Andy Burnham Moves In, Starmer Moves Out & Britain Gets Its 7th PM in a Decade | House Tour 2026

On July 20th, 2026, at Buckingham Palace, the handshake that followed, [music] the ceremony known as kissing hands, made him the 59th Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He traveled the short distance back to Westminster, walked through the most photographed front door in Britain, and delivered [music] his first speech on the pavement of Downing Street with his wife Marie-France Van Heel and his mother Eileen Burnham at his side. "We will make this moment a circuit breaker for Britain," he told the assembled press, "bringing forward a new political model and a new economic model." Staff lined the hallway inside number 10 and applauded as he entered. >> [applause] >> The King of the North had arrived at the center of power, and the building he now calls home is one of the most historically extraordinary addresses on Earth, a modest Georgian terrace that conceals, behind [music] its famous black door, approximately 100 rooms, three centuries of British political history, >> [music] >> and the weight of every decision that has shaped a nation. >> [music] [music] >> Today, we're doing something unusual for this channel, >> [music] >> a house tour of a building the public cannot visit on a street the public cannot enter. >> [music] >> We're going inside 10 Downing Street, the cabinet room where Churchill broadcast to the nation, the state dining room [music] that has hosted every serving American president, the private flat on the third floor where UK Prime Ministers try, with varying degrees of success, >> [music] >> to live a normal family life amid the most abnormal of professional circumstances. And we're telling the full story that led to this moment. Why Keir Starmer's promising landslide collapsed within 22 months, who Andy Burnham is, and what made him the obvious answer to Labour's crisis, and what Britain can expect from the man who built Manchester >> [music] >> and now has to build something on a considerably larger canvas. The building at 10 Downing Street [music] is, from the street, one of the most deliberately understated structures in Britain [music] for what it actually contains. A narrow black brick Georgian terrace, a single door bearing the number 10 in brass, >> [music] >> two police officers. That is everything the public sees from behind the gates on Whitehall. >> [music] >> From the outside it looks, as has been noted by almost every journalist who has described it over 300 years, like the kind of London property that an affluent professional might purchase [music] for slightly more than the neighborhood average and consider themselves lucky. It is not that building. Behind the famous bomb-proof black door is a complex of approximately 100 rooms extending far deeper into the Westminster block than the street-facing facade would suggest. As the building's historians have put it, it is something like a TARDIS, considerably larger inside than it appears from the outside. >> [music] >> The front terrace we recognize from every news broadcast is only the entrance to a far larger structure formed when the original terrace was joined to a grand mansion facing Horse Guards Parade in the early 18th century. The building subsequently absorbed most of number 11, traditionally the Chancellor of the Exchequer's official residence, connected through an internal tunnel creating one sprawling governmental campus that [music] its most famous residents have occasionally described as difficult to navigate and impossible to leave feeling entirely normal. Step through the [music] black door and the hallway opens into a space lined with portraits of every Prime Minister who has ever held office. The sitting Prime Minister conspicuously [music] absent from the display, added only after they leave, at which point the frames shift and the line of history extends by one more face. [music] The staircase rising from this hallway carries the unbroken visual record of British governance stretching back to Robert Walpole, the first man to hold the office, who accepted the building as a gift from King George II in 1735 and insisted it be given not to him personally, but to whoever held his position permanently. That condition has held for nearly three centuries. The state rooms occupy the first floor. >> [music] >> The terracotta room, the white room, the blue room, the small dining room, the pillared room, formal reception and entertainment spaces where heads of state have been welcomed, treaties discussed, [music] and press conferences held that have changed the course of international affairs. The state dining room seats up [music] to 60 guests at a formal table. It's walls hung with portraits, its ceiling carrying the decorative [music] plasterwork of a house that has hosted every American president who has visited London since Harry Truman. The cabinet room is the most functionally [music] significant space in the building. A long oval table around which the cabinet meets every Tuesday when Parliament is in session, the Prime [music] Minister's chair positioned at the center of one side, distinguished from all the others by a slightly higher back, the one visible mark of hierarchy in a room otherwise arranged for collective authority. It was from this room in September 1939 that Neville Chamberlain