My old friend Andy Burnham's shift from devout Blairite to hard-Left class warrior is driven by naked ambition: TOM HARRIS

Back in September 2002, Yates’s Wine Lodge was a Blackpool institution: packed, raucous and not for the faint-hearted.

And for three Labour MPs looking for sanctuary from the buzz and noise of the Party Conference at the nearby Winter Gardens complex one weekend that month, it was the perfect spot for a quick pre-lunch drink.

We had been MPs for just over a year – me, Kevin (now Lord) Brennan and Andy Burnham – and, as we stood around that sticky table, cool pints of 11am lager in hand, we were contemplating the future.

Each of us was still wide-eyed about politics in those days, less jaded than we were to become. But above all we were ambitious – one of us most of all.

That day, we made a solemn promise to watch each other’s political backs. And we also agreed to help each other avoid the bear traps that lie in the path of every parliamentary career.

Which brings me to today. I have avoided criticising my old friend Andy Burnham in the public prints: I wanted to see how he actually decided to govern as PM, judging him by his actions.

But after his deeply worrying speech to his own Labour Party conference on Tuesday, I can no longer keep my counsel. Quite frankly, the address was a betrayal of the values that the three of us once held dear.

Back then, Burnham was a genuine New Labour devotee: a supplicant and a semi-protege of Tony Blair. He believed in the project to modernise the Labour Party, to make it acceptable to Middle England, to rid it of the hardline socialist forces that had so impoverished our country in preceding decades.

Andy Burnham delivers his keynote speech at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool

This week, however, I watched Burnham’s final transformation into a strident class warrior, gripped by the delusion that everything that happened to Britain under Margaret Thatcher – and then under Blair and Gordon Brown – was ‘a wrong turn’.

He appears to have undergone a Damascene conversion to the hard-Left: a transformation all the more potent and dangerous because he is a man schooled in the dark arts of New Labour spin.

So how has it come to this? The answer is obvious: naked personal ambition.

It was clear to me all those years ago that Andy was the most natural politician in our trio: the one most likely to rise to Cabinet level and even – with a little luck – to one of the great offices of state.

He certainly didn’t lack self-belief. And unlike the other favoured sons of the 2001 intake, such as the future Foreign Secretary David Miliband, Andy was working-class.

But he did not romanticise his background in those days, as he does today. And he struck me as a genuine pragmatist who, like any good Blairite, believed in market forces.

I remember one afternoon in 2005, by which time Andy had reached Minister of State level (one down from Cabinet minister) at the Department of Health. He appeared perfectly comfortable working in a ministry run by the arch-Blairite Patricia Hewitt. And I was in a particularly good position to observe him, as I was serving as Patricia’s parliamentary private secretary (PPS) at the time (the lowest rung on the ministerial ladder).

When the privatisation of the important body NHS Logistics was being mooted, Andy – far from being the red-blooded socialist we saw on display in Liverpool this week – nodded emphatically in agreement.

Indeed, he was so enthusiastic about introducing market forces into the NHS that one Labour wag used to advise everyone against leaving a pen on the table after ministerial meetings lest Andy decide to privatise it.

It was only when the electorate, in its wisdom, relieved Labour of the burden of government in 2010 that Burnham the born-again socialist emerged.

After two unsuccessful bids to lead the party, he found himself working under that idiotic Marxist Jeremy Corbyn – a man who represented the very antithesis of the political moderation the young Andy had once championed. For whatever reason, Burnham appears to have swallowed every drop from the Corbynist cup.

Few of us who first worked with Andy the Blairite all those years ago would ever have predicted the extraordinary metamorphosis in his politics.

Privatisation, deregulation and tax cuts, despite the manifest boon they have conferred on Britain’s long-term economic growth and international standing since the 1980s, he now disowns as ‘neoliberal’.

Today, Burnham waxes fond on the 1970s, a decade he barely remembers: one of stagnant growth, hyper-inflation, record levels of strike action and humiliating International Monetary Fund bailouts. So much for the good old days.

Even the sell-off of the nation’s council houses to the people who lived in them he now insists was a sign of failure: Burnham referred in his Liverpool conference speech to those homes as ‘lost’, as if changing their ownership meant they had been demolished or filled with concrete, rather than still providing housing for tenants and owner-occupiers no longer beholden to their local council.

Andy Burnham, then health secretary, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown pictured in 2010

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Burnham chooses to ignore the fact that Labour’s 1979 manifesto stated that the party didn’t oppose selling off council homes to their tenants. Now, under his administration, the dream of home ownership for many will be constrained by Labour’s insistence that any new homes built by local authorities will be available for rent only.

This obsession with the state as the source of all benevolence continues in his push for nationalisation of public services such as water.

With virtually no mention of how such a programme is to be funded, we are clearly in for a tax-and-spend bonanza the likes of which we have not seen since the ignominious days of the last Chancellor called Healey.

Even Andy’s old boss, Jeremy Corbyn, now sitting as an Independent, must look at his former lieutenant with amazement as he digests his transformation from capitalist shill to red-blooded socialist.

I still remember the young Andy Burnham fondly and I believe that, deep down, he’s a nice bloke. I wish I could give him the benefit of the doubt. But a fundamental element of Blairism, to which he used to subscribe so faithfully, was a clear-eyed acceptance that Labour corporatism in the 1970s had failed the country, and that many of Thatcher’s reforms were not just needed but were welcome.

The government that he and I served didn’t depart from that principle – because we believed it to be right.

Abandoning it now is a disastrous surrender to a socialist creed whose implementation has always and everywhere failed throughout history. Trust me, Andy: It will fail again. And bring you down with it.

Tom Harris is a former Scottish Labour MP and Transport Minister