The most Leveson-minded prime minister ever to reach No 10
Burnham called Leveson Part Two “non-negotiable” in 2016 and said this year he would revive it if he “had the influence”. Publishers should be reading the green paper timetable.
Andy Burnham became UK Prime Minister without a contest, a challenge or a televised debate, and, as the Spectator noted with some alarm, without taking press questions at either of the set-piece moments of his rise: his by-election victory and his “No 10 North” policy speech. For most incoming prime ministers that would read as ordinary media management. For this one, the national press is entitled to wonder whether it is a preview.
Burnham is the most committed supporter of press regulation ever to enter Downing Street. In 2016, as shadow Home Secretary, he called Leveson Part Two “non-negotiable” and wrote to ministers demanding it proceed, telling Radio 4: “The Government’s only done half the job.” This year, before the leadership crisis broke, he said of the abandoned inquiry: “I haven’t given up on that”, adding that he would revive it if he “had the influence”.
He now has the influence.
The motive is foundational, not tactical
Most politicians’ views on press regulation are positions. Burnham’s are biography. His politics were forged in the Hillsborough campaign, and his view of the national press, above all The Sun, was forged there too. The campaign that made him, the fight to overturn a false narrative that a newspaper printed and defended for decades, is not an episode he can be lobbied out of. When he linked press reform to Hillsborough in 2016, he was describing the foundation of his public life.
That distinguishes him from every predecessor who inherited the Leveson question. Cameron commissioned the inquiry and shelved its second part; the May government formally abandoned it in 2018, over Sir Brian Leveson’s own objection, and saw off a High Court challenge to that decision; Johnson, Sunak and Starmer had no appetite to reopen it. Burnham arrives with the opposite problem: a personal commitment made repeatedly and in public, and a government to run.
The battle lines were drawn before he got the job
The lobbying began weeks before the removal van reached Downing Street. Hacked Off has been open about its hopes; Hugh Grant has pressed the case in person. On the other side, the Telegraph has already run the “war on journalism“ counter-offensive: a panic its critics note is not disinterested, given the paper’s deputy chairman sits on the board of the company that funds IPSO, the industry’s self-regulator. An unnamed industry source has warned that if the government’s media green paper were “hijacked to advance a press regulation agenda”, it would undermine the stated aim of combating misinformation.
That green paper is where intention will first meet timetable. Lisa Nandy’s consultation, launched on 23 June with proposals to make “trustworthy” news prominent in social feeds, closes on 31st August landing directly on the new prime minister’s desk. Prominence for trusted news could be commercially significant for national and local publishers alike. It could equally become the vehicle for a standards agenda, depending on who defines trustworthy and how. The Press Recognition Panel has already welcomed the paper in terms the industry will not enjoy. Whether Nandy keeps DCMS in this week’s reshuffle, and who gets it if she does not, is not a detail this time.
What he could do, and what it would cost
The instruments vary in price. Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act, the costs-shifting provision publishers spent a decade fighting, was repealed by the Media Act in 2024; restoring it would require primary legislation and a bruising parliamentary fight. Reconvening Leveson Part Two, by contrast, is a decision, not a bill. An inquiry into historic press conduct could be restarted by a government that wanted one.
But wanting one and affording one are different things. Burnham takes office with Labour only just drawing level with Reform after a year behind, a cost-of-living agenda he has promised to put “front and centre”, and limited capital to spend on a fight with the national press that most voters stopped following in 2012. Publishers betting on his restraint has the political arithmetic on their side. The arithmetic, though, is the only part of this that moves.
The paradox: their examiner may also be their defender
There is a second file on the new prime minister’s desk, and it points the other way. The Starmer government’s stance on AI and copyright (the opt-out proposal, the refusal to legislate transparency) united news publishers and the wider creative sector against it. An open letter is already urging Burnham to ditch the policy; a Lords committee sketched the alternative in March, a licensing-based framework in which AI developers pay for what they ingest. Burnham has no personal investment in his predecessor’s position and every cultural instinct pointing the other way. It would cost him little to give publishers the copyright settlement they have spent three years demanding.
The prime minister most likely to reopen the question of how newspapers behave is also the one most likely to defend what they own. Publishers could find their conduct examined and their copyright protected by the same government. No occupant of No 10 has offered them both at once, and how the industry plays it, which fight it picks, which gift it accepts, will be a story in itself.