HE'S NOT THE MESSIAH, HE'S A VERY NORTHERN BOY

One does sometimes wonder whether British politics, in its tireless pursuit of novelty, has not simply decided to run the same old reel of the 1970s backwards, hoping that this time the projector will behave. Enter Andy Burnham, lately Mayor of Greater Manchester, freshly minted MP for Makerfield, and now, by some mysterious alchemy of by-elections and coronations, the prime minister-in-waiting. The man has gone from municipal magnificence to Downing Street with the speed of a particularly determined Uber driver who has spotted a surge price. 

One almost admires the footwork. Almost. In his speech the other day – delivered, naturally, in Manchester, at the People’s History Museum, that reliquary of approved left-wing nostalgia – Burnham put what he called “the wealthy south on notice.” This is the sort of phrase that sounds bold in the echo chamber and faintly ridiculous once it escapes into the open air. One pictures the wealthy south – those notorious plutocrats of Guildford and Tunbridge Wells – trembling behind their aga cookers. The north, we are assured, shall rise again. Devolution shall be the watchword. Power will be wrested from the grasping tentacles of Westminster and redistributed to the regions, where, presumably, it will be exercised with the wisdom and restraint that have so far characterised local government in these islands.

The proposal for 'No 10 North' is particularly choice. Part of the Prime Minister’s office is to decamp to Manchester, presumably so that Burnham can feel at home without the inconvenience of actually living in London. One is reminded of those Roman emperors who, tiring of the eternal city, would set up a rival court in some provincial capital, usually with disastrous results for the tax base. Here the intention is framed as rebalancing, a noble correction of historical injustice. The subtext, of course, is rather more practical: the Red Wall, that fragile crust of former Labour seats that crumbled under the weight of reality, must be rebuilt with the mortar of regional pride. Reform UK has been making uncomfortable inroads; best to remind the northern voter that a chap from the north is now in charge, or at least has part of his filing cabinets up there.

Burnham speaks of replacing 'trickle-down economics' with 'good growth.' The phrase has the unmistakable whiff of the seminar room. 'Good growth' appears to mean more state ownership, more council houses, and the sort of economic rebalancing that usually involves taking money from productive areas and spraying it across less productive ones while calling it solidarity. One awaits the precise definition with the quiet dread of a man watching a new chef experiment with molecular gastronomy. The last time we tried this recipe in earnest we ended up with the Winter of Discontent: rubbish piling in the streets, bodies unburied, and the country looking for all the world like a particularly gloomy episode of Coronation Street written by a committee of trade unionists. The speech itself was a masterclass in the genre. Pro-left journalists nodded along like those little dogs one used to see in the back windows of cars. The sketch writer from the Daily Mail was, one gathers, not invited – a small but telling detail. When your idea of pluralism is to exclude the scribblers who might notice the joins in the rhetoric, one begins to wonder whether the “rebalancing of power” might eventually extend to the press. North Korea is doubtless watching with interest.

Then there are the WASPI women, that awkward constituency Burnham once courted with promises of compensation before the realities of fiscal arithmetic intervened. Ten billion here, ten billion there; pretty soon you’re talking about serious money. Higher taxes across the board are clearly on the menu. One suspects the wealthy south will not be the only ones footing the bill. The north, after all, must be paid for, and the immigrants Labour has so enthusiastically welcomed will require housing. Those shiny new council houses will not, one gathers, be reserved exclusively for the native-born. Burnham’s past record as Mayor of Manchester has been politely airbrushed for the occasion. The grooming gangs scandal, the testimony of Maggie Oliver and the victims – these are not topics for the victory lap. Better to focus on the shiny rhetoric of devolution and the ten-year plan. Ten years! One wonders whether he seriously believes he will still be around to see it through. His approval ratings, even before taking the top job, already tilt negative. The public has a way of growing restless when the rhetoric meets the rates bill.

And who is apparently lined up to steady the economic ship? Ed Miliband, the eco-zealot whose previous stint in high office suggested a man who could lose an argument with a wind turbine. The hits, as they say, keep coming. What is most striking about Burnham’s ascent is the constitutional insouciance of it all. A man who was not even an MP a few weeks ago is now on the verge of becoming Prime Minister without the tiresome formality of a general election. He demanded one when the Tories changed leaders; now that the shoe is on the other foot, the principle appears less pressing. This is not democracy so much as musical chairs with nuclear codes. The public, having voted for Starmer’s Labour in 2024, did not vote for Burnham’s particular brand of northern municipal socialism. No one, as the saying goes, voted for this.

The technique is familiar. Divide the country neatly into north and south, virtuous provinces and decadent capital, then present yourself as the champion of the former. It worked moderately well for various Scottish nationalists and it may work again. Whether it produces competent government is another matter. The country already labours under sluggish growth, high immigration, and strained public services. The solution, apparently, is more of the medicine that contributed to the malady: more state, more spending, more division dressed up as fairness. One tries, as the post’s author gamely claims to have tried, to find something positive in the prospect. Burnham is affable enough on television. He has the common touch. Yet affability is no substitute for coherence, and the common touch becomes rather less appealing when it is used to usher in policies that have failed before with monotonous regularity. 

