Andy Burnham does not currently have a seat in parliament and has yet to even be selected as the candidate to fight the Makerfield by-election. But make no mistake: the mayor of Greater Manchester has made his pitch to become prime minister.
During a speech in Leeds on Monday, Burnham made little secret of his ambition, using a confident address to tell his audience he wanted to talk about the “big changes” he believes are needed in how Britain is run.
And he said that a vote for him – if he is selected for the by-election – was a “vote to make life more affordable again… to power up places… to re-industrialise”.
“This is the choice in this by-election,” he said. “Do you want Makerfield and the North to stay on the same path it’s been for the last 40 years, or do you want a new path which brings the country back together and makes it work for everyone?”
Speaking at the Northern Investment Summit in the city, he hit out at the “wrong path” he said Britain had been on for four decades.
Deindustrialisation was compounded by privatisation in the 1990s and austerity in the 2010s, he argued.
That led to wealth being “siphoned” out of the North and other places, he said, leaving an economy that does not work for most working people. Lost were good jobs and high streets, he said, and left behind were people “paying over the odds for the daily basics” including energy, housing, water and transport.
He was also unafraid to challenge his own party in his speech.
A vote for him, he said, was also one to “change Labour, because Labour needs to change if we’re to regain people’s trust”.
And he called for his own party to avoid damaging Brexit arguments.
Some of his own supporters have accused his rival, Wes Streeting, of stoking these in a bid to derail Burnham in his bid to return to Westminster.
In what will be seen as an attack on Streeting’s decision this weekend to call for the UK to rejoin the EU, he said that while he believed Brexit has been damaging, “I also believe the last thing we should do right now is rerun those arguments”.
He added: “Britain will be stuck in a permanent rut if we’re just constantly arguing and people are pulling away from each other.”
Burnham will face questions over his own role in the last 40 years, including when he was the health secretary in the last Labour government. He will be unable to fight the pro-Leave seat of Makerfield without facing more questions on where he stands on the EU.
He will face a fight to convince voters in the area, many of whom rejected Labour at the local elections earlier this month in favour of Reform.
At the weekend, YouGov released polling showing voters were split over whether Burnham was a prime minister-in-waiting. In his speech, he certainly sounded like a man who believes he is.
After Streeting did the same on Saturday, it is now clear that Burnham has made his bid to replace Keir Starmer as PM.