As Andy Burnham campaigned for election as the new MP for Makerfield, setting out on an inevitable path to becoming Britain’s prime minister, he presented himself as a straightforward, man-of-the-people politician.
After the chicanery, deceit and incompetence of recent governments, here was a bloke the electorate could do business with. He likes football, chips, The Smiths and whichever left-ish policies he thinks suit the public mood that day. In short, a no-nonsense leader in waiting. What the voters see, he suggests, is what they will get.
One mystery remains, however, right by Burnham’s side: his wife, Marie-France van Heel, sometimes known as Frankie or just by her initials, MF. Despite the intense scrutiny of her husband in recent weeks, Van Heel remains enigmatic. She has given few interviews, none recently. She has purged the internet of social media profiles. Those close to her rebuff or ignore the queries of journalists, although reports cite friends who describe her as a “beautiful, very gentle and highly intelligent” woman who speaks three languages.
Despite Van Heel’s apparent desire to remain in the background, when Burnham arrived in London on June 22, ready to claim British politics’ highest honour after his byelection win, his wife, with whom he has three children, was right there in the taxi with him.
One close friend of the family says: “I think she sums up the line ‘behind every successful man is a strong woman’. She stays out of the limelight but is clearly Andy’s rock, who adores her kids. Fashionable but extremely funny and personable. Marie-France is just one of us, no airs and graces. A people’s person.”
Burnham met the Dutch-born Van Heel in 1989, when they were both students at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Burnham was in his second year studying English. After a childhood split between Belgium and Holland, Frankie was a fresher, one of a group Burnham was “excited to impress”. Having bonded over a shared love of The Smiths, the pair started dating. Like Burnham, Van Heel was keen on football and captained a women’s team during her time at university.
In a film recorded years later, Van Heel said Burnham told her he wanted to be an MP the night they met. “I left the room at that point,” she recalled. But not for long, it seems, as his “long hair, good looks and monobrow” proved irresistible.
Professor John Mullan, who taught Burnham for all three years of his Cambridge degree, this week recalled his entrance exam in December 1987. “[Burnham had] smart clothes, a north-west (was it Liverpool?) accent, considerable verbal confidence,” Mullan recalled last month. He also remembered that Frankie was “the coolest girl in the college”, and that “when Andy became her official boyfriend (his fellow students all seemed to imagine that she had chosen him), there was some surprise and a feeling that he had scooped the [football] pools”.
After a few years, their relationship had an unusual interruption when Frankie – reportedly with Andy’s blessing – submitted to the matchmaking skills of host Cilla Black on TV dating show Blind Date in 1992.
Burnham watched the program “from behind the sofa” as Van Heel went to Gibraltar with “Will from Surrey”, a man in dungarees who claimed to write poetry in the shower, but they failed to hit it off. (“Luckily for me, she preferred me,” Burnham said later.) In his post-date interview, Will describes her as a cold fish. She responded by saying: “He thought I was a fish because I didn’t jump on him and rip his clothes off.”
When the footage was played to the audience in front of them and Black, Van Heel threw a cushion at him. “She completely lost her s—,” he tells The Telegraph, recalling the confrontation three decades later. Afterwards, he claims, she told him backstage: “F— off, I never want to see you again.”
Ironically, “Will from Surrey” (otherwise known as Will Harris) ended up working for the Conservative Party, and 11 years later, Burnham and Van Heel were together in a parliamentary bar when he walked in as director of communications for the Tories.
Harris has since suggested Burnham and his partner’s politics were similar from the off, describing Van Heel as “clearly left-wing – from the Miliband set” when they met on Blind Date.
“We had some mutual friends from Cambridge. She was a nice girl, but she had a passion even then,” he recalled, adding that she already talked about “a guy called Andy” in “quite an admiring tone” at the time of their trip to Gibraltar (it was, says Harris, “a bit naughty” that she went on Blind Date despite having a boyfriend). “When I ran into her a few years later she was equally admiring – praising Andy for how he was getting on politically. She is a real trooper when it comes to being the political wife.”
She and Burnham were married in 2000. Their son, Jimmy, had been born earlier that year and the couple have two daughters, Rosie and Annie, in their early 20s. They had been living in Brixton when Jimmy was born, but in 2001, Burnham was elected MP for Leigh, in Greater Manchester, and they moved back up north, where the girls were born.
All three children were educated at St Edmund Arrowsmith, a Catholic state school in Ashton-in-Makerfield. Today, the family is said to be close and also has a bichon frise, Axel. A friend says Van Heel “loves country walks”, with a beer in a pub at the end to tempt her husband.
Van Heel’s Blind Date appearance, she said later, was part of an early attempt to break into TV presenting.
“I thought that appearing on a TV dating show might raise my profile and help my career,” she said in a 2023 interview with one of her employers, Heavenly, a branding consultancy. “Twenty years of intermittent mickey-taking was the result, but I’m happy to embrace my 15 minutes of fame/shame!”
But her TV ambitions were soon jettisoned for a career in marketing, which later took on a more environmental focus. She worked for BSkyB for years before starting her own company, MVH Marketing, in 2008. It was dissolved three years later, after which Van Heel became chief strategy officer for Heavenly. Among her branding work she was involved in the designs for England Rugby and the BBC. Some credit her with her husband’s distinctive campaign posters, which often feature a cartoon of him in his trademark suit and dark T-shirt.
