The poet Blake Morrison - pictured - has highlighted, in an article for the Guardian, that Labour's expected new leader and prime minister, Andy Burnham, is a fan of the working-class poet Tony Harrison, who died last year.

Burnham, who studied English literature at Cambridge, recently attended an event at Salts Mill in Shipley celebrating Harrison's life and work. Morrison said: "Burnham was introduced to Harrison’s poetry as a sixth-former. An English teacher at his school put him on to V, Harrison’s long poem, set in a Leeds graveyard, which became infamous after Richard Eyre dramatised it for Channel 4. The Conservative MP Gerald Howarth attempted to get the broadcast (and broadside) banned for its use of four-letter words, which the Daily Mail described as a 'torrent of filth'. V recounts the poet’s confrontation with a skinhead who has sprayed graffiti on headstones, a young man with whom he turns out to have quite a lot in common.

"To the teenage Burnham the existence of the poem was proof that a working-class background, which he and Harrison shared, needn’t silence or disadvantage you. The poem has an epigraph from Arthur Scargill: 'My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.' Burnham quoted that to his father, who was sceptical about his son reading English at university (what use would a degree like that be?). The quote did the trick. He went on to study at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge."

Morrison adds that Burnham believes that  "a knowledge of Chaucer (another favourite of his), Shakespeare, Orwell and Harrison has done him no harm on people’s doorsteps, he thinks. In 2015 he even confessed to wondering whether he’ll write poems himself one day 'when politics has run its course for me.' "

In the article Morrison addds: "Andy Burnham will be judged not on his ability to quote poems or write his own but on what he does for the UK over the next two years and perhaps beyond. But I trust he’ll keep Harrison’s V firmly in mind. When the bereaved poet is “going to clear the weeds and rubbish / thrown on the family plot by football fans” he finds the word “UNITED” graffitied on his parents’ headstone. A message about ending division isn’t what the skinhead had in mind; he’s a Leeds United supporter. But Harrison takes heart all the same: he knows “what the UNITED that the skin sprayed has to mean” and imagines an end to “all the versuses of life”, the class, economic and ethnic differences that split the nation, “the unending violence of US and THEM”.

Morrison adds: "The versuses have got much worse since Harrison published his poem 41 years ago. And even at the time, he admitted, the prospects for ending them weren’t good. But that’s Burnham’s task: to unite this horribly divided country. With what he’s learned from poetry, he’ll maybe have a chance."

Andy Burnham is also a long-standing admirer of Philip Larkin. A separate Guardian profile records that after graduating with a 2:1 from Cambridge, and returning home at the age of 21, Burnham wrote to the Guardian to complain that Philip Larkin had not made the newspaper’s league of great poets. “Wearing the odd cycle-clip and drinking a pint of beer or two doesn’t stop you from writing great poetry,” he wrote. “I hereby proclaim Larkin’s Love Songs in Age as the century’s greatest poem.” 

Footnote: Blake Morrison could also have mentioned that a previous, recent Labour leader also has a fondness for poetry. Jeremy Corbyn confessed to penning verses before becoming party leader, and after he resigned following his election defeat in 2019, edited an anthology with trade unionist Len McCluskey to which he contributed a long poem about refugees.  

Background: Poet-playwright Tony Harrison dies aged 88