Andy Burnham, the man about to become Britain’s next prime minister, looked exhausted and on the edge of fury.

It was October 2020, the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic. As mayor of Greater Manchester, he had just learned from an aide that the Conservative government in London, some 200 miles south, had imposed fresh lockdown restrictions on his area, while refusing his demand for $87 million to protect low-income workers and struggling businesses.

“This is no way to run the country in a national crisis,” he fumed in front of a Manchester concert hall. “They should not be doing this. Grinding people down. Trying to accept the least they can get away with.”

“It is frankly disgraceful,” he said.

The video clip went viral, earned Mr. Burnham the nickname “King of the North” and was arguably the moment that set him hurtling toward No. 10 Downing Street.

On Friday, he became the leader of the Labour Party, and on Monday, King Charles III will formally ask him to become the country’s 59th prime minister.

Mr. Burnham’s brand has always been that of the plain-spoken, stand-up-for-the-little-guy politician. Despite his highbrow English degree from Cambridge University, his regional accent communicated his ordinary upbringing in northwest England.

Born in 1970, Andrew Murray Burnham grew up in a close-knit Roman Catholic family in the village of Culcheth, between two postindustrial cities in decline for decades: Liverpool, where he was born, and Manchester.

“Our lifestyle was modest, and we never had a family holiday abroad,” he wrote in “Head North,” his 2025 memoir. “But we didn’t want for anything.”

As an ambitious young member of Parliament, he quickly rose through the ranks even as he lost two bids to become Labour Party leader. He was a junior minister under Tony Blair and a member of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s cabinet before growing disillusioned with London and returning home to run one of Britain’s largest cities.

Now, he will replace Keir Starmer, one of the most unpopular British leaders in modern history. It is not clear how Mr. Burnham intends to overcome the challenges that doomed his predecessor: high government debt, slow economic growth, aging infrastructure and political division.

“Andy Burnham is fundamentally an instinctive politician,” said Joshi Herrmann, a journalist and the founder of The Manchester Mill, who has covered Mr. Burnham for years. “That’s a valuable skill set,” he said. “But it’s naïve to think that a better communicator is going to get around these fundamental problems of British life.”

‘Not for People Like Me’

Mr. Burnham was 17 when the rejection came.

By his own admission, the interview in the wood-paneled room at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge University, had gone poorly. He had fumbled a question about “The Canterbury Tales” and accepted that the “completely alien world” of one of Britain’s elite universities was out of reach.

Instead, on his 18th birthday in 1988, he was back at Cambridge for another interview, this time with Fitzwilliam College, which offered him a place.

It was Stephen Harrington, his English teacher at St. Aelred’s Catholic High School, who urged a reluctant Mr. Burnham to set his sights on Cambridge.

“It was very much, ‘Oh, no, no. That’s not for people like me,’” Mr. Harrington recounted to the BBC.

If he was uncertain that he belonged there, Mr. Burnham had little doubt where he did. After serving as a political assistant to the lawmaker Tessa Jowell, he longed to enter politics in Westminster, the seat of Britain’s government. “From my early twenties,” he wrote in his memoir, “my ambition was to become a member of Parliament.”

In 2000, Mr. Burnham moved back to his parents’ house to run for office in nearby Leigh.

When he won the election in June 2001, he was just 31.

The Hillsborough Legacy

On a spring day in 2009, Mr. Burnham was standing in front of nearly 37,000 people.

It was the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, when nearly 100 soccer fans were crushed to death in the deadliest sporting tragedy in British history. In the ugly aftermath, the police and parts of the media falsely blamed Liverpool Football Club fans, hiding the actual cause: failures by the police.

Mr. Burnham, the still-youthful secretary of culture, media and sport, was deeply familiar with the tragedy, not least as one of his friends had been at the Hillsborough match. When he was asked to represent the government at Liverpool’s Anfield stadium for the remembrance, his “blood instantly ran cold,” he later recalled. The government was still, two decades later, refusing to acknowledge what had happened.

As he began to speak, the boos came quickly. The crowd chanted “Justice for the 96” for several minutes, leaving Mr. Burnham to stand silently.

Hillsborough became his cause. Mr. Burnham added his voice to those arguing for a new inquest and full disclosure of all documents related to the disaster. After listening to the debate, Prime Minister Gordon Brown backed Mr. Burnham. Subsequent investigations found the police had lied repeatedly and Liverpool fans were cleared of any responsibility.

The need for an extended fight on behalf of the Liverpool fans was deeply frustrating for Mr. Burnham, according to his memoir and other interviews. He still believed he had a place in London, but only if he could bring wholesale change to the system.

In 2010, Mr. Burnham tried, and failed, to become the leader of the Labour Party. Five years later, he tried again.

