Beryl Dykes is doing a bit of shopping in Stockport when she spots Andy Burnham and shouts at him across the pavement. “Why did you not get in instead of that daft twit?”

It’s a fair question, one that Andy Burnham admits that he’s spent a long time thinking about, though he’s too diplomatic to point out that he’s still in the daft twit’s cabinet; is, in fact, the daft twit’s shadow home secretary. “Honestly! You must have been able to do a better job than him,” she says. And then: “I thought you would have gone for it again this time.” Burnham smiles. “I think that ship has probably sailed.”

Yet “never say never” might be the motto of Burnham’s career. He’s gone from being an up-and-coming junior minister in Tony Blair’s last government to practically the last man standing in Corbyn’s and having stood and failed in the 2010 Labour leadership election, and stood and failed in the 2015 one, he’s now standing and hoping not to fail in his bid to be the mayor of Manchester.

Don’t you worry about losing again? I ask him. “Of course. It’s a stressful thing to do. But you learn from those experiences and you take stuff from that and bring it into this contest… Though it is quite punishing at times.”

It seems like a bit of an understatement, this. In the current situation, mayor of Manchester is an absolutely plum job: a newly souped-up role in charge of a massive budget with devolved health powers in a staunchly Labour city, plus – and who wouldn’t want this in the current political climate? – an exit route out of the bloodbath currently engulfing the heart of the party. “I did declare my intention to stand in May well before any of this,” he points out when I bring this up. And anyway, first, and crucially, he needs to secure the Labour party nomination in a tough fight against the incumbent, Tony Lloyd, and another local MP, Ivan Lewis. Lloyd has a strong power base, not least from the unions Unite and Unison, which have both come out for him, and both campaigns were well under way before Burnham threw his hat in the ring.

There’s an inbuilt snobbery to Westminster. It doesn’t take well to people with accents

It’s a tense time. He has exactly one week left to reach the 11,574 people in the Greater Manchester area eligible to vote, one of whom, it turns out is Beryl Dykes. She’s been a member of the party her whole life, she tells him proudly.

“Manchester has done well, hasn’t it?” he says to her. “But the other places like Stockport, they need a bit more attention, don’t they?” I hear this several times over the course of the day. Burnham is pitching himself to the doughnut around Manchester, the Oldhams and Boltons and the Wigans, many of which voted Leave, including his own constituency of Leigh.

And he’s good at it. He has an easy way with people and though he’s running late for his next meeting, he stops and chats with Beryl Dykes and her extended family and they joke good humouredly about this and that. He’s a nice bloke, Burnham, even his enemies seem to agree on that. A local boy from an ordinary family who got himself to Cambridge and then, via what was the standard 90s route from researcher to special adviser to safe seat, to the secretary of state for culture and then health.

Those days seem like an awfully long time ago, however, and in recent more fractured times, Burnham’s name has become as divisive as almost anyone’s in politics. A Corbyn victory, Burnham argued in the leadership campaign, would lead to 20 years of Tory rule, but as one by one his cabinet colleagues resigned, Burnham stayed put. A piece in the Daily Telegraph last week was headlined: “Missing, presumed lost: Andy Burnham’s spine.” And one political journalist tells me that “his name is literally a swearword now. That’s what one of his former colleagues in the shadow cabinet told me recently. He’s reviled more than anyone else. He’s hugely pissed off everybody down here and now that he thinks the party’s fucked, he’s leaving. He’s leaving, but he’s not helping. He just appears to be totally in it for himself.”

Another tells me what a nice and genuine man he is and how he really does think he’s acting out of conscience, but then concedes that “he’s got himself into a bizarre position. Clearly he doesn’t want to piss off Corbynistas in the run up to the mayoral election. And he really does believe in loyalty. But at the same time, he knows how rubbish Corbyn is.”

The most generous interpretation, perhaps, is that he’s in a lose-lose situation, condemned for standing by Corbyn, as he would have been condemned if he’d stepped down. You’ve had a lot of flak for it, haven’t you?

