“I rule it out”: Burnham says he won’t be making a leadership bid

Andy Burnham has been named in several newspapers lately as a possible future Labour leadership candidate, but he was keen to scotch such rumours when he appeared on Marr this morning, saying:

“I rule it out… No, I am [a] Labour loyalist to my core. I am loyal to the leader, and the leader of our party, Ed Miliband, has said, the NHS will be his big priority going towards this election. I am 100% focused on developing a plan for the NHS that can speak to the country and can win the next election for Labour and make Ed Miliband prime minister.”

Whilst this has (rightly) been read as a confirmation that Burnham wouldn’t consider making a move on the leadership before the election (and neither will anyone else – despite a difficult few weeksthere is no appetite in either the PLP or the Shadow Cabinet for leadership change), it’s still thought – despite today’s comments -that Burnham would consider standing for Labour leader in future if the circumstances for such a contest arose.

Burnham was appearing on the show to talk about Labour’s plans for the NHS – especially the recently unveiled one week cancer test pledge. The Shadow Health Secretary said:

“If we want to make progress on cancer in the next decade, early diagnosis has got to be the focus. These plans go back to when I was health secretary, I asked the national cancer director ‘what can I do to make the biggest difference on cancer?’ He came back to me and said ‘early testing and diagnosis’. We then developed these plans for one week tests. We’re coming back to them now because they remain the right thing to do.”

Burnham also attacked the increasing privatisation of the NHS under the coalition government, and suggested he’d like to see a greater shift towards preventative care in the health service.