He entered the 2015 contest as its front-runner, but was defeated by Jeremy Corbyn, from the party’s hard-left wing.

Disillusioned by that loss and his broader frustration with politics in London, Mr. Burnham announced in 2017 that he would campaign for the Manchester mayoralty. In his memoir, he described the Hillsborough anniversary as the moment he realized how the British political system “fails people in a very personal way.”

“While it would be another eight years before I finally left, things were never the same after that day,” he wrote. “The spell was broken and I had fallen out of love with Westminster.”

Promises in Manchester

On his first day as mayor in 2017, Mr. Burnham declared that he would make good on an audacious promise to end rough sleeping — the British term for homelessness — in three years.

“Whilst the city centre’s skyline is filled with cranes, our streets should not be crowded with people who have no roof,” Mr. Burnham said as he walked through the downtown, greeting people who had spent the night on the street.

It was classic Burnham — the kind of retail politics that he excelled at during his campaign. He pledged to donate 15 percent of his $148,000 salary to homelessness charities, and continued to do this over his nine years in office.

But critics say the rough-sleeping promise was also evidence of another trait: the tendency to over-promise and under-deliver.

In 2020, the year Mr. Burnham had said there would be no more homeless people sleeping in the streets of Manchester, the problem had dropped by about half. But the Manchester Mill reported this year that the number of rough sleepers had increased steadily over the past four years, undermining the mayor’s promise.

Some of Mr. Burnham’s other efforts in Manchester have been more durable.

His relentless pursuit of economic investment has led to a building boom downtown. And while he has little foreign policy experience, Mr. Burnham traveled the globe as mayor, building partnerships with businesses in a way that complicated the idea that he was a traditional left-wing politician.

In September 2018, he traveled to China to boost efforts to improve high-speed trains across his region. Two months later, the Chinese Embassy in Britain posted a news release praising the mayor’s visit.

Mr. Burnham’s most well-known legacy in Greater Manchester is the buses. Using existing mayoral powers, Mr. Burnham dramatically improved the area’s transportation network. He imposed new regulations over the legal objections of private bus companies, lowering fares and increasing reliability.

Luke Raikes, who was a member of the Manchester City Council for 11 years, said the new bus system “made a huge and very visible difference to people.”

Overplaying His Hand

The event on the fringes of the 2025 Labour Party conference was packed. Everyone wanted to hear Manchester’s mayor, who had hinted days earlier that he might challenge Mr. Starmer for leadership of the party.

“I’ve done nothing more than launch a debate,” Mr. Burnham insisted that day in September. At the time, he had no path to power. He couldn’t challenge the prime minister unless he was a member of Parliament.

The conclusion in Labour Party circles was that Mr. Burnham had overplayed his hand. His barely concealed ambition suggested he lacked party loyalty.

But eight months later, voters in a set of municipal and regional elections delivered a searing declaration of no confidence in Mr. Starmer, who was already badly weakened by a scandal over Peter Mandelson, a Jeffrey Epstein associate he had appointed as U.S. ambassador.

Mr. Burnham’s moment had arrived.

Within days, a Labour lawmaker in Makerfield resigned to make way for Mr. Burnham to run. In June, he won decisively.

For more than two decades, Mr. Burnham has accused national governments of failing to address the needs of working-class people, especially outside London. At his Covid news conference in 2020, he railed against a Conservative government he accused of refusing to listen to the needs of its people — “people too often forgotten by those in power,” he said that day.

On Monday, he will finally wield that power himself, and will immediately confront some of the difficult choices that he accused others of botching.

“We have no sense of the trade-offs Burnham is going to make,” Mr. Herrmann said. “I would bet my bottom dollar that he doesn’t know what trade-offs he’s going to make either.”

Eshe Nelson contributed reporting.

One after the other, Britain’s recent prime ministers have pledged to revive the nation’s economy. One after the other, the promised growth eluded them.

Andy Burnham, set to formally become the newest prime minister on Monday after being named head of the Labour Party on Friday, has arrived with his own version of this pledge: “Good growth in every British postcode.”

His plan? Give away power to local officials so they can make their own economic choices. Mr. Burnham has promised to bring about “the biggest change in our lifetimes to the way the country is run.”

Mr. Burnham has not revealed the details of his economic agenda. But his priorities are emerging in his speeches and recommendations from advisers. The New York Times spoke with five economists and policy strategists who are playing a role in formulating Mr. Burnham’s economic vision, several of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk openly about policies that were still not final.

Alongside the so-called devolution of power, Mr. Burnham has said he will bring more public utilities and services under public control, while quickly tackling the high cost of living.

But Mr. Burnham will face the same economic challenges that befell his predecessors: a heavy public debt burden, stubbornly high inflation and low productivity growth. Those are compounded by the unavoidable legacies of the country’s decision a decade ago to leave the European Union, which has dragged on the economy, and years of too little public investment. Nervous consumers are saving a lot, rather than spending.

