Clara’s Verdict
Head North is a political book with an unusual afterlife. Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram published it in March 2024, when both were mayors making an argument from outside Westminster about how power in Britain is distributed. Two years on it is charting on Audible UK again, for reasons that have very little to do with the book and everything to do with where its senior author now sits.
That makes it a peculiar and rather valuable listen. Ten hours and twenty-five minutes of two politicians explaining, at length and without the compression of a broadcast interview, what they believe is wrong with the British state and what they would do about it. Whether you find that inspiring or infuriating will depend entirely on your own politics. What is not in question is that it is a fuller statement of intent than any manifesto is ever permitted to be.
About the Audiobook
Published by Trapeze on 7 March 2024, running a little over ten hours. The book is structured as a conversation between Burnham and Rotheram, covering the experiences that shaped them, including the Hillsborough disaster, their years in Westminster and what they saw of its systematic flaws, their move to city-region mayoralties, and their confrontations with Boris Johnson’s government during the Covid-19 pandemic. Out of all that comes a ten-point plan they present as a way to rewire the country.
The substance is devolution: an argument for spreading political and economic power out of London, and a sharp assessment of what the levelling up agenda actually delivered. It is a case made by two people who have run city regions and can point to specific things that did and did not work, which lifts it well above the general run of political memoir. They are also candid about the personal history behind the politics, and the book is at its most persuasive when the argument grows directly out of that history rather than being asserted alongside it.
One thing to be aware of before you start, since the listing may confuse you. The description now refers to Burnham as Prime Minister, and one recent reviewer notes with evident satisfaction that one of the authors currently holds that office. The book itself was written and recorded in 2024, from the vantage point of a mayor. Do not come to it expecting a programme for government written in office. Come to it as the argument a man made before he had the power to act on it, which is arguably the more revealing document of the two. The publicity is stacked in capital letters on the listing: Gordon Brown calls it “A PATH-BREAKING BOOK”, the Observer reduces it to “A CLEAR PLAN”, and the Telegraph bills it as “THE BOOK THAT REVEALS BURNHAM’S BLUEPRINT FOR GOVERNING”.
The Narration
The narrator field on this listing is blank, which is a small failure of metadata, because the answer is sitting in the description itself. Head North is read by Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram. For a book of this kind that is not a nicety, it is the entire proposition. An argument about regional power, delivered in the accents of the regions in question, by the two men making it, carries an authority no hired reader could supply.
Both are practised public speakers, and the risk with practised public speakers is the obvious one: platform cadence, the rhythm of a conference speech, applied to ten hours of prose that does not need it. They mostly avoid the trap, largely because the conversational structure keeps pulling them back towards ordinary speech. The alternation between two voices is also a genuine structural help across a listen this long, giving the ear a change of texture every few sections and making it easy to keep track of who is arguing what. Burnham is the more fluent reader of the two; Rotheram is the warmer. The Hillsborough passages are where the self-narration justifies itself completely, and I will say no more about them than that they are delivered without any performance whatsoever.
What Readers Say
The average sits at 4.6 across a modest pool of ratings, and the written responses divide along the lines you would predict, with the notable feature that even the qualified ones are warm. T, writing in July 2026, finds the book newly relevant and says it “Clearly demonstrates why PLP backed him”, reading the current run of policy announcements back into the framework the book sets out. That is a specifically 2026 way of listening to a 2024 book, and it is probably how most of the current audience is approaching it.
Likebuyer calls it “An eye opener into the awful manipulations and workings of Westminster.” and argues it should be read right across the political spectrum. The most measured response comes from Norma Young, who at four stars describes it as a good read from two local politicians and adds the observation I found most useful of all: “Love the interpretations of a subject from 2 very different people sharing similar values.” That two-voice quality is exactly what distinguishes this from a solo political memoir, and it is the thing the audio edition captures best.
Who Should Listen?
Anyone who follows British politics with more than casual interest should hear this, and that includes people who disagree with every word of it. Books setting out a governing philosophy in detail, before the compromises of office arrive, are rare and useful documents, and the ten-point structure means you can engage with the arguments individually rather than swallowing or rejecting the whole thing. It will also reward listeners in the North and in the Manchester and Liverpool city regions specifically, since a great deal of the evidence is drawn from there.
It is a partisan book and does not pretend otherwise, so anybody hoping for a balanced survey of devolution policy will need to read around it. The middle sections, where the ten points are worked through in policy detail, also ask for real attention, and this is not a background listen while you do something else. Approached properly, it offers a detailed account of how one of the country’s most prominent politicians believes Britain should be rewired.