Andy Burnham talking with Labour members in Stockport. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

“Yes. People are in different positions right now, aren’t they? The position I’ve taken is highly consistent with what I’ve always done, in that if you remember in 2006, I think it was, there was a kind of effort to remove Tony Blair. When people asked me to take part in that, I didn’t. In 2009, my good friend James Purnell resigned on a local election night [and called upon prime minister Gordon Brown to do the same], and I was asked to take part in that, and I didn’t. I’m pretty consistent in the way that I do these things. I personally fear that there’s a problem where MPs look like they’re trying to dictate an outcome the party is not on board with.”

At the same time, we’re a parliamentary democracy, I say, and if you can’t actually lead the party in parliament, you don’t have a functioning opposition, do you?

“Well, that’s why I wanted the mediated talks, because you’re right, there needs to be a functioning opposition. You’re absolutely right about that. In the midst of all this, I have been doing my job. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I called for a statement on hate crime in the aftermath of the referendum. I called a debate on the legal status of EU nationals and challenged the government to secure the status of EU nationals. I had an urgent question on Orgreave this week. I’ve been trying to do my job, because I do think we need a functioning opposition right now.

“And the rules of the Labour party have changed, by the way. I know you say that it’s all about parliamentary democracy, but the leadership rules changed. The MPs used to have much of the control of the nomination of the Labour leadership, but also a third of the electoral college. That’s now changed. The vote is now a pure one member, one vote. And that’s probably why I lost the last leadership election.”

It’s a sore point. He was first out of the blocks in the last leadership election and favourite to win until Corbyn appeared from nowhere. “Would I have won if the 2010 leadership rules had been in place in 2015?” he asks his campaign manager at one point. His manager nods.

“Which is pretty hard for me to take. Though I still think the rules are right. Not that £3 thing, but it being members of the party deciding.”

But it doesn’t change the fact that here the Labour party is, in what looks like its death throes, at which point you jump ship and hotfoot it up to Manchester. Stay, I say. Fight in the trenches.

“If you don’t mind me saying it politely, I think that represents the old thinking that Westminster’s the be-all and end-all. That you’re nothing unless you’re in Westminster and that’s where everything is happening. I take the view that if Labour stays in Westminster, it’s not going to sort itself out from there. It’s become dysfunctional. It needs to embrace a new way if doing things and the devolution of power to the rest of England is a big opportunity for the party to do that.

“I’ve been entirely consistent over a decade or more in saying, ‘Labour is too London-centric.’ I’ve run two leadership campaigns saying that… and I am ready to leave Westminster and devote myself here.”

Andy Burnham joins Kenny Dalglish and Hillsborough survivors and families in a rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone at a candlelit vigil for those who died in the disaster, April 2016. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Yes, but who wouldn’t want to do that at the moment?

“I think there’s a bit of a contradiction there. You were saying that Westminster is where all the attention is and the glamour is…”

Glamour! There’s nothing glamorous about Labour in Westminster at the moment. It’s a wholly unglamorous shitstorm. But you do actually need senior members of the Labour party to get stuck in and be part of it.

“This is somewhere where I know I can make a difference. Labour is losing its connection in the north. It needs a stronger northern voice.”

One of the political correspondents I talk to tells me a joke about Burnham playing up his roots that he says was doing the rounds during the leadership election: “It was ‘What’s Andy Burnham’s favourite flavour of crisps?’ And the answer was ‘coal’.” This might, though, actually play to his point about the Westminster-centrism. And in fairness to him, he really has stayed rooted to where he came from. He lives in his constituency. His family is there. It’s pretty basic, this, and yet it’s not true of so many MPs. “I’m very lucky. I’m very rooted in my area and I’ve got such support from local people. The people who my kids are at school with, play sport with. There’s a kind of protective environment there and it’s quite special to me.”

Did you consider doing it the other way? Like Cooper and Miliband and Osborne and Clegg and all the other MPs who base themselves in the leafier bits of London and nip up to their constituencies for their surgeries? “Everybody advised me against it. It was kind of the Westminster way, you have your kids down there. I was like, ‘Nope.’ Because my networks are here, my mum and dad, my brothers, my, you know, support system. I never really thought of that.”