In recent years, she has been the chief marketing officer for Iduna, a company that owns large parts of Manchester’s electric vehicle charging network.
Van Heel has taken on charity work alongside the day job. She is on the board of Plan International UK, which works to improve gender equality, and has previously advised organisations including the Alzheimer’s Society, Marie Curie and Great Ormond Street Hospital. She is typical of the modern political spouse, who has a career outside politics at least as successful as her partner’s within it.
Part of Van Heel’s desire for privacy may stem from the experience of losing her sister, Claire, who died of breast cancer at 39, leaving four children behind. A friend told The i Paper: “The perspective one gains from a tragedy of this kind … encouraged her to try to avoid the attention that can surround the wives of politicians.”
After her sister’s death, Van Heel herself had a preventative double mastectomy in 2010, when testing confirmed she had a faulty gene that can increase the risk of breast cancer.
She has also experienced unpleasant press scrutiny. In 2009, she and Burnham attended the unveiling of a statue of the Queen Mother. Van Heel’s appearance, and choice of clothing, were raked over by a tabloid newspaper.
In the same year, it emerged that Burnham had, in 2005, told what was then the parliamentary fees office that Van Heel would divorce him if he wasn’t reimbursed for £16,000 ($30,800) worth of renovations on a London flat he was buying. The claims, which included a new kitchen, had been repeatedly rejected beforehand but were eventually paid.
Later, having recently remortgaged their family home to buy a “nest egg” flat in south London, Burnham tried to put the costs of that property – including two mortgages, refurbishment, furnishing and legal bills – through the parliamentary expenses system. A review of the Telegraph expenses files reveals that when the claims ran into trouble, it was Van Heel who took up the baton, faxing detailed notes, “on behalf of Andy Burnham MP”, to parliamentary officials, asking them to approve expenses they had previously rejected.
Quizzed about his expenses after they became public in 2009, Burnham said his claims had been “limited to the unavoidable extra costs of living away from home”. He was never found to have broken any rules.
While she has consciously evaded the limelight since, Van Heel came close to being embroiled in a political scandal this month when Burnham, who has been a keen advocate for electric vehicles as mayor of Manchester, was criticised for not declaring his wife’s tiny (0.2 per cent) ownership stake in the Iduna business.
Burnham’s response was that he had taken legal advice that concluded he did not need to declare his wife’s shareholding in the company because he had already declared her as an employee and recused himself from all decisions about Iduna and the Be.EV charging network being rolled out across Greater Manchester.
Burnham has insisted his wife “takes no interest in my day-to-day job whatsoever”, but Van Heel has spoken of the toll political life takes on the family, admitting it is a “bit of a balancing act”. When Burnham was running for Labour leader in 2015, he spoke at an event at Soho House. At the end of the talk, an audience member raised their hand to ask a question: it was Van Heel.
“You’re not allowed to ask a question,” Burnham joked. She replied: “I was just going to ask when you’re next home?”
“Umm, a week on Thursday,” he countered sheepishly.
Asked about her response to his Makerfield run, he said it was “probably a two-word answer … probably half joking”. Yet when he prevailed in Makerfield last month she was there, beaming at his side.
The evidence is that she and her husband are on the same page politically. Speaking to the New Statesman this year, Burnham said his wife thought Britain would have stayed in the European Union had he, rather than Jeremy Corbyn, been Labour leader at the time of the referendum.
And before she purged her social media accounts, Van Heel was prone to offering the odd bit of political commentary. On X in 2015, she variously called then MP Boris Johnson an “idiot” and said then minister Jeremy Hunt was “bloody awful”, along with calling for a “military coup” to get the Conservatives out of government. In the Heavenly interview in 2023, she said then prime minister Rishi Sunak’s claim to be a big proponent of green policies had been the last thing that made her “laugh out loud”.
Elsewhere, she has complained about being told to leave the House of Commons for “outrageously” breastfeeding in the gallery. And she described lockdowns as a “COVID omnishambles”. In one work profile, it is said Van Heel’s daughters “keep her on her toes and plugged into the various issues that young women are deeply passionate about”.
For the most part, however, she has been a resolutely non-political figure. Even those who have made a close study of Burnham know next to nothing about his spouse.
“I still know hardly anything about her,” says Joshi Herrmann, founder of the Manchester Mill newspaper, who has interviewed Burnham several times. “I’ve never met her, never heard an anecdote about her, never seen her at an event. She just hasn’t cropped up at all.”
While she has largely kept herself out of the papers, Van Heel has been at her husband’s side for 25 years, as his political fortunes have waxed and waned, through his career as a Labour MP and minister and on to being mayor of Greater Manchester for the past nine years.
Perhaps Victoria Starmer, wife of Burnham’s predecessor, Keir Starmer, represents the best model for the approach she will take moving forwards: visible when the occasion demands, but content to remain in the background, focusing on her family and her own career.
That would certainly fit with her apparent interest in the quiet life, but she may find herself being sucked into 10 Downing Street life all the same. Indeed, if Burnham wants to present himself as a normal-yet-accomplished politician, he may find his bright, devoted, successful, independent wife is one of his greatest assets.
The Telegraph, London
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The ‘coolest girl in college’ behind Andy Burnham’s rise
