Manchester

Andy Burnham has won the race to be named as Labour's candidate in the Manchester Mayoral race. The shadow home secretary's victory was certainly convincing - he won 50 per cent of the vote amongst Labour members; interim mayor Tony Lloyd got 28 per cent, whilst former minister Ivan Lewis won 19 per cent. So what now? Burnham had made himself something of a laughing stock recently with his flip-flopping about quitting the shadow cabinet. He drew derision for staying loyal to Corbyn, so at least after today he appears to have a bonafide reason at last for leaving the shadow cabinet.

The recent Queen’s speech, along with the growing divisions in the Conservative Party over the EU referendum, have focused attention on how this Government will be remembered after David Cameron steps down in 2019. Many mentioned prison reform, improving university standards and tackling extremism, as signs of the Prime Minister’s determination to establish his legacy as a social reformer, guided by the compassionate conservatism which characterised his earliest pronouncements as Tory leader. Less remarked upon, however, was the renewed commitment in the speech to building the Northern Powerhouse, and empowering cities in the North to fulfil their economic potential – another key way in which the Government hopes to leave its stamp long after Cameron has left office.

‘The shortest way out of Manchester,’ it used to be said, ‘is notoriously a bottle of Gordon’s gin.’ But that was a long time ago, when ‘Cottonopolis’ was the pivot of the Industrial Revolution, the British empire was expanding and life was cheaper. They tend not to drink gin any more in the bars on Deansgate. It’s cocktails, a tenner a pop. The hub of George Osborne’s ‘Northern Powerhouse’ is a much-changed city. Now they’re queuing to get in, even though the super-duper HS2 rail link may go no further than Crewe, which is in Cheshire, and only southerners think Cheshire is in the north. Andy Burnham is the latest chap to set his cloth cap at the rainy city.

After months of local campaigning, backbiting and press releasing, the Greater Manchester mayoral election has finally piqued the national attention. Andy Burnham's apparently sudden declaration he will run for the role has thrust the race into the limelight. There may be more than a hint of cockiness to his claim that the competition needs a 'big name' to raise its profile, but there is also more than a hint of truth. Unlike the London race, there has so far been little momentum to its poorer northern relative. But for Andy Burnham the question that really matters, given that the Labour candidacy is likely to determine who becomes mayor of 2.5m people next year, is whether he can actually do it. And it's far from a given.

I have started salivating excessively at night. I wake each morning in a pillowed swamp of my own effluvium, a noisome pond which is — I suspect — redolent of rapidly approaching death. I have done the hypochondriac thing and googled the possible causes and there’s a whole bunch of stuff — pancreatitis, close exposure to ionising radiation, rabies, pregnancy, serotonin disease and liver failure, to name but a few. My suspicion is it’s either rabies or pregnancy because I exhibit other symptoms common to both conditions, according to the internet. I cannot abide drinking water, for example, which suggests that I might be hydrophobic, a key indicator of rabies.

A doff of my flat cap to Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs economist who has been made a peer, a Treasury minister and George Osborne’s ‘Northern Powerhouse’ supremo. The metro-politan media is busy trying to find reasons why this project for improved links between northern cities plus elements of devolution is a bad idea, or has ulterior motives behind it.

This has, I think we can all agree, been the most stage-managed election ever. Nobody on a soap box, no punches thrown, no bigoted women. Just a seamless marathon of national messaging that starts with the Today programme and ends with Newsnight. It is the regional media, however, that feels the iron grip of the parties’ media machines the most. We work where voters actually live. So how we are treated during political visits can be revealing. And Labour, most regional reporters seem to agree, seem to have chilled out. Ed Miliband and other senior Labour figures are freely giving up their time.