broadcast [music] the words that told Britain it was at war with Germany. The private flat where the Prime Minister's family actually lives sits on the third floor. It [music] is, by universal account of those who have seen it, modest, described variously as cozy, [music] pokey, and smaller than you'd expect by journalists and biographers who have managed brief access over the decades. >> [music] >> Tony Blair and David Cameron both chose to live in the marginally more spacious quarters of number 11. >> [music] >> The garden at the rear of the building spans half an acre adjacent to St. James's Park, providing outdoor space that successive prime ministerial families have used for birthdays, informal [music] gatherings, and in the case of one recent occupant, a series of gatherings that became a political [music] scandal of their own. A kitchen occupies the basement. The head of the British government lives, in practice, [music] in a working apartment above the most consequential office suite in the country. Andy Burnham and his partner, Marie France van Heel, herself a communications consultant who has worked alongside him for years, moved into this apartment on July 20th, 2026. >> [music] >> To understand why Britain has a new Prime Minister today, you have to understand what happened to the previous one and how a landslide election victory [music] of historic proportions unraveled in under 2 years. Keir Starmer entered number 10 on July 5th, 2024, [music] carrying 412 seats in the House of Commons, one of the largest parliamentary majorities in Labour Party history, ending 14 years [music] of Conservative government. The mood outside Downing Street that night was electric. >> [music] >> It felt to many observers like a genuine reset after years of political chaos under successive Conservative leaders, including Boris Johnson's party scandals, Liz Truss's disastrous 49-day premiership, and Rishi Sunak's increasingly desperate attempts to hold together a party that had lost the confidence of the country. What followed across the next 22 months was a collapse of public confidence so comprehensive and so swift that it surprised even Starmer's most pessimistic internal critics. The government [music] faced sustained criticism from across the political spectrum simultaneously. [music] On the right, his immigration policy and tax increases drew condemnation. On the left, his stance on the Gaza war, his welfare [music] reform program, and his refusal to introduce a wealth tax were treated as betrayals. The 2025 local elections delivered poor results. The 2026 local elections were catastrophic. [music] Labour lost more than 1,000 seats on local councils across England in a single night. The internal pressure accumulated through the spring of 2026 until it became irreversible. Cabinet resignations began. >> [music] >> Health Secretary Wes Streeting departed. Four junior ministers resigned, >> [music] >> ministerial aides followed. >> The Prime Minister Keir Starmer is continuing to face [music] down the prospect of a leadership challenge. Pressure is building on Mr. Starmer to step down with four junior ministers resigning joining over AC 7 MPs urging him to quit. >> Over 95 labor MPs had written formally asking Starmer to step down [music] or set a departure timetable. His communications chief resigned. >> It's been another major departure from Downing Street. The executive director of communications, Tim Allan, has quit. >> His chief of staff resigned. The appointment of Peter Mandelson, a figure with [music] documented close associations to the late Jeffrey Epstein, as British ambassador to Washington generated a scandal that required Mandelson's subsequent removal. Andy Burnham's commanding win in the Makerfield by-election on June 18th removed the last meaningful obstacle to a transition of power. >> [music] >> On June 22nd, 2026, Starmer stepped outside the black door and delivered his resignation. He was measured. He was composed. He said he had heard his party's answer about his fitness to lead into the next general election [music] and accepted it with good grace. On July 20th, he delivered a final statement outside the same door before leaving for Buckingham Palace. Today, I am here to offer my resignation and close the book on my time as Prime Minister. >> [music] >> My work is done. He praised Burnham as his successor. He left. [music] What has he left behind? The assessments are genuinely mixed. His defenders [music] point to meaningful achievements, strong protections for working people enacted into law, a measurable reduction in child poverty, sustained support for Ukraine on the international stage, and the stabilization of government machinery after the disorder of the late conservative years. His critics point to failures of communication, >> [music] >> a perceived capture by technocratic management rather than political vision and policy decisions particularly on welfare in Gaza that alienated the very voters Labour needed to hold. At his final Prime Minister's [music] Questions in Parliament, Starmer defended his international record and cited his domestic [music] policy achievements with evident pride. Whether history treats him as a transitional [music] figure who stabilized the country or as a leader who squandered a historic mandate is a question that only time can answer. [music] The man who