Andy Burnham cancels engagements as his father’s death is announced

Andy Burnham has cancelled his engagements for Monday and Tuesday after his father, Roy, died.Among other plans, the prime minister had been due to speak to the TUC conference in Brighton on Tuesday.Angela Rayner, the housing secretary, posted her condolences online, saying: “My thoughts are with Andy and his family at this terribly difficult and sad time.”Burnham’s father had Alzheimer’s and was in a care home. In an interview Burnham gave in July, he said his father’s condition meant he was unaware that his son was about to become prime minister.“That’s a sadness because he would be [proud],” Burnham told The Times. “But the way I look at it, it’s his achievement as well. A whole family achievement, although he doesn’t know it.”Burnham has talked about the fact he wants to improve social care in part because of his experiences with his father.In one of his first speeches as prime minister, Burnham said it was humbling to see the “skill and the care and the professionalism” of care workers like those looking after his father, and that they should be paid more.In Head North, the 2024 book he co-wrote with Steve Rotheram, the Liverpool city region mayor, Burnham described what he called a happy upbringing with his father, his mother, Eileen, and his two brothers in Culcheth, near Warrington in Cheshire. Roy worked as a telephone engineer, while Eileen was a GP’s receptionist.“Neither my dad, Roy, nor my mum, Eileen, went to university. But both could have done if they had grown up in a different time and in a different place,” he wrote.“Their knowledge of that fact seemed to make them all the more determined that their three sons would go. But that did not make them pushy parents in any way.“Their approach was one of quiet encouragement and confidence-building. Our family home in Culcheth was always full of music, life, laughter, love and support.”