Mr. Burnham faces formidable economic problems, but at their heart is stalled growth.

Britain’s economy has been sluggish since the 2008 financial crisis. Gross domestic product per person is just 7 percent higher than it was in early 2008, compared with more than 20 percent in the decade before the crisis.

“Growth is the big challenge the U.K. faces,” said David Aikman, the director of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, an independent think tank. The country’s more enduring problems like how to fund the clean energy transition and support an aging population “would look a lot easier if we had faster growth,” he added.

Many of the big economic troubles, like high debt and huge demands on public spending, aren’t unique to Britain. But Mr. Burnham is bound by constraints of his — and his party’s — own making. Wary of spooking international buyers of British government debt and raising borrowing costs further, he has pledged to stick to strict rules on debt and spending made by Rachel Reeves, whom he is expected to replace as chancellor of the Exchequer in coming days. Mr. Burnham will also inherit a party that promises not to raise any of the three biggest taxes in the country, including income tax.

Mr. Burnham comes to the prime ministership after nearly a decade as the mayor of Greater Manchester in the north of England. The job gave him power over transport, housing, policing and skills development through adult education and training. Mr. Burnham highlighted the virtues of local over central government control as a political signature and has promised to further devolve powers from Westminster nationwide.

Britain is “extraordinarily centralized,” said Diane Coyle, a professor of public policy at the University of Cambridge who has influenced economic policymaking in Manchester for much of the past two decades.

Power, especially over finances, is hoarded in London, a level of centralization that is notable by international standards. Local governments have less ability to raise the funds they need than peer countries, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D.

Centralization has led to two big, deeply entrenched problems — low growth and lagging prosperity in most of the country, and economic overheating in London and the southeast characterized by unaffordable housing. London’s productivity is 30 percent higher than Britain’s average, and it has been that way for the past couple of decades.

Here, Manchester is instructive. The city, which was an industrial powerhouse in the 19th century, suffered through the second half of the last century amid rapid deindustrialization. But it is staging a revival. The city has become a growth model with impressive amounts of inward investment and productivity gains. Mr. Burnham’s hope is that Manchester’s resurgence, the seeds of which were laid before he became mayor, can be replicated across the country.

The critical advantage of devolution, Ms. Coyle said, is officials get better information about concerns like what skills local companies need in workers, and can better sync education and training policies to meet those demands.

The recommendation was echoed by the O.E.C.D., which said on Wednesday that if Britain could shrink the gaps in regional productivity it could raise overall economic growth. Local policies could be used to get more young people into jobs and improve transportation, both major culprits in Britain’s regional inequality.

Getting there will be hard. Britain is a patchwork of local authorities, with overlapping boundaries and varying responsibilities. Some control policing. Others the collection of waste. As power has become centralized in London, the capacity to manage economic policy effectively has drained away from many parts of the country.

Britain has been left both “too fragmented and too centralized,” said Neil Lee, a professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics. Now there is a broader political consensus to try to address this, he added.

The departing government had said it was working on a plan to give local officials more control over how they spend a share of national taxes. Those efforts are in the early stages, and it remains to be seen how Mr. Burnham will carry out his vision for devolution.

Several of his other proposals are also long-term in nature. Mr. Burnham has said he will lay out a 10-year plan to bring down the cost of water, housing, energy and transportation by taking “greater public control” of these utilities and services. Given the fiscal constraints he will face, that probably means stronger regulation and more partnerships between government and companies, not widespread nationalization.

Will any of this generate economic growth? Maybe, economists say, though not quickly.

In the short term, Mr. Burnham faces a citizenry impatient for change and is expected to announce steps to tackle the cost of living.

The new government will hopefully do “a few eye-catching measures to address the cost of living,” maybe on energy prices, rent or social housing, said Danny Sriskandarajah, the chief executive of the New Economics Foundation, a think tank that has been among those advising Mr. Burnham.

The last few years have shown how the plans of Britain’s political leaders can be sent off course. The British economy is highly sensitive to shocks from events overseas because of its openness to trade and dependence on foreign bondholders.

At the start of this year, quicker economic growth and a reduction in borrowing seemed in sight, and inflation was expected to finally return to the central bank’s 2 percent target. But then the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran set off a war that pushed up energy prices. Household energy bills have risen on average 13 percent from a couple of months ago. Expectations of interest rate cuts, which would lower mortgage costs, have vanished.

Mr. Burnham will have to fight through these shocks to deliver his own economic agenda, including an improvement in living standards.

Otherwise, disposable incomes, adjusted for inflation, will fall, Mr. Sriskandarajah said. “And no government is going to survive that.”