameful dereliction of duty, political cowardice of the worst kind in saying that

this issue is too difficult and we're not going to touch it, we're just going to leave it. This is about basic care of fellow human beings and those who are vulnerable. And we're saying that politics can't address that. But that's where we got to. And we got to it through that normal behaviour of Westminster. when I put forward an idea in 2010 for a national care service, that was branded a death tax. Then Theresa May came forward and put forward some people as a dementia tax.

That kind of creates a situation where everyone says, oh, well, don't go there. But what a failure that is. What a failure. 30 years since the Royal Commission on Social Care, barely anything has really changed. In fact, social care has gone backwards. And doesn't that just say something about how politics

has really fallen, if you like, you know, it has to be radical. We'd have never created the NHS if we weren't radical as a country at times. And I think given where we are now, you have to have a degree of radicalism to change it. I've talked about the 40 years since the 80s. I don't think neoliberalism trickle-down economics has been kind to a lot of places across Britain, particularly the places that were the industrial centres of Britain. I think it's been very unkind to those places, actually. You go there now and you feel a sense of decline.

The high street isn't what people would want it to be. And sometimes in politics, you have to say, I'm going to break out of the kind of consensus and start talking about those things in a different way. And it's what I've started to do. But you have to be sensible about it in terms of what solutions do you bring forward. And you have to be pragmatic about it.

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stress of trying to find funding to overhaul the social care system, which is your third failure. So let's come on to it now. The stress of that must feel completely overwhelming. No, it doesn't. It doesn't because the status quo is the worst of all worlds. That's the issue, isn't it? Let's just look at what we've got right now. Millions of people are going without their basic needs being met because the system isn't good enough to. to meet their basic daily needs. So that's the first thing. Second thing, you have millions of family carers,

people like my mum who tried to care for my dad at home, who in the end are actually the main issue I rediscovered as a family. My mum was sinking under the pressure of trying to make it work when the care system couldn't make it work for her. But that's the reality for so many people in this country as a consequence of broken social care.

Then there's the next injustice of having to pay a fortune for this broken care that people get. So they pay a lot of money for a very poor standard of care. And some people, the most unfortunate, those who get, let's say, Alzheimer's at an early age, pay with everything down to 23,000 pounds of their savings. So they can spend hundreds of thousands of pounds because they can be cleaned out by the whole experience of being unlucky enough to get dementia. You know, the randomness of it, if you've got a cancer, you can get everything paid for and you,

but you get dementia, you get absolutely wiped out physically, emotionally, financially. It's just terrible, isn't it? Yeah. So I don't get overwhelmed by it, as the point I'm coming to, because it can't be worse than that, can it? Surely we can make it better than that. people are already paying. So the money is going in. It's just being done in the most unfair way imaginable.

It's like American healthcare, the most vulnerable, pay with everything. And we're okay with that in Britain, the home of the National Health Service. Well, I don't think so. And I think if I can get beyond the newspapers who kind of work with the worst point scoring politicians to frighten people about these issues, and it's happening now, given I've raised the issue again, if we can get beyond that and we can just point. the proposals in front of people, some of them might be quite radical. I think the British public will let us know which one they can accept.

And they're actually often quite radical in what they want. Talk to me about your dad, Roy. When did you first start noticing as a family that he was showing signs of Alzheimer's? Yeah, this is difficult. I mean, it's just emotional topic for me, but it was a, year or two after the pandemic. So a pandemic was hard for everybody, wasn't it? You know, and it took a toll on older people, my mum and dad to a degree, just because that contact wasn't there. And we all remember that time. And coming out of the pandemic, my dad was diagnosed with

prostate cancer. And you hear that and you think, oh my goodness, we must, you know, we get him into treatment. And my brothers and I, we look back at that and we reflect on it because, you Because I don't think we knew enough or had it explained to us enough that the intensive treatment that comes with prostate cancer may in fact have brought on the dementia. I don't think I, you know, with all my background in health, I didn't understand enough the relationship between those two things. So it was shortly after he'd had his prostate cancer treatment.

I think it would have been 22 sort of time. I remember sitting with him in his, bungalow and he just kept asking me about could I see something in the trees and you know and you know it was he was saying it could see shapes in the trees and I was like now it's nothing that you know it's fine but I remember coming away that day thinking something has changed and yeah you never never forget that I'm so sorry one of the terrible cruelties of this situation is that he doesn't know you've become prime minister yeah is there a picture of you as prime minister in his room, in his care home?