And his wife runs a tight ship, I’ve been told. He’s almost impossible to get hold of at weekends and he is clearly very close to the extended Burnham clan. And it’s notable that his greatest political triumph is rooted here too. After a humiliating moment at the 20th Hillsborough anniversary when he was booed and jeered by a crowd of thousands, he came out and fought hard for many years for justice for the Hillsborough families. I watch the YouTube video of his speech in the House of Commons on the day the Hillsborough inquest published its findings and it’s a shame that it wasn’t that Andy Burnham who was around during the leadership campaign. It’s quite brilliant: passionate, moving, properly serious. MPs rarely clap. It’s against the Harry Potter-esque rules that govern the chamber. But at the end, they burst into applause.

Theresa May has nowhere near the decency of Jeremy Corbyn

The problem is that apart from Hillsborough, perhaps, it’s been hard to know exactly what Andy Burnham does stand for. Jonn Elledge, writing in the New Statesman this time last year, wrote that Burnham “brings to mind the quote widely attributed to Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, a leading figure in France’s 1848 revolution: ‘There go my people. I must find out where they are going, so I can lead them.’”

You were very much part of the New Labour project, weren’t you?

“Absolutely and I’m very proud of the many things that we achieved.”

And you’ve gone from that, from the New Labour idea that it’s fundamentally a good idea for Labour to have power, to where you are now, propping up Corbyn.

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t… how?”

By serving as his shadow home secretary, one of the great offices of state.

“Some people have a difference of view about what it means to stand up and fight for the Labour party. There are a lot of people who say you’re not doing that unless you are resigning and protesting. I have a different view. My view is that the Labour party is in a dangerous position. I argued against plunging ourselves into a bitter and divisive leadership contest. I’m still worried about the lasting damage that this will cause.”

And, in fairness, when we get to the coffee shop in Stockport where he’s due to meet a collection of local members, they’re pretty much in agreement with him. There’s obviously been a political calculation made. The leaflet being handed out states he is “a radical mayor… to rival London”, a turn of phrase that suggests he’s borrowing some of Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-establishment glamour, but Liam Hopley, a 28-year-old who’s come along, tells me that he does respect him for his loyalty.

“I think he has shown a willingness to steady the ship and I think that’s really important at a time like this. It’s commendable. I wasn’t sure about him up until a couple of weeks ago. But I think he’s really proved himself.”

It’s a casual meeting, but the crowd of 20 or so actively wants to hear what Burnham has to say for himself and he riffs on his big themes. Manchester versus London. Neglected outer Manchester versus pampered inner Manchester. He hedges on HS2 but speaks keenly about HS3, the trans-Pennine system that’s been proposed to link the major northern cities together, though he won’t actually have the power to do anything to bring this about. And then he outlines what he’d do with the NHS. This is Burnham’s Big Idea. He could, arguably, have decided to run for mayor of Liverpool, where he was born, and where he now, post-Hillsborough, has a solid fanbase, but it’s the Manchester mayoralty that is going to have devolved health powers. And for the one-time secretary of state for health and shadow health secretary, this is what he’s itching for.

He wants to integrate the social care system into the NHS. It’s a policy he’s championed for years, to take social care out of the private sector and into the heart of the NHS, and if he did become mayor of Manchester, he would have the chance to put it into action. However, even just a year ago, he was arguing vociferously against devolved health powers for the region. “I did,” he says. “Because was it right that six weeks before the general election, we hear that the leaders in Greater Manchester have done a deal with George Osborne? We hadn’t been told about it. I hadn’t been told about it [he was shadow health secretary at the time]. That is a clear illustration of what is wrong with Greater Manchester politics.”

The audience in Stockport nods approvingly when he explains his NHS plan. Katherine McDermott, 36, who’s organised the meeting and only joined the party after the election last year, tells me that she’s a huge fan. “Do you want someone who’s just going to jump ship when times get tough? We need someone like him in Manchester. I mean, look what’s going on in Westminster. You can always rely on the Labour party to make things worse, can’t you?”

