When the Labour leadership contest began, Andy Burnham looked like the choice of the left. Now he is behind – and warning that Jeremy Corbyn could split the party. So how can he regain the initiative?

You need energy, it is becoming increasingly clear, to fight for the Labour leadership. Accordingly, as Andy Burnham heads for an early train from Waterloo to Guildford, he fortifies himself with his campaign drink of choice, Green Goodness (ingredients include: celery; cucumber; spinach) and contemplates the vigour of the man whose surge in the polls poses a serious threat to his hopes of succeeding Ed Miliband: Jeremy Corbyn. “Jeremy is representing a break with politics,” Burnham says. “There are no soundbites, there is no script. It is that which I think people are finding very attractive.

Andy Burnham: timid Labour would not be up to creating the NHS today Read more

“The party is hungry for something different,” he goes on. “It wants a bigger thing. It has been fed this diet of thin, meagre gruel of gimmicky policies. It is hungry. That is why it laps it up.”

Next week, Burnham will publish his leadership manifesto, a move that he insists should not be seen as a relaunch of his campaign. But as he travels to a computer class at the 3AAA Guildford Apprenticeship Academy, he seems, appropriately enough, like a politician in need of a reboot.

When the race got under way, Burnham appeared to be the natural candidate on the centre-left, and poised to win a significant share of the trade union support. But the growing momentum of Corbyn’s surprise success has cost him dearly. Between him, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall, it is Burnham who Corbyn hurts the most. The veteran backbencher – he was first elected in 1983, when Burnham, now 45, was just 13 – is scooping up his rival’s votes at an alarming rate. And, as well as winning the endorsement of Britain’s two largest trade unions, he is packing out meetings of party members and the newly registered supporters who have paid £3 each for the right to vote in the contest.

In the circumstances, you couldn’t blame Burnham if he was a little flat. But whether it’s the result of the energy drink or natural enthusiasm, when he arrives at the academy, he breezes into an IT lesson and immediately sets about teasing Elliott Westlake, a 16-year-old student who is working hard to hone his computer skills.

“You should be watching the cricket,” Burnham tells him after the teenager admits that he had enrolled on the course even before receiving his GCSE results. Then, as if remembering that he is on the campaign trail, Burnham’s tone changes. “I am dead impressed you are here,” he says.

Burnham is in Guildford to show that, under his leadership, the Labour party would recover ground in areas of Britain, such as the south-east of England, where its support has shrunk in the last decade. He also wants to illustrate one of the main themes of his manifesto – the ending of what he calls the “snobbery” of the education system, which values academic excellence over achievements in technical education.

In a brief pep talk to the IT class, Burnham adopts a serious tone as he outlines his vision for education before joking with the tutor about his lesson on computer coding. “I am afraid you lost me there,” he says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Burnham and his fellow Labour leadership candidates during a BBC debate. Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA

Perhaps the fact that Burnham has run for the leadership before helps him to navigate such situations easily, moving naturally from the light to the serious. But despite that expertise, next week is a critical juncture, a vital opportunity to turn around his campaign.

The trouble is not confined to the Corbyn problem: earlier this month, he found himself badly bruised by a Commons vote on the Tories’ welfare reforms. The shadow health secretary admits that he has “taken a hit” after he unsuccessfully challenged the decision by Harriet Harman to support some Tory plans, such as limiting child tax credits to more than two children. Burnham made two powerful interventions at meetings of the shadow cabinet to call on Harman to allow Labour to oppose the bill. The interim Labour leader agreed to table a “reasoned amendment”, but instructed her party to abstain on the bill as a whole.

Corbyn supporters risk return to Labour splits of 1980s, says Burnham Read more

Burnham is painfully aware of the contrast with Corbyn. They both opposed the bill, but his rival was the only leadership candidate to vote against it. “I feel I have probably taken a hit, but I did it for the party’s best interests – I have always done that,” he says. “I would have had to resign from the shadow cabinet. It would have meant leading a rebellion through the lobbies. I wasn’t prepared to do that. I took the view it would be highly damaging to the Labour party. It might have helped my leadership campaign.”

Now Burnham is trying to present that decision as a virtue: his determination to put party unity before personal interest. And that call for unity is now an important part of his campaign. He is warning that if Corbyn wins, Labour could experience a return to the splits of the early 1980s. He doesn’t blame Corbyn personally – indeed, he says that he would like to give his rival a campaigning role. But the shadow health secretary suggests that some of Corbyn’s supporters are playing what he calls a “dangerous game”. He cites, for example, the claim by Dave Ward, the general secretary of the Communications Workers Union, that the left winger would act as the “antidote” to the “virus” of the Blairites.

“That is very provocative and frankly unhelpful,” he says of Ward’s remarks. “There is a factionalism that is bubbling under here which, to his credit, Jeremy has not [endorsed] … There is a risk, though, of a split if people talk in that provocative way.

“I think the language is becoming inflammatory. The CWU showed that. It really doesn’t help to talk in those terms. It just fuels the sense, it just adds fire to the factionalism that is there. That is a dangerous game.”

