Continuing the – part-serious, part-ironic – recalibration of my position on Andy Burnham, I was heartened to learn from a somewhat hagiographic article in yesterday
Times by his old English tutor at Fitzwiliam College, Cambridge that Burnham's degree was in English Literature. It makes a change from the usual PPE (Cameron, Truss) or Law (Blair, Starmer).
Burnham’s favourite novel is seemingly the weighty
Middlemarch – which I had to do for ‘A’ level, and is the book above all books that one is glad to have read but never wants to read again.
His old tutor, John Mullan, now professor of modern English literature at University College London, says that Burnham’s (Dutch) wife Marie-France van Heel “was the coolest girl in the college and, when Andy became her official boyfriend, there was some surprise and a feeling that he had scooped the pools”.
In her third year at Cambridge – after Burnham had graduated – Frankie van Heel went on ITV’s
Blind Date. (Insert your own joke here.)
Meanwhile, according to Mullan, “Andy was a footie lad in a college with lots of footie lads. It is hard not to see him in the Everton shirt he often wore, enjoying post-match beers in the college bar with the boys.”
So, as I said yesterday, Burnham does appear to be a fully paid-up member of the human race.
But of course that doesn’t mean he will necessarily be a good Prime Minister...
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