Andy Burnham joined forces with his wife on the eve of his first Labour conference in Liverpool amid growing unrest among his party’s big beasts.

Marie-France van Heel, whom Mr Burnham met during their time studying at Cambridge, recently quit her job as a marketing executive to support her husband in Downing Street.

And in Liverpool the couple were warmly received by Labour’s faithful, who gathered on Merseyside to dutifully applaud the Prime Minister and his ‘First Lady’ as they embraced outside the conference hall.

Eschewing her previous designer look, a widely criticised £850 Victoria Beckham dress as Mr Burnham swept into power, Ms van Heel was dressed smartly in a burgundy faux leather midi £46 skirt from Next, and matching kitten heels and bag, teamed with a white shirt.

Her husband wore £295 jeans, an £80 T-shirt, a £695 suede Harrington jacket and low-top Adidas £110 Topanga trainers.

Earlier this week Ms van Heel, known as Frankie, attended a lunch hosted by US First Lady Melania Trump while Mr Burnham made his first official visit to President Donald Trump.

She also met Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky's wife Olena and Canadian PM Mark Carney's wife Diana in a meeting at the UN General Assembly in New York. 

She is said to be keen to get to know her opposite numbers ahead of the UK holding the G20 presidency next year and holding the G7 presidency the year after.

Since arriving in Downing Street, she has also joined her husband at the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, as well as the opening of the Bayeux tapestry where she met the King and Queen and Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron.

Ms van Heel had worked for Be.EV, a Manchester-based electric vehicle charging network, since 2024. 

The Prime Minister vowed to create 'hope in every heart' as he arrived in Liverpool from his family home in Warrington, where he went for a run this morning.

Speaking outside the conference hall in front of the party's 'Hope Again' slogan, a defiant Mr Burnham, in his trademark all-black 'working man's' outfit, spoke to the press with his hands on his hips.

He promised to set the UK on a new course because the decade since the Brexit vote had resulted in 'too much drift and too much division' and said 'we need to draw a line under that.'

Renewing his 'good growth in every postcode' guarantee, Mr Burnham said: 'We're going to make this a really important week where we set out a new direction for the country.'

He said his vision would leave 'people able to have hope again that things will improve, that life will get better – and it will'.

He also said it was a 'proud' moment for him to walk up to his first party conference as leader and PM, saying: 'My grandad drove a lorry for Tate & Lyle up and down these docks. I wonder what he would make of this right now.'

Everton fan Mr Burnham added: 'I love coming to Liverpool on a Saturday, normally to support the Blues, but we're all supporting the Reds today, aren't we?'

Accustomed to the need for grit at the Hill Dickinson stadium, Mr Burnham is likely to require all his resilience and energy to fight off growing unrest this week from senior party figures who have challenged him and have sniped publicly at each other.

Former Business Secretary and Streeting supporter Peter Kyle said the PM was not doing enough to boost economic growth, while former Deputy PM Angela Rayner lashed out at the Home Secretary's plans to lengthen the time before foreign care workers could claim settlement rights.

Speaking to the BBC, Mr Kyle suggested the Government needed to make more short-term decisions to boost growth, like slowing the rollout of new workers' rights.

'We might need to look and have honest conversations with unions about how we sequence some of the rights going forward to make sure that we get growth into the economy in the shorter term,' he said.

Meanwhile, communities secretary Ms Rayner said increasing the timeline for permanent residence from five years to 15 years for foreign social care workers and applying it retrospectively to all those who have come to the UK since 2021 would 'change the goalposts'.

She has previously called Shabana Mahmood's migration proposals, which have been welcomed by others on the right of the party, 'un-British'.

Ms Rayner's increasingly vocal opposition, which is supported by others within the party and the growing unrest at the Government's economic plans – or lack of them – ahead of next month's Budget could cause a headache for the PM, curtailing his honeymoon period.

The backbiting continued when Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy hit back at Mr Kyle, suggesting Mr Burnham was moving faster than Sir Keir Starmer did as Prime Minister.

She told BBC Radio 4's Today programme Mr Burnham was 'impatient for change, and he thinks big about the sort of change that the country needs'.

With the PM also ruling out an early snap election in pre-conference interviews, saying he wanted to 'knock dead' rumours of one, party chair Bridget Phillipson also sounded a note of caution about winning the next election despite Labour's initial poll boost since Sir Keir Starmer was toppled.

