Andy Burnham: The King of the North Enters Downing Street — The Fifth Prime Minister of My Career

Yesterday, Andy Burnham accepted the invitation of King Charles III to form a government, and became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Speaking outside Number 10 — no lectern, standing freely in the street in that unmistakably direct Northern manner — he promised a "circuit breaker for Britain." My warmest congratulations to him. It is a remarkable moment for the country, and, I confess, a quietly extraordinary one for me.

In December 2021, Andy sat for me in Manchester. He was then Mayor of Greater Manchester, freshly re-elected, and already carrying the nickname the press had given him during the pandemic: the King of the North. What struck me in that sitting was the same quality the nation has since come to know — an authority rooted as much in conviction as in connection. With his elevation to the premiership, that portrait takes on a new weight. Andy Burnham becomes the fifth British Prime Minister to have sat before my lens.

Andy Burnham: The King of the North Enters Downing Street — The Fifth Prime Minister of My Career (Rory Lewis Photographer)

And here is what makes this one different. Sir John Major, Sir Tony Blair, David Cameron and Theresa May all came to me after their years in office — statesmen in reflection, their legacies already forming. Andy sat for me before his. For the first time in my career, a sitter has walked on from my studio and into Downing Street.

Each of those earlier sittings remains vivid. Sir John Major in 2017 — to this day, none more unique. David Cameron in 2018, one of the most challenging sittings of my career, and again in 2023 upon his unexpected return as Foreign Secretary, when I drew on Sir James Guthrie's meditative statesmen of the First World War. Sir Tony Blair in 2019, the third Prime Minister I photographed, who has since returned to my lens. And Theresa May in 2022, the fourth British leader of my career.

Britain has now had seven Prime Ministers in a decade — and I have photographed five of them. Taken together with my sittings of cabinet ministers, ambassadors, parliamentarians and senior military figures across the UK and the United States, political portraiture has become one of the defining strands of my practice, and this body of work is taking shape as one of the most prolific records of modern political leadership assembled by any photographer working today. I approach it as a historian first. From Holbein at the Tudor court to Guthrie's wartime statesmen, portraiture has always been the first draft of history — the face of power, fixed for those who come after us. That is the tradition in which I try to work, and the responsibility I feel every time a leader takes the chair.

There is a personal thread here too. Burnham was born in Aintree and raised in Culcheth, between Liverpool and Manchester — like me, a product of the North West. That a Northerner of his stamp now stands at the door of Number 10 means something to those of us who grew up between those two great cities.

As it happens, I write this from London, where my studio at Bleeding Heart Yard is open all this week. Should the new Prime Minister wish to mark the opening chapter of his premiership with a formal portrait, the honour would be entirely mine.

Congratulations, Prime Minister.