The United Kingdom has a new prime minister after Andy Burnham took over the keys to Downing Street, becoming the fourth person to hold the office under King Charles. The former Greater Manchester mayor moved into Number 10 without the usual internal leadership contest, with Labour lawmakers lining up behind him in what colleagues described as more of a coronation than a fight, a swift transfer of power at the very top of British government.
The change followed the resignation of Keir Starmer, who formally stepped down on Friday and tendered his resignation to the King before Burnham was invited to form a government. In a statement marking the handover, Starmer said he was passing the baton to his successor and wished him every success, adding that Burnham had his full support. Starmer had become personally unpopular and his party had performed poorly in a run of local elections, leaving the writing on the wall for his premiership.
Burnham arrives with a reputation as a charismatic figure who connects easily with the public, built during his years as mayor in Manchester. On the morning he took office he visited a homelessness shelter, and he has now brought together a reshaped top team for his first cabinet meeting at Number 10, following a reshuffle that ran late into the night and cleared out many of Starmer's closest allies.
He began his first full day in office with an announcement aimed squarely at the cost of living. Burnham said VAT would be removed from household electricity bills from October, a move the government says will be worth around forty-five pounds a year to a typical home. Officials put the cost of the measure at roughly eight hundred million pounds, and the prime minister said it would be paid for by scrapping plans for digital ID cards.
The announcement drew immediate scrutiny over how it would be funded, including questions from one of Starmer's key allies. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds defended the plan, saying the change was funded for the rest of this year, with any longer-term commitment to be settled in the usual way through a future budget. Analysts noted that with the energy price cap still expected to climb, the cut would mean bills rise by less than they otherwise would rather than fall outright.
At the centre of the new cabinet is Chancellor John Healey, who had previously quit as defence secretary in a clash over funding, arguing there was no clear pathway to reaching three per cent of GDP on core defence spending by 2030 when he believed it needed to reach three and a half per cent. Ed Miliband takes over as foreign secretary and Wes Streeting was appointed defence secretary late in the evening, while Angela Rayner returns to housing, Yvette Cooper moves to health, Pat McFadden keeps the work and pensions brief, Lisa Nandy stays at culture, Alex Norris becomes justice secretary and Ellie Reeves is named attorney general.
With so many Starmer loyalists out and new faces in, the immediate question facing Burnham is whether he can hold his party together behind him. On the international stage, aides said his first calls as prime minister went to Trump, Macron and Zelensky, underlining the diplomatic diary of summits and crisis talks that will crowd his first weeks in office.
One of the sharpest tests will fall to Healey himself. Having walked out of the defence brief in protest that the money simply was not there, he now controls the Treasury and is under pressure to find the very billions of pounds he had argued were missing, a reversal that places the new government's spending promises squarely on his own desk.