Macbeth on the Metrolink: Andy Burnham’s Tragic Plot to Topple Starmer and Bankrupt Britain

Andy Burnham: Macbeth on the Metrolink

Andy Burnham, the so-called King of the North, strides about the national stage like a man half convinced of his destiny, half consumed by it. His admirers call him authentic, grounded, principled. But peer through the smoke of his bonhomie and you glimpse something darker: an overfed ambition gnawing at its leash, a Macbeth rehearsing his soliloquies on the tram to Piccadilly. Burnham is not content with being Manchester’s mayoral monarch. His true quarry is Keir Starmer’s throne — and if history is any guide, his quest will leave wreckage not unlike Liz Truss’s economic car crash.

The Old Record of Missteps

Let us not airbrush his past. Burnham’s career is strewn with errors and contradictions. As Health Secretary under Gordon Brown, he once flirted with the privatisation of the NHS — opening the door to more private provision, a move he now disowns with the amnesiac air of a man denying a youthful fling. Later, in his failed Labour leadership bids, he positioned himself as all things to all members: the Blairite heir, the left-wing sympathiser, the centrist compromise. He was none of these convincingly, and twice the party rejected him.

These are not the scars of a martyr but the fingerprints of opportunism. Burnham has a habit of surfacing wherever the current flows strongest, wrapping himself in whatever cause confers moral momentum. Hillsborough gave him authenticity. Manchester’s buses gave him populism. Now Gaza and social housing grant him gravitas. Yet always the pattern is the same: he seizes the mantle of champion, proclaims his purity, and steps forward as the man of the hour.

Liz Truss with a Northern Accent

And here is where the comparison with Liz Truss becomes uncomfortably sharp. Truss believed her ideological zeal could suspend economic reality. Burnham believes his northern idealism can rewire Britain’s balance sheet by force of will. Both mistake theatre for substance. Both imagine that slogans — levelling up, King in the North, growth, growth, growth — can fill Treasury coffers. Both exude a missionary glow when asked awkward questions about costings, brushing them aside with the airy confidence of prophets.

Burnham dreams of capped fares, renationalised routes, green revolutions, and municipal renaissance. Noble dreams, yes — but funded how? He invokes the language of fairness and inevitability, as though justice itself were a line of credit. This is economics as Shakespearean soliloquy: stirring, tragic, but doomed to collapse once the bond markets and the Treasury clerks make their entrance.

The Dethroning Instinct

But Burnham’s ambition is not merely economic; it is Shakespearean in scope. His eyes do not rest on Manchester; they flicker ceaselessly toward Westminster. His speeches bristle with coded challenges to Starmer — Labour must be bolder, Labour must be braver, Labour must not forget the regions. It is less advice than a dagger waved in the night, pointed at the weary figure on the party throne.

Starmer, cautious lawyer that he is, plays the part of Duncan: steady, managerial, dull. Burnham, meanwhile, seethes like Macbeth in his castle, convinced he was born to rule, that fate cheated him in earlier leadership contests, that the crown is his by right of authenticity. Every time he plays the northern everyman, every time he appears at a rally to declare that London must listen, he is whispering: This is my kingdom, not his.

And like Macbeth, he courts the witches of populism — those voices that hiss sweet promises of destiny fulfilled. They tell him he is the man the people truly want, that Starmer is merely a caretaker, that he need only step forward and claim what is already his. But the witches neglect to mention the carnage that follows. For dethronements are never clean. And Burnham’s ascent, should it come, will be purchased in blood — the blood of Labour unity, of economic credibility, of Britain’s fragile trust in politics.

The Inevitable Wreckage

If Burnham does succeed in his northern coup, what then? A Britain governed by dream rather than discipline, by the theatre of fairness rather than the arithmetic of reality. Like Truss before him, he would collide with markets that care nothing for romance. Bond yields will not pause to admire his bus policies. Currency traders will not be moved by his speeches at Manchester town halls. His idealism, unmoored from costings, will crumble on contact with global capital — and Britain, once again, will be left clutching the fragments of another leader’s hubris.

And yet, perhaps the most Shakespearean irony is that Burnham may never even reach this final act. His vaulting ambition may simply overleap itself, exposing him as a plotter who mistook rhetoric for inevitability. Starmer, for all his grey caution, may endure. Burnham may pace the northern battlements forever, railing against fate, the crown always just out of reach. A tragic hero, yes — but tragic because he believed destiny was owed to him, rather than earned.

The Curtain Falls

So let us watch Andy Burnham carefully. For in him we see not just a mayor with plans for buses, but a would-be usurper rehearsing his monologues, eyeing the sceptre, convinced that his passion alone can command history. But passion, untempered by realism, is merely the spark that sets the thatch ablaze. And if Burnham’s hand ever grips the throne, we may discover that beneath the northern warmth lies the same delusion that felled Truss: the belief that sincerity can balance the books, that destiny can pay the debt.

In Shakespeare’s telling, Macbeth loses not just the crown but his soul. Burnham, one suspects, would settle for the crown alone — and drag the country down with him in the taking.