Two weeks before Josh Simons stood down as the Makerfield MP for his benefit, Andy Burnham was at Salts Mill in Shipley celebrating the life and work of the poet Tony Harrison. It was a small gathering, with actors, directors, writers and family members paying homage. Burnham wasn’t the only politician to speak; Richard Burgon, MP for Leeds East, is another fan (in 2020 he put down an early day motion in parliament that recognised how Harrison had “always written, and spoken, for the people”). But Burnham’s was the most incisive illustration of how literature in general and poetry in particular can change lives.
Burnham was introduced to Harrison’s poetry as a sixth-former. An English teacher at his school put him on to V, Harrison’s long poem, set in a Leeds graveyard, which became infamous after Richard Eyre dramatised it for Channel 4. The Conservative MP Gerald Howarth attempted to get the broadcast (and broadside) banned for its use of four-letter words, which the Daily Mail described as a “torrent of filth”. V recounts the poet’s confrontation with a skinhead who has sprayed graffiti on headstones, a young man with whom he turns out to have quite a lot in common.
To the teenage Burnham the existence of the poem was proof that a working-class background, which he and Harrison shared, needn’t silence or disadvantage you. The poem has an epigraph from Arthur Scargill: “My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.” Burnham quoted that to his father, who was sceptical about his son reading English at university (what use would a degree like that be?). The quote did the trick. He went on to study at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
Politicians with English literature degrees are thin on the ground. Among those who won seats in the 2019 election, for example, they’re a mere 4%. Steve Witherden, a Labour MP in Wales, hadn’t learned to read till he was 11, which made studying English at Lampeter all the more exciting; others would claim that an English degree helps foster broad-mindedness and empathy. Burnham is more robust about it: a knowledge of Chaucer (another favourite of his), Shakespeare, Orwell and Harrison has done him no harm on people’s doorsteps, he thinks. In 2015 he even confessed to wondering whether he’ll write poems himself one day “when politics has run its course for me”.
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If he does write something more literary than a political manifesto, he’ll join a distinguished line of MPs and prime ministers, from Benjamin Disraeli (“When I want to read a novel, I write one”) through Winston Churchill (who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1953) to Alan Johnson and Rory Stewart, not forgetting (though we might like to) the fiction of Jeffrey Archer, Edwina Currie and Ann Widdecombe. More important, Burnham’s career shows that a humanities degree need not be a disqualification in life. The number of young people studying English, history or languages at university has declined catastrophically in recent years, to the point where many institutions are shedding staff and closing down degree courses. But do you need to have studied science, maths or PPE to become a prime minister? Maybe not.
Andy Burnham will be judged not on his ability to quote poems or write his own but on what he does for the UK over the next two years and perhaps beyond. But I trust he’ll keep Harrison’s V firmly in mind. When the bereaved poet is “going to clear the weeds and rubbish / thrown on the family plot by football fans” he finds the word “UNITED” graffitied on his parents’ headstone. A message about ending division isn’t what the skinhead had in mind; he’s a Leeds United supporter. But Harrison takes heart all the same: he knows “what the UNITED that the skin sprayed hasto mean” and imagines an end to “all the versuses of life”, the class, economic and ethnic differences that split the nation, “the unending violence of US and THEM”.
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The versuses have got much worse since Harrison published his poem 41 years ago. And even at the time, he admitted, the prospects for ending them weren’t good. But that’s Burnham’s task: to unite this horribly divided country. With what he’s learned from poetry, he’ll maybe have a chance.
