There’s a joke doing the rounds about Andy Burnham. It usually goes something like this: a Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walk into a bar. “Hello, Andy, what can I get you?” asks the barman.
The man who would be our next prime minister has been through a few incarnations in his career as a Labour politician. This shape-shifting has been reflected in the jobs he’s done and the policies he’s championed.
But it’s also been reflected, of course, in the clothes he wears, in the image he’s trying to project. Andy 4.0 (four? It could be more) is Manchester Andy. You know what I mean. The buttoned-up polo shirts. The Everton shirt. The Clarks Wallabees. The yellow Bee Network pin. The black T-shirts and 5-inch running shorts. The clothes that say gen X dad, northern indie fella and Labour’s last big hope for political redemption who loves nothing more than to man a barbecue on the weekend.
Still, they say the most bitter divorces follow the most passionate love affairs, which makes the inevitable separation of the former mayor and his “Manchester clothes” one of the most agonising breakups in British politics. Because if he gets to No 10 – and the odds are that he will – he’s going to have to make peace with wearing a tie again.
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I’m not the first and I won’t be the last to ponder this stuff. Kemi Badenoch got there first in fact, describing him as a “pair of eyelashes and a black T-shirt” last week. Burnham went there too, addressing his wardrobe during a speech at the People’s History Museum in Manchester on Monday. “It’s been such a wrench to leave that I’ve had to get special permission from what people in Westminster call my Manchester clothes,” he started. “I’ve had to get special permission to wear them this morning.”
Because, unlike most politicians, Burnham has not only finessed his public image, he’s proceeded to engage with the discourse around it. In a now-viral video, he corrected Badenoch’s assertion that the T-shirt was black (it was, in fact, navy). He also chose to speak at a museum which happens to house the navy workwear jacket worn during his famously rousing speech in October 2020, in which he railed against a Westminster-imposed Covid lockdown. The jacket sits, quite deliciously for him, in a vitrine next to Michael Foot’s donkey jacket. Oh, and he also mentions that.
The North Face cagoules. The Howick jacket. Those T-shirts. If we’ve learned anything from Rishi Sunak’s Sambas and Liz Truss rummaging through Claire’s Accessories, Britain does not like a leader who likes to shop. But if the clothing is authentic – if, in fact, it would be inauthentic to wear anything else – it can be a handy bit of self-branding, a way to make a statement without opening your mouth. The fact that the stuff he wears tends to be the building blocks of any normie’s wardrobe is the icing on the cake. This is clothing as outreach.
One term for this could be identity dressing. Just as George W Bush wore cowboy hats to remind us he was from Texas and Ron DeSantis wore branded fishing gear to remind us he was from Florida, Burnham wants you to know, off the bat, that he works on policy while listening to Orange Juice.
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Yet Burnham’s ability to transform is part of the reason he’s been successful. He used to be an Armani suit guy (albeit bought in the sale) – but now he’s a vibes guy. Stubbornness is useful in politics, but an ability to adapt – whether it’s on policy or designers – shows you’re listening. Politics is not about fashion but it is about optics. Ignore this, as Rishi Sunak did wearing Prada loafers on a visit to Teesside, at your peril.
Of course Burnham’s casualness could be seen as an exercise of male privilege. There is no equivalent for women. Angela Rayner was pilloried for wearing flatforms, despite being a child of the 90s. And being casual can go too far, as Jeremy Corbyn learned to his detriment. But sometimes you simply need the chops to back up the kecks. Keir Starmer (and we can’t ignore him in all this) also loves football and Orange Juice, but for some reason when he’s wearing his Stone Island tops, they feel like the clothing equivalent of a teleprompter.
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There’s every chance cleaving to the ministerial dress code will work in Burnham’s favour. He knows how to reflect his constituents while harbouring just a pinch of vanity that comes with the job. That’s why the worker’s jacket travelled so well during that 2020 speech – it was wfh gear – and why a chore jacket, as otherwise reported, wouldn’t have landed (too posh). Burnham will not go down in history as the first man to weaponise a T-shirt – that would be Volodymyr Zelenskyy – but he will be the first to reluctantly but comfortably put on the proverbial tie – if and when the time comes.
