Andy Burnham announces father’s death and cancels all engagements

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has confirmed the death of his father, Roy, who was previously diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

Downing Street announced that the PM’s engagements today and tomorrow have been cancelled.

He had been due to host business leaders in No 10 this afternoon.

Tomorrow, he had been scheduled to chair the weekly cabinet meeting and later speak at the Trade Union Congress in Brighton.

Communities Secretary Angela Rayner said: ‘My thoughts are with Andy and his family at this terribly difficult – and sad time.’

Known as Roy, Kenneth Roy Burnham was a former telephone engineer who worked first with the Post Office and then BT. His mother, Eileen, was a GP receptionist.

Roy, who was in his mid-80s, had been living in a care home in the north of England for several years, and the Labour leader has spoken openly about his father’s condition.

When he became prime minister, Burnham said his dad was initially unaware of the news, although care home staff noticed he appeared to recognise his son at one point on TV.

Appearing on Elizabeth Day’s How To Fail podcast last month, Burnham recalled a ‘wonderful’ moment from visiting his father the Sunday after he was appointed.

Growing tearful, he said it was a matter that made him ‘quite emotional’ as he remembered a manager telling him, ‘We wanted you to know, we all knew kind of what time you might be coming up Downing Street, so we got Roy in his chair, and we got the telly right in front of him, and six of us stood round him, and all said, “Look, Roy! Look, look!”‘

She added that ‘momentarily’, they thought Roy ‘knew’.

And in an interview with The Times on the eve of taking office in July, Burnham revealed the extent of his father’s illness, explaining that his father didn’t know his son was on the brink of leadership.

‘That’s a sadness because he would be (proud),’ Burnham said.

‘The way I look at it, it’s his achievement as well. A whole family achievement, although he doesn’t know it.’

Both staunch Labour supporters, Aintree-born Burnham has long credited his parents for shaping his political values growing up.

In his book, Look North, Burnham described his ‘close-knit’ upbringing alongside his two brothers in the 70s and 80s, penning that neither his mum nor dad went to university.

‘But both could have done if they had grown up in a different time and in a different place.

‘Their knowledge of that fact seemed to make them all the more determined that their three sons would go. But that did not make them pushy parents in any way.’

He praised: ‘Their approach was one of quiet encouragement and confidence-building. Our family home in Culcheth was always full of music, life, laughter, love and support.’

Navigating his father’s health also became one of the driving factors in Burnham’s aim to reform the social care system.

In a major speech over the summer, Burnham promised to help ‘my dad and the millions like him’, who face the unfairness of the current ‘broken’ system.

He added that there are ‘millions of family carers, people like my mum, who try to care for my dad at home, who in the end are actually the main issue’.

‘We discovered as a family, my mum was sinking under the pressure of trying to make it work when the care system couldn’t make it work for her,’ he said, noting that no one should have to sell their home to pay for care in ‘an ideal world’.

Towards the end of the pandemic, Roy was diagnosed with prostate cancer, for which he had ‘intense’ treatment. He was later informed he had developed advanced Alzheimer’s.

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