If this is the best Labour can offer after its brief stint in office, one shudders to think what the next decade holds. The north, we are told, cannot trust a word he says. The country as a whole may soon reach the same conclusion. In the meantime, the spectacle continues: a would-be prime minister playing regional champion while quietly preparing to expand the state and its claims upon the citizen. Britain has survived worse. It has, alas, also survived better. The Winter of Discontent may yet return, not with a bang but with a devolved whimper, delivered from a secondary office in Manchester. Pass the heating oil; we may need it.

VICTOR WILLIS (1951 -2026): AN OBITUARY

Victor Willis, the only unambiguously heterosexual policeman in the annals of popular music, has finally hung up his handcuffs, one day shy of his seventy-fifth birthday – a timing so neat it suggests even mortality couldn’t resist a disco beat. Born in 1951, the son of a San Francisco Baptist minister, Willis arrived in New York with a voice trained in gospel and a constitutional immunity to irony. 

While others in the Village People were busy auditioning for posterity in leather chaps, Willis – resplendent in his regulation cop uniform – insisted that “Y.M.C.A.” was merely a wholesome hymn to physical fitness and male camaraderie. One admired the sheer audacity of a straight man fronting what looked like a mobile Gay Pride float and then treating the resulting global innuendo as someone else’s problem. It was like watching a teetotaller conduct an open-bar party and claiming the punch was fruit cordial. 

Jacques Morali, the French producer who assembled the group like a novelty cake, recognised in Willis the perfect straight man – in every sense. Willis wrote or co-wrote the hits that turned disco into a worldwide municipal anthem: “Macho Man,” “In the Navy,” and “Go West.”, for which the crowning irony arrived in 1993 when the Pet Shop Boys covered it. Where Willis had offered a straight man’s pep talk to the frontier, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe delivered a flamboyant, wistful, orchestral sigh of knowing resignation. It was as if the Village People’s cop had been gently arrested by reality and remanded into the custody of those who understood the joke all along.

There were the usual rock-star detours – drugs, arrests, a spell in the wilderness – but Willis outlasted most of his colleagues and the entire disco era itself. He won copyright battles that secured his royalties, returned to touring, and maintained, with heroic literal-mindedness, that young men at the Y were simply enjoying 'straight fun.' In an age of compulsory ambiguity, his refusal to wink was almost avant-garde. 

He leaves a wife, Karen, and a catalogue that will outlive us all. Whenever strangers throw their hands in the air at weddings, sports events or political rallies, they are performing an unwitting act of Willis worship. The man who sang about the Navy never went down with the ship. He simply sailed on, straight as a die, while the rest of us wondered what the joke was.

DAME PENELOPE KEITH (1940 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Dame Penelope Keith, who has died at the age of 86, spent much of her career perfecting the sort of cut-glass accent that could frost a greenhouse at twenty paces. In an era when British comedy still believed suburbia was worth satirising, she became its undisputed queen, a woman who could make the word “ghastly” sound like a royal decree. 

Born Penelope Anne Constance Hatfield in 1940, she arrived with the sort of respectable English vowels that suggested centuries of careful breeding, even if the actual pedigree was rather more modest. She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in the early Sixties, where she no doubt learned that the best way to survive classical theatre was to wait for the sitcom that would actually pay the mortgage. That deliverance came in 1975 with The Good Life, in which she played Margo Leadbetter, the woman who believed that self-sufficiency was all very well provided one’s neighbours did it without lowering the tone of the avenue. Keith’s performance was a masterclass in majestic disapproval; she could convey the moral weight of a dropped aitch with nothing more than a raised eyebrow and a slight tightening of the jaw. Britain, still pretending it hadn’t quite lost the Empire, adored her for it. 

To the Manor Born followed, confirming what we already suspected: Keith’s genius lay in portraying women who regarded the rest of humanity as charmingly déclassé. She brought to these roles a glacial dignity that made the jokes land like well-aimed cricket balls. While lesser performers might have camped it up, Keith understood that the funniest thing about snobbery is its absolute sincerity. She played it straight, which is why it remains devastatingly funny decades later. One half-expected her to address the nation on the correct way to fold a napkin during the three-day week.

Later honours arrived, as they tend to for national treasures who have never quite embarrassed the middle classes: a BAFTA, an Olivier, and eventually a DBE in 2014. She became Dame Penelope, a title that suited her as naturally as a Barbour jacket suits a Labrador. In her later years she presented television programmes about villages, those bastions of Englishness where everyone knows their place and the scones are never dry. It was the perfect coda: the woman who had spent her career gently mocking the Home Counties now toured them with the air of a benevolent duchess.

She leaves behind a body of work that reminds us how much sharper British comedy was when it trusted its audience to understand irony without neon subtitles. In an age of performative outrage and anxious egalitarianism, Penelope Keith was a reminder that hauteur, properly done, is an art form. The nation will be the poorer for her passing, though doubtless she would have observed that the flowers at the funeral had better be properly arranged. One shudders to think what Margo would have said otherwise.