walked through the black door on July 20th, 2026 is [music] in almost every measurable respect a different kind of Labour leader from the man he replaced. Andy Burnham, born in Aintree, Liverpool in 1970 into a working-class family, [music] educated at Cambridge in a football jersey that his tutor has subsequently mentioned repeatedly in profiles of the man it helped define, has built his entire political identity around the idea that the governing class and the governed is too [music] great and must be closed. He spent 16 years in Parliament under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown holding cabinet positions including [music] Culture Secretary and Health Secretary. He ran twice for the Labour leadership in 2010 and 2015 and [music] lost both times. Then in 2017, he did something unusual for an experienced Westminster politician. [music] He left Parliament and ran for mayor of a city instead. Seven years as mayor of Greater Manchester produced the [music] evidence base that made him the obvious choice when Labour needed someone other than Starmer. His record is specific and documented rather than merely rhetorical. During his tenure, [music] Greater Manchester's economy surged and he oversaw improvements to its public transit network as well as launching a major home building program. >> [music] >> He had a very clear ambition for Greater Manchester, for its economic success, for [music] social inclusion, for everybody being able to live a good life in the city region, his deputy mayor Kate Green told CNN. [music] The Bee Network, his integration of buses and trams under a single publicly controlled system, reversing decades of privatization, became a flagship achievement that is now being studied [music] as a model for other English cities. His pandemic confrontation with Boris Johnson's government, when he [music] publicly refused to accept what he argued were inadequate financial support packages for Northern regions facing lockdown, gave him a national profile and a reputation as a fighter for communities Westminster had historically overlooked. He is, by universal assessment, a significantly better communicator than Starmer. This is really a live experiment in how important the messenger is, one political analyst told CNN. Where Starmer was frequently described as technocratic, managerial, and difficult for ordinary voters to connect with emotionally, Burnham is warm, direct, [music] and plain-spoken in a way that works on television and in town halls simultaneously. [music] His northern working-class identity, emphasized consistently and strategically, positions him as a credible answer to Reform UK's insurgent populism from the right [music] and the Greens' growing appeal on the left. His policy agenda is taking shape. He has pledged what he calls the biggest devolution of power from London [music] to Britain's regions in modern history and has announced his intention to move parts of the Prime Minister's office itself to Manchester. He has vowed the largest [music] social housing building program since the post-Second World War rebuilding period. He has signaled a willingness to review personal income tax thresholds. He wants to put life's essentials, energy, water, public transit, [music] under stronger public control, describing his economic model as a circuit breaker [music] from what he characterizes as the wrong turns of the past 40 years. The challenges he inherits are significant. [music] The economy remains under pressure. The NHS is in chronic distress. A social security cost review is expected to force [music] difficult choices this autumn. Bond markets displayed nervousness at Burnham's appointment, concerned [music] that a more left-leaning leader might abandon the fiscal discipline Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves had maintained. Trump's America has described Britain under Labour as a poverty-stricken disaster, [music] adding an external diplomatic complication to an already complex domestic picture. [music] The next general election is approximately 3 years away. Whether Burnham can arrest Labour's decline, win back working-class voters who have drifted toward Reform UK, and translate Manchesterism from a metropolitan success story into a national governing philosophy, those are [music] the questions his tenure at number 10 will answer. In the building that has now seen seven prime ministers pass through [music] its black door in a single decade, 10 Downing Street has housed Churchill and Thatcher, Blair and Brown, Cameron and May, and Johnson and Truss, and Sunak and Starmer. Now it houses Andy Burnham, the king of the north, the boy from Aintree who wore a football jersey to Cambridge and went on to win Manchester three times before winning Britain. He says he will be a circuit breaker. He says he will build a new economic model. He says he will move the prime minister's office to Manchester. The black door is still there. [music] The 100 rooms are still there. The portraits still shift down the staircase wall as each prime minister comes and goes. So here is [music] the question, does Andy Burnham become the leader who finally breaks Britain's revolving door of political instability, or is the building itself simply [music] too difficult for anyone right now to master? Drop your answer in the comments. >> [music] >> I'm a fool I'm a fool