Not yet. I don't think. But something wonderful happened last week. So I went into his care home on Sunday. And so for people listening now, because this may have gone out later, this was the Sunday after I've become prime minister, so six days later. And one of the staff said, oh, the manager wants to speak to you before you leave. So I went over and I spoke to her.

she said we all wanted you to know this has to be careful this does make me quite emotional she said we all knew kind of what time you might be coming up Downing Street so we got Roy in his chair and we got the telly right in front of him

and six of us stood around him and all said look Roy look look and she said he turned and he had a he said momentarily they said we thought he knew Oh, Prime Minister, how moving. Well, it was because at the time that they were doing that,

I was kind of holding my mum and we were having a sort of chat about him. Yeah. So the thought of them doing that 200 miles away was like, yeah. Sorry, no, please don't apologise. All emotion is welcome here. Was your mum the woman you were hugging for a while? Okay, that's beautiful. And how is I was whispering in her ear about my dad.

But then to hear what the staff said I just need to say this The staff who work in social care I mean When are we going as a society To recognize them and what they do I've seen hundreds of people care for my dad And when you see someone caring for a relative

You look at that process through new eyes Don't you see things you maybe wouldn't have seen before When just it was caring for somebody else But they're incredible and include the staff from other countries and overseas. They are incredible what they do. And that was just another example of it that they thought to do that on that day

rather than just leave him in his chair when that was happening. And how is Eileen Burnham doing? Redoubtable, by all accounts. Yeah, not in us. She's not in the Marie-France category of redoubtable. She's in a sort of more mild version of that. But no, she's good. I mean, it's been a hard road for her in terms of what she's done,

but she did an amazing job supporting my dad and then has recovered somewhat because of the arrangement we've now got with the care home, which is great. And she went through the same thing as Mary France, actually, about me going further into this job. But I think in the end, as a family, we always taught these things through and everyone understood what I was doing, why I was doing it. And she absolutely understands as well.

and all of my lot. You know, they're all brought into the idea of a country that is kind of fairer to everywhere, more rebalanced, a little north to south. They all believe in that. So they know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. And again, they're behind it. You've done me the honour of speaking so personally today and I'm so grateful. Do you think the most powerful politics are personal?

Mm-hmm. I go back to that point about faith and me as a child, really, you know, reading, the Catholic social teaching and the catechism. I've never really differentiated politics from that and, you know, the teachings that you hear. And, you know, the same thing, you know, love thy neighbor as thyself. You know, all of that just meant me to me that, you know,

that's kind of basically what you should do, what you're being asked to do and all religions have their versions of the same thing. So I know some people think it's controversial. to say religion and politics shouldn't mix, but they are part of the same thing to me. I remember coming into Parliament in that period in the early 2000s, and somebody who was a greater Manchester MP called Paul Goggins, he was much more Catholic than me in terms of, very devout, but he found, he singled me out because he realized we had a shared background,

and he became something of a mentor to me. And I'll never forget Paul saying to me, He said, Andy, in here, there are just so many people who come in here, get a bit of power, and then kind of give that power to people who've already got a lot of power because they want to ingratiate themselves and get things from people who've got power. He said, that's the last thing you should do. Give your power to people who've got none. That's why you're here. And so Paul was like massive in terms of prisoner welfare and homelessness and refugees.

He really said to me, that's why you are here. And I never forgot that. And some of my work on homelessness has been very much influenced by Paul. But to me, that is bringing a sort of faith perspective to politics. And the reason why people think sometimes they don't mix is because probably that's an exception, really, in terms of Paul was an exception to the norm. But that's why, you know, I remember him and I like talking about him because he should be talked about. He was an incredible influence on my life. Prime Minister, first Prime Minister on How to Fail,

you set the bar very, very high. I obviously have to ask you if your eyelashes are real. If you do anything to them, anything to your brows, your lashes. They're not falling off. I get accused. This is one thing from my dad, actually. I can be great. He was kept his sort of darker hair.

Not so much now, but quite late. And everyone thinks I'd die it. I can prove that I don't. But no, so he gave me some good things. Well, it's been a real privilege to ask you that important question and all of the others. Thank you so, so much for coming on How to Fail. You're so welcome, Elizabeth. Thanks for having me on. Please do follow How to Fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.