LONDON: A man who once said his favourite biscuit would be “beer, chips and gravy”, who prefers to dress down, who is a fan of The Smiths, The Stone Roses and football, became the UK’s seventh prime minister in a decade on Monday.“King of the North” Andy Burnham, who in his former role as Greater Manchester mayor crafted a persona as the bloke who understands the concerns of ordinary people, preferring to dress in T-shirts and trainers, made his first pledge as PM to end rough sleeping in Britain.He had earlier been chopping mushrooms at homelessness charity The Passage in Victoria, London, before meeting the king.Standing outside the No. 10 door after becoming PM, he said, “I will soon go through that door behind me and issue my first instruction to end rough sleeping in our country”. The statement, greeted with cheers, was a sharp contrast to outgoing PM Keir Starmer whose first policy was to cut winter fuel payments to pensioners.Burnham had made a similar pledge when he became mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017 and set up a shelter with 600 beds. However, figures show rough sleeping actually increased in recent years. When challenged about this by Sky News, he said figures had come down from when he became mayor but homeless people from other cities had been moving to Manchester.Burnham, who became Labour leader on Friday, went to meet the king at Buckingham Palace in a suit, with his wife, Dutch-born Marie-France van Heel, later on Monday morning. The king asked him to form a govt, and he agreed in a short meeting that directly followed outgoing PM Keir Starmer going there with his wife, Vic, and tendering his resignation.He was then driven to Downing Street where he made his first speech as PM, without a podium or notes and just two mics — part of his man-of-the-people style — outside No. 10.He said he was going to help the public with the cost of living straight away. Over the weekend he had announced he would ditch Starmer’s controversial national digital ID scheme, saying the vast expense of the scheme could be used on other priorities.“We will make this moment a circuit breaker for Britain, bringing forward the biggest changes in the last 40 years,” he said, lashing out at Margaret Thatcher’s govt for centralising political power and privatising economic power in the 1980s, promising to “put life’s essentials back under public control”, making them more affordable and creating a “new political economic model”. He promised to help more young people into work and build more council homes. “I will put the care of people at the heart of everything I do,” the 56-year-old said.Starmer earlier delivered his final speech outside No. 10 from the podium, reminding the country he took Labour from a historic defeat in 2019 to a landslide general election victory in 2024, listing all his achievements, and saying, “I go with a smile.”