And Burnham’s politics and desire to make a difference seem to come from a very genuine place. It’s just, perhaps, with him that you also get to see the cogs and wheels of modern politics at work just beneath the surface. In this instance, a sense that he’s trying just a bit too hard to make today’s Andy Burnham fit the narrative demands of this latest chapter in the Andy Burnham playbook: the Westminster refusenik who fought the establishment and is now heading home, where the heart is.

He tells me a bit too emphatically how fed up with “the Westminster shenanigans” he is. You say that, I reply, but you’ve literally spent your entire career engaged in the shenanigans, haven’t you?

“There’s always been facets of it I don’t particularly like. There’s a kind of inbuilt snobbery in the place. It doesn’t take too well to people with accents. The more I’ve seen of this country at close quarters, in terms of the establishment, that frightens me.”

But, Andy, I say, you are the establishment.

“Well, no.”

You were a secretary of state. You can’t get much more establishment than that.

“You’re here today, gone tomorrow as a minister. It’s the permanent civil service, the leading figures in the police, I would include the media in it. If you look at some of the historical injustices we’ve been working on in recent times, what they all have in common is a kind of nexus of power between people in politics, the police, the press and the civil service. And I’ve never felt part of that.”

He almost was, though. And it’s a bit poignant, looking back through some of his older press cuttings. David Blunkett saying he’d put good money on Andy Burnham being prime minister in 15 years’ time. James Purnell and Andy Burnham as the Blair and Brown of their generation. Purnell slipped off and slid seamlessly into a £295,0000-a-year job at the BBC. Don’t you sometimes look at that and think that looks quite nice? I ask.

“I look back at our generation, everyone has kind of... life has thrown us in slightly different directions. But no. No, I’m in this to try and make a difference still, in whatever way I can. Politics has got harder, you’re right that it has. It’s not the world I came into.”

We talk about his leadership campaign. The decisive moment in it, some people argue, was Iain Duncan Smith’s Welfare Reform bill. Harriet Harman urged the party to unite behind it. Corbyn defied the party whip and voted against it. And Burnham, in the popular terminology, “flip-flopped”, going from saying it was “unsupportable” to, well, supporting it. Burnham’s line is that he got the shadow cabinet to change its position and it was that which succeeded in getting a “reasoned amendment” on it. “I do my politics in private,” he said. But it is something he’s thought about a lot, he concedes. “I chose party loyalty. Party unity. Possibly to my cost.”

If you’d followed your conscience, instead of doing the loyalty thing, I point out, the campaign might not have swung against you so decisively. You might have won and if you had been leader of the Labour party, it’s possible you might have campaigned a bit more vigorously for Remain, seeing as how you’re married to an actual European. (His wife is Dutch.)

“A true, real-life European.”

In which case, we might not now have Brexit…

“There’s quite a lot of ‘ifs’ in there.”

He does seem to ponder it though. Has pondered it, in all probability. The Andy Burnham that might have been. A counterfactual that should maybe haunt us all.

He’s forceful and convincing when he talks about loyalty, but he did tell an undercover journalist from the Sun last year that Corbyn would be a “disaster” and it’s noticeable that in the more than three hours I spend with him, he only once, and once only, says one thing in any way positive about the leader to whom he’s so loyal towards.

What do you think of Theresa May? I ask him at one point. You singled her out for praise, didn’t you, in your Hillsborough speech?

“I did. I could only respect how she’d handled herself and her team. It was very impressive.”

More impressive than, say, Jeremy Corbyn?

“Wrong values, wrong party.”

Well, she’s obviously a Tory, I say.

“I would say she’s ruthless in protecting her own.”

But nonetheless in her personal skills? In her leadership ability?

“She has nowhere near the decency of Jeremy.”

That’s it. The ringing endorsement in full. “I’ve been in the cabinet and then the shadow cabinet for 10 years,” he says at one point. “That’s a long time.” It is. And honestly, it’s hard to blame him for wanting out. Especially now.