Andy Burnham to become U.K.’s prime minister Monday after being declared Labour Party leader

Andy Burnham was officially declared leader of Britain’s governing Labour Party on Friday, clearing his final hurdle to taking office as prime minister next week.

The center-left party announced the result of a leadership contest to replace departing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, in which Burnham was the only contender.

The announcement was a forgone conclusion after he secured nominations from 379 of the 403 Labour lawmakers in the House of Commons as of Thursday night.

“We’re going to give them hope back,” Burnham said in his first speech as leader. “This is a proud moment you have given me and my family today, and an emotional one, but it is one for which I am ready.”

Starmer had been under mounting pressure to resign for weeks, following a disastrous round of local elections for his party in early May, but his decision came after a political rival from within Labour. He will remain prime minister until Monday, when he formally tenders his resignation to King Charles III. The king will then ask Burnham to form a government.

Who is Andy Burnham and what are his policy priorities?

Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester, has been prime minister-in-waiting for weeks, but he has revealed little detail about his policy priorities. After winning a special election for a seat in Parliament a month ago, he pledged to build a politics “based on unity and hope” and an economy that spreads growth evenly across the country.

He will arrive in Number 10 Downing Street largely unknown to voters outside Manchester. He has held no press conferences and given few interviews.

Burnham, who will be the U.K.’s seventh leader since 2016, brings a more relaxed style of leadership than the rather stern Starmer, and is regarded as one of the Labour Party’s best communicators. But he faces many of the same problems as his predecessor, including a sluggish economy, a cost-of-living squeeze fueled by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and overstretched public services.

Burnham began sketching out some of his priorities in his first speech as Labour leader, and will say that he will have the “courage to fix the big things that politics has neglected,” his office said.

He will highlight plans to focus on economic renewal, more public control of key sectors and creating new modern industrial jobs, arguing that Britain took “a series of wrong turns in the 1980s” when “political power was centralized and economic power privatized.”

That’s the decade when Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher oversaw policies of privatization, deindustrialization and political centralization that transformed the U.K. economy.

In a social media video posted late Thursday, Burnham said he also would make a priority of tackling the patchy access to social care for those who need it because of age, illness or disability. It’s a pressing issue in a country with an aging population, and one that has foxed previous Labour and Conservative governments.

What has Burnham said about Trump?

Burnham has previously criticized President Trump, accusing the American leader of bringing “instability” to the world.

“The path we’re on, if we are not careful, is a path towards the politics of the United States of America,” Burnham warned on the campaign trail in June. While he didn’t attribute it directly to Mr. Trump, he said Americans were grappling with “a polarized, poisonous politics where people in communities don’t work together anymore.”

Last year, in an interview with The London Economic that included questions about Mr. Trump’s reelection and the rise of right-wing, populist parties in Europe, he said: “I think we now have to have a real debate about what that means and the instability that [former prime minister] Liz Truss brought to Britain, I think Trump is bringing to the U.S. and the world.”