The prime minister’s father, who lived in a care home while suffering from Alzheimer’s, has died.
Andy Burnham has spoken about how his father, Roy Burnham, who was living in a care home, was unaware he was about to become prime minister as a result of his illness.
The experience is one of the driving factors in the prime minister’s aim to reform the social care system.
Mr Burnham had been due to host business leaders in No 10 on Monday afternoon but cancelled all of his engagements on Monday and Tuesday following his father’s death.
Speaking about his father being unaware of him becoming prime minister, Mr Burnham told The Times over the summer: “That’s a sadness because he would be [proud]. The way I look at it, it’s his achievement as well. A whole family achievement although he doesn’t know it.”
But he later told the How to Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast that staff at his father’s care home had shown Roy footage of Mr Burnham entering Downing Street for the first time.
The prime minister said: “Something wonderful happened last week. I went into his care home on Sunday. This was the Sunday after I’d become prime minister, so six days later.
“One of the staff said, ‘Oh, the manager wants to speak to you before you leave’. So I went over and I spoke to her, and she said, ‘We all wanted you to know’.
“I have to be careful here; this does make me quite emotional. She said, ‘We all knew what time you might be coming up Downing Street, so we got Roy in his chair, and we got the telly right in front of him, and six of us stood around him and all said ‘Roy, look’.
“And she said he turned and momentarily, they said, ‘we thought he knew’.”
Mr Burnham has vowed to “grasp the nettle” of reforming the adult social care system, drawing on his father’s experience in care.
In a major speech about reform of social care, Mr Burnham promised to help “my dad and the millions like him” faced with the unfairness of the current system.
He described the “broken social care system” in England as “the worst of all worlds” and said that it is a “massive” priority for the public.
Mr Burnham’s father, who was in his mid-eighties, was a former telephone engineer, first with the Post Office and then with BT.
He and the prime minister’s mother Eileen brought him up in Culcheth, Cheshire, alongside his two brothers.
The prime minister described his “close-knit” upbringing in the Seventies and Eighties in his book Look North.
In the 2024 book, co-written with Liverpool City Region mayor Steve Rotheram, he wrote: “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.
“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.”
Communities secretary Angela Rayner said: “My thoughts are with Andy and his family at this terribly difficult – and sad time.”
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