At 17, after reading The Merchant of Venice – its depiction of racism stirred something in me – I scribbled down some thoughts and submitted them to an essay prize at Cambridge University. There were very few entries; I won the prize. At the ceremony, the fellows encouraged me to study English. My parents weren’t so keen: “Can’t you already speak it?” they puzzled.
Thanks to Andy Burnham, we are now on the cusp of having, at last, a prime minister with an English degree, and my first thought is: 20 years too late! How much easier it might have been to persuade my immigrant parents of the virtues of literary study if the PM were an English graduate. My mother might have been disabused of the idea that a course in English must be some kind of remedial programme for educationally subnormal foreigners.
This, for me, is the most relatable thing about the PM-in-waiting: that he once also lobbied dubious parents to let him read English at Cambridge. Burnham quoted to them the epigraph from “V.” – that astonishing 1984 poem by Tony Harrison, one of Burnham’s favourites: “My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.”
The words, originally Arthur Scargill’s, recall a working-class culture of literary emancipation. Labour was once steeped in it: a culture of subscription libraries, talks at the Workers’ Educational Association and shelves creaking beneath the ever-voluminous John Ruskin (the Victorian art critic was the writer most read by the first batch of Labour MPs). So many politicians on the left were formed by this tradition. The degree-less James Callaghan was as partial to poems as Burnham. His favourite was Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” – the poem with which Burnham’s beloved “V.”, set in a ruined Leeds cemetery, is in fiery dialogue. Middlemarch, Burnham’s favourite novel, also gestures to that old-school inheritance. It’s amazing, in 2026, to have a leader in contact with this rich proletarian tradition.
English graduates proliferated in the postwar education boom, but few gained more than a toehold on power. The Wordsworth scholar Chris Smith made it to culture secretary, with Burnham his special adviser. The closest an English grad got to No 10 was Michael Gove. Literary politicos skew neither left nor right, but they pursue, I think, a distinct style of politics – one shaped by their academic hinterland – in which language is paramount.
Literature is political. That we know. But we forget that politics, in turn, has a literary angle: the words pledged in manifestos, delivered at the despatch box, enshrined in law. The “narrative” and the “messaging”. A web of language – it has been helpfully unravelled by literary theory – surrounds politics. Politicians tell stories. Even the nation, Homi Bhabha shows, is a “narration”, while power ultimately expresses itself, per Foucault, in “discourse”. These insights can be overstated, but one needn’t be a postmodernist to share them. Edmund Burke puts it in his own dusty way: what lies behind “the construction of poems is equally true as to states”. English grads are primed to understand this. (So too, to be fair, are spin doctors.) If anyone got this, it was Gove, ever tilting at windmills, imprinting his flag-waving narrative on to the discourses of education. Burnham’s regionalist rhetoric – as rich in vibes as it is vague in policy – is redolent of that.
This more literary style of politics may be Burnham’s only real divergence from Keir Starmer, who has similar enough views but cannot name a favourite novel. The public is left cold by the technocratic style, the inability to construct a vision for the country. Since the building blocks of any vision are words, it’s not too fanciful to think a leader with a more poetic cast of mind might sense, and articulate, national feeling more successfully. Burnham credits his rhetoric to Shakespeare, all of whose plays he has read. (I’ve yet to notice the resemblance.) His slogan (“For us”) was clearly inspired by Harrison’s concept of “[uz]” the downtrodden northern masses conjured in the poem “Them & [uz]”.
That un-ageing zeal for Harrison’s poetry (Burnham spoke recently at the poet’s memorial) proves this isn’t someone whose English degree, like so many others, is a dusty detail from the past. He seems to be a genuine product of “Cambridge English”, that once nationally influential school of thought. Presided over by Britain’s greatest critic and social thinker, FR Leavis, Cambridge English held literature to be a lifelong common pursuit with an almost Jesuitical social mission. At Oxford, English literature was a hobbyhorse for gentlemen, but at Cambridge it was a serious business, a course not just in literature, but also “Life and Thought”: elements that lent Cambridge English its socio-political vigour. This was the intellectual tradition Burnham was inducted into in the 1980s.
In recent British politics, it is Gove who has been explicit about his debt to Leavis. Burnham’s Manchesterism, however, also echoes Leavis’s idealism about the English provinces, and all that talk of football and music is, I feel, coloured by a Leavisite regard for provincial folk life. Above all, Burnham’s moralising critique of Thatcherism channels Leavis’s horror of capitalism and its disruption of organic life.
In the end, I didn’t study English. What would I tell my parents now? Not that an English degree gets you into power, but studying literature trains you in what to do with it. Leavis called it “moral intelligence”. How far will Burnham dare to go with his?
[Further reading: DH Lawrence and the superiority of fiction]