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He entered parliament at 31. The cabinet? For that, a callous London elite kept him waiting until 37. Local leaders in Manchester fought hard for years to empower their city, at which point he slid in to run it. Now he occupies Downing Street with scarcely more scrutiny than that accursed cat gets.
This is a charmed career — a tribute to Andy Burnham’s political talent but also, if he could just admit it, to the openness of the British establishment. What justifies his air of grievance, then? What eats him? He remembers “sneering voices in the corridors of power” and a feeling of “imposter syndrome” at Cambridge. Life gets harder than that, brother.
Perhaps the grievance is on behalf of the “north” (which I see has become coterminous with “Manchester”) not himself. If so, it is still wrong.
London dominates for a reason. England has been a unified entity for a millennium. Unlike Germany or Italy, which consolidated late, its regions did not have ages to develop as independent powerhouses. So, Yorkshire is not Lombardy, Birmingham is not Hamburg. Even in Manchester’s Victorian pomp, it had around a fifth of the population of the capital, whose scale has been freakish almost forever. All that changes over time is the ranking of the non-London cities. (On which note, when will Manchester atone for usurping Norwich? What reparations will it offer Lincoln?)
A country that has been unified for about as long as England is France. Sure enough, the Paris region accounts for as large a share of France’s GDP as London does of Britain’s. There is no conspiracy here. The regions are not being done down on purpose. It is historical path dependence at work. In fact, were it not for artificial constraints, such as the planning laws, London might be even more dominant than it is. Reducing the gap is an honourable mission, which every government of my lifetime has tried. Attributing the gap to conscious malice in the capital is demagogic.
Let me suggest how Burnham gets away with all this. The idea that London disdains the “provinces” was somewhat true until the shock of Brexit a decade ago. That attitude has since overcorrected, however, to a kind of inverted snobbery. Politico-media London in particular lives in round-the-clock fear of being seen to not “get” the rest of the country. Hence the pulling of punches. Burnham’s rise is impossible to understand except in that context. He is the beneficiary of a sort of regional privilege that might never have existed before. The sternest audits of Burnham come from Manchester-dwellers such as Joshi Herrmann, who can’t be called “out of touch” or some such inanity.
In another era, certain questions would have dogged Burnham:
Why does the north-west run such a big fiscal deficit? Who thinks the gimmick of running 10 Downing Street from there is going to last more than a few months? In what world is Manchester a repeatable model for urban regeneration? I like the place as much as the next man — try Skof — but most post-industrial cities don’t have 100,000 students, two giant football clubs, an international airport and a BBC base. Are Stoke or Sunderland meant to magick up equivalent assets?
Also, what’s all this about Burnham being the first northern prime minister for half a century? (Not his claim, but one that does the rounds.) Tony Blair grew up mostly in Durham. Liz Truss is from Leeds, if anywhere. Perhaps “northern” has come to mean “northern-accented”. If you don’t sound like Daphne in Frasier, you are basically from Knightsbridge.
The old disregard for the north had to go. But it is not much better to walk on eggshells around a powerful person out of regional sensitivity.
Beware any politician who goes on about where they are from. Richard Nixon couldn’t shut up about Whittier, as though a virtuous hometown was a substitute for being virtuous oneself. So often, the strongest leaders seem placeless (Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan) or even act against their backgrounds (FDR, Clement Attlee). David Cameron, not in their league but the last prime minister who was at least technically up to the job, seldom invoked the rural home counties, though he was rooted there. A biography is no replacement for a plan.
The pretence that virtue lies in the heartland, the slander against the big metropolis, the cheap shots of those metropolitans to push back too hard, lest it seem snobbish: if Burnham’s rise reminds me of anyone’s, it is JD Vance’s.
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