Andy Burnham has admitted that his wife was hesitant about his bid to become prime minister after he failed to become the Labour Party leader twice.
Marie-France van Heel “took some persuading” before the former Greater Manchester Mayor stood in the Makerfield by-election in hopes of leading the country.
Speaking about her reaction to his plans, Mr Burnham told podcast How To Fail with Elizabeth Day: “She was like, ‘What? Not again. They told you twice they don’t want you. Why are you doing it again?’”
“She’s quite blunt in telling me about my failures in past endeavours, and she doesn’t hold back, and there’s no soft landing there,” the prime minister added.
Mr Burnham married Ms Van Heel, who is known as Frankie, in 2000, shortly after the couple’s eldest child, Jimmy, was born.
She grew up in the Netherlands and Belgium before moving to the UK to study at Cambridge University, where the couple met and started dating.
Ms Van Heel is the chief marketing officer of Iduna Infrastructure and was previously the chief strategy officer at London-based agency Heavenly.
She watched her husband enter parliament as the MP for Leigh in 2001, before becoming health secretary in 2009, and Manchester mayor in 2017.
Mr Burnham said: “We’ve always just had honest conversations about it. She knows why I’m in politics and what I’m trying to do. It is about changing the country to make it fairer. I know that sounds a bit corny to say, but it’s exactly why I’m doing it, in the same way that I stood to be mayor of Greater Manchester.”
He told Ms Day that his wife needed convincing about his plans to become prime minister because she “didn’t want to see me go through it all again and then end out on the wrong side, at the end of it.”
Burnham stood for the Labour leadership in 2010 and 2015, and came fourth and second respectively.
“Just to give you a flavour of the famous Marie-France van Heel as she now is, I would, as a young politician…go in and do these interviews thinking I’d done really well…and I would come out and I’d turn my phone on, the old Nokia mobile phone, and first text in block capitals from said person, this is what it would read, ‘Answer the f***ing question’.”
He told The Sunday Times that her response to his plans to run in Makerfield was “probably a two-word answer”.
