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“He’s burned bright and briefly,” says one MP of Josh Simons. At the age of 32, the Makerfield MP has already run a thinktank, held a ministerial job, resigned in a scandal, and now quit parliament to in a blaze of publicity to make way for Andy Burnham.

Simons has been supporting Burnham as a potential successor to Keir Starmer for some time. But few expected the ambitious Labour figure to give up his seat having only won it two years ago and moving his young family to the constituency.

In his letter, he said he was putting his constituents first, as there needed to be a “shock to the Westminster system”.

He was also one of the first to call publicly on the prime minister to set a timetable for his departure after the local election results – even though he previously ran thinktank Labour Together that helped put Starmer in power and fuelled its policy programme.

Burnham supporters have been gushing about Simons’s decision, with one saying he had “literally put the party and the country first – like everyone else lectures we have to do – he’s done it”. Simons, who only recently welcomed a third child with his wife, was showered with praise from Burnham, who hailed “the difficult decision and sacrifice that he and his family are making”.

However, many MPs had only recently been disparaging Simons for having tangled up the government up in a scandal over gathering intelligence on journalists.

After entering parliament, Simons had a meteoric ascent – quickly becoming a ministerial aide and then being promoted to a job in the Cabinet Office in September last year.

But he resigned from Starmer’s government in February over his role in Labour Together’s commissioning of the public affairs agency APCO to investigate journalists reporting on the thinktank. The Guardian had revealed Simons had personally commissioned and reviewed APCO’s work on journalists looking into the group’s funding.

He said he was “surprised” and “furious” at a the PR report on the journalists but he eventually quit as a Cabinet Office minister, saying his position in office had become “a distraction from this government’s important work”.

His re-emergence as a key player in the drama over Starmer’s leadership was unexpected, but those who have worked with him say he has extremely sharp political antennae.

With family from Bury, Greater Manchester, he studied at Cambridge before working for the Labour party, and subsequently as a research scientist on artificial intelligence at Meta. In 2022, he joined Labour Together as its director, before his last-minute selection for the Makerfield seat two years later.

One Labour source said: “Josh is immensely bright and incredibly hard working. In the end, it was his frustrations with the Labour party and his zeal for taking on the antisemites of the hard-left that were his undoing. He never got the support he deserved for all he put in.”

However, his past at Labour Together, which had at one point been a vehicle to organise against Jeremy Corbyn, is not likely to be welcome by many on the left of the party if he becomes a core part of Burnham’s operation. He is also seen by many colleagues as close to the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who is more on the Blue Labour right of the party than Burnham, who has become the darling of the soft left.

One MP supporter of Burnham said: “Simons should never have been an MP.” Another said it was a mystery how the left and centre of the party would work together under a campaign to make Burnham leader, saying: “It’s a big unknown … Josh is Shabana Mahmood’s beast – lock, stock and barrel. I guess we just have to see what lands where.”

Many colleagues think this is not the last people will hear of Simons. Despite his plan to leave parliament, Simons’s letter hints he will remain close to Burnham, telling his constituents: “If you place your trust in Andy, we will restore our towns to the places they should be, rip up the existing system and build a new one that puts you at the heart of it. With Andy, I will fight for that, and for you, every step of the way.”