Unison endorses Jeremy Corbyn for Labour leadership Read more

In a sign of how he has been thinking deeply about the danger of a split, Burnham draws a parallel with the early 1980s, when the “gang of four” broke away from Labour to form the SDP in 1981, and then the Militant Tendency went to battle with Neil Kinnock after his election as leader in 1983. “There are dangers here, there are some echoes of the early 80s. Those should ring loud warnings, alarm bells. At the beginning of Labour’s second term in opposition in the 80s – that is what happened. People thought Thatcher wasn’t going to last. There is a real historical parallel. This is actually the big consideration for people as we get into the final stages of this race. Labour needs to reflect on this, and not go down that path.”

Other candidates and their supporters are not beyond reproach, as Burnham – clearly with supporters of Tony Blair in mind – says that the right can also be guilty of divisive tactics. “There is factionalism on the right of the party and on the left. It is not just on one side.”

In Burnham’s view, his key pledges transcend that division. The two promises at the heart of his manifesto are his plans to break down the barriers between technical and academic education, with fairer funding through a new graduate tax, and his long-held dream of bringing together the health and social care systems. This would be funded through a means-tested levy to be drawn up by a commission along the lines of the groundbreaking report by William Beveridge in the 1940s, which laid the basis for the welfare state. “It will set out the most radical Labour vision since the postwar government,” he says of his manifesto, which will be sent to every Labour party member.

The Labour party and the shifting centre ground of politics in the UK | Letters Read more

Burnham insists that his idea for a levy, dubbed a “death tax” by the Tories, is not a retreat to old Labour certainties, and will appeal in middle England. “The care idea is a policy that reaches the areas Labour needs to reach. It is not about retreating to comfort zones or going hopelessly off in an old 70s Labour direction. This is about saying to those older people in large swathes in the south of England, whose properties on the whole are worth more than other parts of the country, that if you all pay this insurance payment collectively, you can keep the vast majority of what you have worked for.

“If you pay random dementia taxes, as we have at the moment, nobody can give you any guarantees about anything, and you might lose everything. I am absolutely certain that I can sell this policy to those voters – 74% of people over 65 didn’t vote Labour.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andy Burnham announces his candidacy for Labour leadership – video

Critics say that, under pressure from Corbyn, Burnham is veering to the left after launching his leadership campaign in May, when he said Labour needed to address voters’ concerns on immigration and the economy. In a speech last week in Leeds, previewing his manifesto, there was no mention of immigration and just a cursory mention of the deficit.

Burnham insists that there has been no change of tack, and that he had always intended to mention the economy and immigration first, before moving on to other areas. “I can see why people say that,” he says to the charge that he has changed course under pressure from Corbyn. But he adds: “No, all along my plan was what you are seeing: [the way to get] permission to be heard [from the electorate] was by facing up directly to, number one, the deficit, our economic record – much of which we should be proud of.”

When he launches his manifesto, Burnham says, he will have in mind the guiding force behind his politics – his granny. Burnham recalls that when he won selection for his home town in the Greater Manchester seat of Leigh in 2001, his mother asked him to devote his political career to ensuring that elderly people did not have to suffer a repeat of her own mother’s experience in a care home.

“My grandmother walked over fields to get out of inner-city Liverpool to buy her first semi-detached house, the house I was born in. At the end of her life, she was determined to pass it on. She kept talking to me and my brothers. And then it all got slowly washed away by the costs of care. It completely left her heartbroken.”

Andy Burnham will not vote against 'unsupportable' welfare bill Read more

Burnham says the memory of his grandmother – and his decision to root his family in Leigh – means he is not the career politician suggested by a quick glance at his CV. A Cambridge English graduate, Burnham went on to become a special adviser to Chris Smith as culture secretary during Blair’s first term. After entering parliament in 2001, his ministerial career under Blair and Gordon Brown culminated in three cabinet posts, as chief secretary to the treasury, culture secretary and health secretary.

But all the cabinet posts in the world – and even the Labour leadership – pale in comparison with what will always be his proudest achievement: his decision as culture secretary in 2009 to endorse the call by the Hillsborough Family Support Group for an independent investigation into the Hillsborough disaster in 1989. “Nothing I will ever do will bring more fulfilment on a personal level,” says Burnham, a lifelong Everton fan who attended the other FA Cup semi-final on the day of the disaster.

And yet the definitive days of his political life may lie ahead of him. Even as he insists that he has a high personal regard for Corbyn, he is clear about the choice ahead: a credible revival of the spirit of Clement Attlee’s pioneering postwar government under him, and an “undeliverable” package under Corbyn. “It is a big win for Labour party members if this race becomes a competition of alternative big visions for the country,” he says. “From what I know of what Jeremy has been saying – I don’t agree with it, I think it is undeliverable. But I don’t disagree that he is offering some big changes ... This [leadership contest] is not just choosing a personality now. This one feels very much like it is the party choosing its centre of gravity in terms of policy and political direction.”