POLITICO spoke to 17 current and former senior politicians and officials, most of whom have worked with Burnham and many granted anonymity to speak frankly, about what the new PM’s arrival will mean for Whitehall. Some warned that Burnham’s plans could spark a turf war not just between ministers and the civil service, but between civil servants themselves.
‘Slowed down’
Some of Burnham’s rhetoric may be hammed up — he has spent nine years as the left-wing mayor of Greater Manchester — but Burnham’s old friend Steve Rotheram insisted it is not “faux” frustration. “We have experienced time and again things being slowed down by Whitehall,” said Rotheram, the mayor of Liverpool City Region who co-wrote their 2024 book “Head North.” “The whole thing is clogging up the ability for us to do the things we want to do.”
It will be a “fight,” according to Miatta Fahnbulleh, the former minister helping Burnham’s transition team with policy. She told POLITICO in an interview earlier in July: “I say this as someone that has worked on devolution for a decade and a half — every stage of it has been a torturous fight, because ultimately you are talking about extracting power and resources out of people who wield power and resources.”
Hostility to Whitehall is everywhere in Burnham’s sections of “Head North.” Whitehall perpetuated “cover-ups” like that over the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, in which a stadium crush killed 97 Liverpool football fans. It fed him a “lie” that infected blood products in the 1970s were safe. It “hoards” power, treats councils with “contempt” and delivered “cheap and nasty” northern rail. Most of it felt “either indifferent or working against you.” He has compared London to the greedy Capitol in the book “The Hunger Games.”
Burnham doesn’t use the political right’s term of non-endearment for the civil service — the “Blob.” But he has written publicly of his belief that Britain is run by around 50 people in Whitehall, most of them with “London-centric views.”
“It’s the unelected officials,” said Rotheram. These include the permanent secretaries, the most senior departmental officials who routinely spend decades in a machine that prizes itself on political impartiality. He added: “There’s no jeopardy, because they’re there no matter what the political persuasion of the government might be.”