When the Mayor of Greater Manchester picked up a guitar this week and launched into Rusholme Ruffians inside a makeshift studio in the Ukrainian capital, it was more than a fleeting photo opportunity. Andy Burnham, strumming a 1985 deep cut mere miles from the front line, offered a peculiar mirror to Britain itself – one that captures decades of political ambition, cultural shifting, and the strange comfort found in a band whose lyrics described a country in permanent decline.
The moment, captured by photographers near Kyiv, was at once incongruous and oddly apt. A man widely tipped as a future prime minister, playing the songs of his adolescence in a warzone, for an audience that may or may not have understood the significance. And yet the choice was deliberate, sentimental, and steeped in the particular brand of British melancholy that The Smiths did more than almost anyone to define.
A Fandom Forged in the Thatcher Years
Burnham’s devotion to The Smiths is no passing fancy. It dates to the band’s imperial phase: he attended their concert at Salford University during The Queen Is Dead tour in 1986, when he was a teenager. By the time he mounted his first Labour leadership bid in 2010, the obsession had calcified into identity. Asked by Labour Uncut for his desert island discs, he named eight tracks; three belonged to Morrissey, two as Smiths singles and one drawn from Viva Hate. For any band, that ratio signals something beyond casual appreciation.
It was also, in retrospect, a quietly provocative choice. Morrissey had already been courting controversy for nearly two decades by then, with nationalist sympathies that would later curdle into overt support for far-Right figures. Burnham either did not notice or did not care. Either way, the selection told voters something authentic, even if it was not entirely comfortable.
He lost that leadership contest, of course, as he would the second one in 2015. But the fandom endured.
The Worldview Behind the Music
The Smiths were never merely a guitar band with a glum lead singer. Their catalogue described a Britain that felt hollowed out: a nation whose justice was theatre, whose schools were meat factories, whose slaughterhouses were literal murder. Nihilism abounded, but so did something else – a kind of restless intellectual energy that turned despair into defiance. Critics who labelled the group miserablist were missing the point entirely. The music thrummed with vitality, even as its words catalogued greyness.
For Burnham, growing up in the North West during the long fallout of deindustrialisation, that diagnosis must have resonated. The Smiths offered a vocabulary for alienation that did not require one to have been literally left behind. You could simply feel it. In Burnham’s case, this sensibility appears to have persisted long after his mid-twenties, when, by his own admission, he briefly soured on the band for what he described as a sniffy, superior attitude among their fans. He wanted Level 42 listeners to feel comfortable voting for him too, he once explained. It did not save his campaign.
The Morrissey problem has only grown more complicated since. The singer’s trajectory, from provocative provocateur to public endorser of figures associated with the far-Right, has made continued fandom a politically loaded position. Burnham has acknowledged the rift, albeit in what critics have characterised as cautious, noncommittal terms.
Cameron, Cultural Appropriation, and the Death of an Idea
The Smiths-as-political-shorthand suffered a catastrophic blow in 2006, when David Cameron chose This Charming Man for his Desert Island Discs appearance. The future Prime Minister described listening to Morrissey and Marr at Eton, in an era when the band’s music was meant to articulate precisely the kind of dispossession Cameron would later architect. Johnny Marr and Morrissey both publicly repudiated his appreciation. The gesture achieved little; Cameron’s brand of callow, low-affect politics proceeded regardless, leaving a trail of consequences with which the country is still contending.
Which leaves Burnham in an interesting position. He is 56 now, a decade older than Cameron was when he committed his own act of cultural vandalism. There is no going back. The Smiths shaped his formation, his politics, his sense of self. He will, as the saying goes, die a fan.
His Kyiv performance suggests he is reconciled to this. So too does a July social media video in which he quoted Is It Really So Strange?, Morrissey’s meditation on leaving and longing. The imagery was deliberate: the North, departure, return.
Why It Matters
Burnham’s guitar moment in Ukraine is, on one level, a triviality – a politician indulging his youthful tastes in front of cameras. But it speaks to something larger about the kind of leadership Britain seems poised to demand in the coming years. The Smiths’ worldview, with its bleak diagnosis of national decline and its stubborn refusal to look away, has aged into something like prophecy. A politician shaped by that music, who has spent two decades in public life trying to translate its energy into policy, may be precisely what the moment requires. Or it may be a sentimental dead end. The next election, whenever it comes, will offer some indication.
