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Features

The humiliation that turned Andy Burnham from Blairite to union man

The former health secretary’s shift to the left wasn’t a purely cynical move; it’s more personal than that

20 June 2015

9:00 AM

20 June 2015

9:00 AM

As graduates of the country’s best university, most former Cambridge students neither seek nor expect much in the way of public sympathy. Last weekend, however, the frontrunner in the Labour leadership contest, Andy Burnham, attempted to elicit a little.

Describing his journey from a Merseyside comprehensive to Cambridge as the thing which ‘brought me into politics’, he told of his bewilderment when, as a prospective English student, he was asked at his interview, ‘Do you see a parallel between The Canterbury Tales and modern package holidays?’ He was, he said, ‘still pondering what the question meant when I arrived at Warrington...

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