Imposter syndrome

As graduates of the country’s best university, most former Cambridge students neither seek nor expect much in the way of public sympathy. Last weekend, however, the frontrunner in the Labour leadership contest, Andy Burnham, attempted to elicit a little.

Describing his journey from a Merseyside comprehensive to Cambridge as the thing which ‘brought me into politics’, he told of his bewilderment when, as a prospective English student, he was asked at his interview, ‘Do you see a parallel between The Canterbury Tales and modern package holidays?’ He was, he said, ‘still pondering what the question meant when I arrived at Warrington station six hours later and when the rejection letter dropped through the door’. The setback was temporary — he eventually won a place — but he says he never lost ‘the sense of being an interloper’.

This is the key to understanding the man most likely to be the next Labour leader. He may come across as a machine politician, but he feels very much like an outsider, battling the elite of his own party. The former health secretary’s path to Cambridge was not, it is true, smoothed by a private education. And it is easy to see how, on arriving there, a Catholic Liverpudlian from a working-class background, albeit a comfortable one, might have felt an initial sense of unease. But as one senior Labour figure puts it, from the time Burnham graduated from Cambridge, he has been the beneficiary of ‘the ultimate conveyor-belt career’: he glided into a job working as a researcher to Tessa Jowell and then a post as special adviser to culture secretary Chris Smith. By 31, he had a safe seat in parliament, and he stayed on the fast track: home secretary David Blunkett’s PPS aged 33, in the Cabinet by 37.

In those days the Labour orthodoxy was Blairite, and so, it appeared, was Burnham.