“Bill Clinton operates by sonar,” observed Robert Reich, who knew the 42nd president as a friend and served for four years as his Secretary of Labor. “He emits a huge number of policies, ideas, and initiatives and he sees what kind of response he gets. And where he sees an opportunity to move, he moves.”
That quote, from Joe Klein’s profile of Clinton published by The New Yorker more than 25 years ago, came to mind recently when I was trying to think of how to capture Andy Burnham, the man who is near certain to become Britain’s next prime minister after Keir Starmer’s resignation. I run a start-up newspaper in Manchester and have been covering Burnham closely for six years now, in his role as the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, and yet I still struggle to define exactly what it is he believes in. The public sees him as a successful mayor, who is running on his record of improving Britain’s second city, but they know little else about what he stands for and what he’ll do in office.
Like Clinton, he emits his sonar waves to build a picture of what it is that he thinks voters and party activists want and then shapes his views accordingly. Since he emerged in British politics in the early 2000s as a high-flying adviser and then cabinet member in Tony Blair’s Clinton-inspired “New Labour” government, Burnham has been regarded with suspicion by many political commentators, not to mention members of his own party.
