Labour

Tomorrow, Andy Burnham will become Britain’s 59th Prime Minister. The team around him has been strikingly circumspect when it comes to setting out his plans. But this weekend we are starting to get some smoke signals via the Sunday papers. The new PM will back licences for drilling at the Rosebank and Jackdaw gas fields. Thames Water, Britain’s largest water supplier, is likely to be placed in special measures over £18bn owed to creditors. Plans for digital ID and the abolition of jury trials will be scrapped, with the post of AI minister upgraded to cabinet rank. Around a third of the cabinet are expected to be sacked and the Departments for Business and Technology overhauled too.

‘Manchesterism,’ Andy Burnham declared in his Makerfield by-election campaign video, ‘is the end of neoliberalism.’ The path to power, he believes, lies in the Mancunian Way. Not the ring road that sits atop Manchester’s actual Downing Street, but his record as mayor of Britain’s ‘second city’ – and the idea that it proves his philosophy of unlocking growth and productivity for the whole country. Yet the Mancunian Way is littered with potholes. Manchesterism is not new. It did not begin with Burnham, nor with any Labour figure in Manchester. The name is borrowed – stolen, really – from the free-trade Manchester Liberalism of Richard Cobden and John Bright, who fought price-fixing, tariffs and protectionism in the 19th century.

When the Labour party football team played a group of journalists at Loftus Road two years ago the hacks won 4-1. The politicians’ solitary goal came from a late penalty. When the referee pointed to the spot, the center-forward stepped up, elbowing well-known politicians such as Ed Balls, David Miliband and Sadiq Khan out of the way in his bid for glory. There was a notable absence that day. “Keir [Starmer] had been due to play, but he didn’t turn up,” a witness recalls. “If he had been there, he’d probably have grabbed the ball and there might have been a tussle.” Instead, Andy Burnham said: “This is mine,” and calmly slotted it into the corner. “It was a perfect penalty,” says the witness.