The Labour leadership candidate Andy Burnham, who has worked in politics for 21 years, makes much of his life outside the Westminster bubble. As well as releasing a campaign video designed to show off his Northern working-class roots, he told Andrew Neil on the Sunday Politics that part of the reason he is ‘rooted’ in the real world is that he has held down normal jobs outside of politics:
AN: You work from a mile from where we are. Tell me one job you’ve had that’s not the Westminster bubble?
AB: I worked for a newspaper, I worked for a publishing company before I came into politics.
AN: For how long?
AB: Pardon? For about four years before I came into politics.
AN: What was the publishing company?
AB: Baltic Publishing, if you must know
However, Mr S suspects that Burnham’s claim of four years working in the real world — before taking a job with Tessa Jowell at the beginning of 1994 — may be stretching the truth.
Burnham began his career path into Labour politics with a degree in English Literature at Cambridge, the same university his Labour rival Liz Kendall attended.
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