After Centuries of Persecution, Andy Burnham Is Set to Become the UK’s First Lifelong Catholic Prime Minister

Boris Johnson was baptised Catholic before turning Anglican, and Tony Blair converted only after leaving office. Burnham — raised in the faith that England once punished on the scaffold — would be the first to carry it into Downing Street.

Andy Burnham lights a candle in Manchester Cathedral in September 2022, after the death of Queen Elizabeth II. (Martin Rickett / PA)

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In a glass jar in a Lancashire church, just over the Liverpool Road from a Catholic social club, sits the blackened right hand of a man the English state hanged, drew, and quartered for the crime of saying Mass.

Edmund Arrowsmith was a Jesuit priest who secretly celebrated Mass in the homes of recusant Catholic families, in an England where saying Mass could cost a priest his life. A crowd gathered to watch him die in Lancaster in 1628. “Be witnesses with me that I die a constant Roman Catholic and for Christ’s sake,” he said from the scaffold.

Four centuries later, a cradle Catholic raised a few miles from that relic is about to walk into 10 Downing Street.

Keir Starmer resigned as prime minister on Monday morning, telling the country he had already informed King Charles of his decision. Andy Burnham — mayor of Greater Manchester, freshly returned to the Commons in the Makerfield by-election — has confirmed he will stand for the Labour leadership, and his party expects him to win it.

He has just returned to the Commons as the member for Makerfield, and he is on course to become the first British prime minister whose politics were built, brick by brick, by the Catholic Church.

Honesty about the claim matters. Burnham is not, strictly, the first Catholic to lead Britain. Boris Johnson was baptized a Catholic, confirmed later as an Anglican, and married his third wife in Westminster Cathedral — a tangle that makes him a technicality more than a believer. Tony Blair waited to be received into the Church until after he left Downing Street in 2007, wary of the old convention against a Catholic premier.

Boris Johnson and his wife, Carrie, in the garden of 10 Downing Street after their May 2021 wedding. Johnson, baptized a Catholic, was married at Westminster Cathedral — the third marriage of his life. (PA)

Neither man was made by the faith like Burnham was. Here’s the background.