Sarah Brown called Gordon her hero, Samantha Cameron insisted David was “incredibly funny”, while Akshata Murty said Rishi was her best friend. When Marie-France van Heel spoke about her husband, Andy Burnham, in a rare public interview a decade ago, she joked that she had noticed his “good looks … and monobrow”. The spousal humanising of a party leader is a well-worn political tool, but van Heel is likely to be a very different prime ministerial partner.
The former senior marketing executive is poised to play a more significant role in promoting Britain than any other spouse in the last two decades, stepping up her political engagements after stepping back from her own corporate career. Van heel has chosen a political adviser to help her navigate the role at home and promote the UK’s interests overseas, the Guardian understands. She has shifted her role at Be.EV, an electric vehicle-charging network based in Manchester, quitting her job as chief customer officer to give her schedule more flexibility, while remaining on the company’s board.
While it is standard for the partners of prime ministers to have taxpayer-funded office support, van Heel has taken on a former special adviser to a cabinet member and is expected to play a more significant role behind the scenes than the previous prime minister Keir Starmer’s wife, Victoria, who continued her work in occupational health for the NHS throughout her husband’s tenure. Last week, she travelled with Burnham to the UN general assembly in New York, attending a lunch hosted by the US first lady, Melania Trump, as well as holding meetings with Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, and the Canadian prime minister’s wife, Diana Fox Carney. The UK is holding the G20 presidency next year and the G7 presidency the year after, and van Heel is seen as a valuable addition to the UK’s diplomatic vanguard.
At the Labour party conference this week, she posed for photos with the Labour Asians Society and attended a fringe event on apprenticeships. One gushing corporate communicator later wrote that she had spent half an hour making apprentices “feel like the most important people in the room”, adding that she was “a total class act”. Van heel and her team are now speaking to charities and leaders and weighing up how to make best use of her “impressive” personality and professional experience to champion causes.
They will be lucky to have her, said Rose Caldwell, the chief executive of Plan International UK, where van Heel was a trustee until July. In a campaign video for his mayoral campaign, she asked the future PM if he remembered his response to her question about what he wanted to do with his life. And I left the room at that point.” After almost a decade in Manchester, van Heel is something of an unknown quantity in Westminster, but insiders say she has already impressed staff behind the scenes.
Speaking to Elizabeth Day for the How to Fail podcast, he said that his wife of 26 years was “forthright” when she thought he had got something wrong. When he told van Heel he was planning to run to be Labour leader earlier this year, after failed bids in 2010 and 2015, she did not hold back. Why again?’” Burnham said.
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