Speaking to the Press Association today, she acknowledged the PM's role in boosting polls as thanks to his 'real sense of connection' but said the party recognised it had a 'massive fight on our hands with Reform, with the Tories'.

As polling showed a snap election would not give any party a majority but Labour the largest share with Reform and the Tories neck and neck, she said:

'We've got a big fight on our hands come the next election and I don't underestimate that challenge for one second, but there's a real sense of purpose and energy as conference gets underway.'

Commenting that 'the only poll that will matter is the one that happens on election day in 2029,' she added: 'What we have seen with Andy Burnham is a real sense of connection with the public, taking things to the next level. That hope, that optimism, that sense that Britain's best days lie ahead of us.'

But the unrest did not seem to distract Mr Burnham and his wife on Merseyside today as the couple projected a united front.

Both 56, they have two sons and a daughter and bonded over a shared love of indie band the Smiths after meeting in 1989.

But their early romance had to overcome an unusual hurdle, when Frankie asked her boyfriend whether she could appear on ITV show Blind Date in January 1992 - leading to a distastrous Gibraltar trip and her potential match calling her a 'cold fish'.

Mr Burnham had agreed to the televised appearance, though later told of watching the primetime Saturday night episode worriedly 'watching through my fingers' and from behind the sofa.

Dutch-born marketing executive Frankie was a social and political sciences student at the time, while Mr Burnham was doing an English degree.

She has subsequently revealed how her decision to go on the show was part of earlier plans to become a children's television presenter.

She said in an interview on ex-employer Heavenly's website: 'I thought that appearing on a TV dating show might raise my profile and help my career – 20 years of intermittent mickey-taking was the result but I’m happy to embrace my 15m of fame/shame!'

Ms van Heel sat on one side of the Blind Date barrier familiar to millions tuning in and was given the chance to ask three men on the other side a set of questions.

Viewers heard how she captained Fitzwilliam College's women's football team and fancied actor Matt Dillon, star of films such as Drugstore Cowboy, There's Something About Mary and Crash.

She went on to choose a contestant described only as Will from Surrey, who was clad in a red sweatshirt and blue dungarees.

His answers included offering up a rhyme in her honour, when answering her question about what he did in the shower by saying: 'I generally make up poems and short stories.'

He followed up by attempting to woo her with: 'Oh, Frankie, oh, Frankie - your name is quite cranky. Pick me for your Blind Date, and there'll be no hanky-panky.'

She then asked the three men: 'What would you do if you were my first taste of British men?'

Will told her in response: 'You give me half an hour and I’ll give you the best time of your life.'

She went on to choose him and they were sent on a date to Gibraltar - only for things to go wrong from there.

The following week, the pair returned to update Blind Date's host and viewers on how they fared - with both making it clear they were not meant to be.

Will labelled her a 'cold fish', prompting Ms van Heel to hurl a cushion at him.

He later remembered, in an interview with the Daily Mail: 'The end of the programme was awful.

'We left the show and went back stage and she said to me: "F*** off, I never want to see you again."'

Yet the pair have since bumped into each other again - including once in a House of Commons bar in 2003 - with Will Harris then employed as marketing director for the Conservative Party, under leader Michael Howard.

Ms van Heel was by then married to Mr Burnham, who had been elected as MP for Leigh in Greater Manchester two years earlier.

Mr Harris recalled: 'She was there with Andy. We are on different sides of the political spectrum. We have totally different views about things but we have this common interest from all those years ago.

'If we ran into each other now we would have a really nice chat.'

He added: 'When I met her, Frankie, she was clearly left-wing - from the Miliband set. We had some mutual friends from Cambridge. She was a nice girl, but she had a passion even then.

'When we went on the show I expected it to be a bit of fun. But it transpired that she had a boyfriend already – Andy – so there was no romance between us at all.

'She talked about Andy in quite an admiring tone even then. 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.'

He told how their paths have crossed on other occasions, with their rival marketing firms even pitching to claim the same clients.

Mr Burnham himself has said of his wife’s primetime TV experience: 'Blind Date were holding an audition in the college and my wife asked me if I minded if she went along.

'I didn't mind at the beginning but had second thoughts when she got on the show. I watched the TV from behind the sofa through my fingers.'

'Luckily for me, she preferred me. It was all good fun and she and Will have kept in touch.'