Andy Burnham became the United Kingdom's prime minister on Monday, after Keir Starmer resigned and King Charles III asked Burnham to form a government. He is the seventh person to hold the office in a decade.
Burnham, 56, won the Labour leadership unopposed last week, formally declared at a special party conference on 17 July after he crossed the threshold of MP nominations with no rival on the ballot. Starmer travelled to Buckingham Palace on Monday to tender his resignation, and the King then invited Burnham to form a government. The handover took place without a general election, as the constitution allows when a governing party changes leader between elections.
In his first speech in Downing Street, Burnham promised a ten-year plan to rebuild the country and what he called a circuit-breaker from years of political and economic instability. He named cutting the cost of living, moving power out of Westminster to the regions, and ending rough sleeping as early priorities, and flagged putting the troubled utility Thames Water under temporary public control.
Starmer announced on 22 June that he would step down, after months of pressure from Labour MPs. At the English local elections on 8 May, Labour lost more than 1,100 council seats and control of around 35 councils, while Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, won more than 1,350 seats. Starmer at first said he would not quit and took responsibility for the results, then went as the rebellion continued and the party's polling did not recover.
Burnham sat in Parliament as the member for Leigh from 2001 to 2017 and held the health portfolio in the last Labour government before leaving Westminster to run local government. As mayor of Greater Manchester from 2017 he brought the city's buses back under public control and built a profile defending the north of England, a record that earned him the nickname King of the North. He returned to the Commons last month, winning a by-election in Makerfield on 18 June after the sitting Labour member stood aside so he could contest the leadership.
He used his first day to remake the cabinet. John Healey, until Monday the defence secretary, was made chancellor of the exchequer, replacing Rachel Reeves, who left the government. Ed Miliband moved from energy to become foreign secretary, Angela Rayner returned as housing secretary, and Wes Streeting was given defence. Several ministers close to Starmer were dropped.
For Australia, the change places a new government in London under the same head of state. King Charles III, who accepted Starmer's resignation and commissioned Burnham, remains Australia's monarch. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese congratulated Burnham on Monday, calling Australia and the United Kingdom longstanding friends, allies and partners, and said he looked forward to working with the new government. The two countries are tied through the AUKUS submarine program and a free trade agreement that took effect in 2023.
Burnham inherits a working Commons majority and the same conditions that unseated his predecessor. Reform UK leads or runs level with Labour in national polling, and a general election is due by 2029. He has promised a decade to turn the country around, starting with a government he rebuilt in a day.
