The spectacle of modern British politics has always had something of the music-hall about it, a slightly seedy provincial revue in which the leading man keeps changing his costume while the scenery collapses behind him. One watches, not so much for enlightenment, as for the pure comic timing of the next pratfall. And so, when the latest piece of Manchester City accounting news broke over the nation’s breakfast tables like a poorly aimed custard pie, a certain thought drifted unbidden across the mind: imagine if the same people who have so inventively managed the club’s books managed, by some symmetrical elegance of fate, to manage the government into a similar state of collapse. After the manner in which Andy Burnham ascended to the premiership, the ensuing laughter would be quite difficult to contain. One might even require medical assistance.
Burnham’s arrival at Number 10 possessed all the dignity of a man who has just discovered that the lift doors have closed on his coat-tails. The previous occupant having been ushered out by his own colleagues with the sort of brisk efficiency normally reserved for clearing a table after a particularly messy children’s party, the former Mayor of Greater Manchester stepped forward, northern vowels intact, to accept the keys. No general election, no tedious consultation with the electorate, just a rapid internal rearrangement of the furniture. It was democracy as practised by a committee that has already decided the result and merely requires someone to announce it in a suitably solemn voice. The phrase “disgraceful” feels almost too mild; it was more like watching a magician produce a rabbit from a hat that everyone in the audience knew had been pre-loaded.
And now, in the background, the City affair rumbles on: the independent panel’s findings about sham arrangements, inflated revenues, and the creative interpretation of what constitutes legitimate sponsorship. The club, majority-owned by interests closely associated with Abu Dhabi, faces the possibility of sanctions that could range from the merely embarrassing to the existentially awkward. Burnham, for his part, has expressed genuine concern that the owners might decide the whole enterprise is no longer worth the candle and sell up. One can understand the anxiety. The investment has been considerable; the skyline of east Manchester has been altered; a certain mutual appreciation has grown between the local political establishment and the distant sources of capital. In such circumstances, a man of sensitive disposition might naturally worry about the sudden withdrawal of so much goodwill.
It would be crude, of course, to suggest anything so vulgar as direct remuneration. The modern statesman does not accept brown envelopes; that belongs to a coarser age. Instead one imagines more refined channels: the quiet understanding, the shared interest in “regeneration,” the carefully worded expression of concern when the benefactors appear threatened. Secret backhanders, if they exist at all in this elevated sphere, would surely arrive not as cash but as the subtler currency of influence, access, and the warm glow of knowing that one’s local power base remains underwritten by parties who can write very large cheques indeed. Whether such arrangements have ever crossed Burnham’s path is a question best left to the imagination, and the imagination, once invited, can be an untrustworthy companion. It begins to notice how frequently the same names recur in conversations about Manchester’s future, how solicitous the language becomes when the subject of the owners arises, and how conveniently the national interest and the local interest appear to coincide.
Picture, then, the delicious symmetry: the same inventive financial architecture that sustained a football club through years of competitive dominance somehow transferring its talents to the national accounts. One day the books refuse to balance; the next, the government discovers that its own carefully constructed narrative of competence has developed an alarming series of unexplained transfers. The laughter would be uncontrollable. Not the crude guffaw of the partisan, but the dry, slightly despairing chuckle of the spectator who has seen this particular revue before and knows exactly how the second act ends. Burnham, who rose without the inconvenience of a popular mandate, would find himself explaining to an increasingly sceptical public why the very interests he once praised as partners in building modern Manchester had, in the end, proved rather more expensive than advertised.
Lorne Micheals, creator of Saturday Night Live, once observed that the secret of comedy is timing, and politics, when it is not careful, provides the timing free of charge. The disgraceful manner of the succession, the lingering questions about foreign capital and domestic influence, the faint but persistent aroma of arrangements that prefer to remain off-stage: all of it combines into a scene that almost writes itself. One does not need to allege the receipt of secret payments to notice that the proximity of large sums of money has a curious effect on the clarity of political vision. The eye begins to water slightly; the moral focus softens. And if, by some further comic twist, the club’s difficulties were ever to become the government’s difficulties, the resulting spectacle would be less tragedy than farce of the highest order.
In the meantime we are left with the image of a prime minister who arrived by internal arrangement, surveying a football club whose accounts have been the subject of independent scrutiny, and expressing concern that the money might leave. The rest is implication, and implication, like a good dry white, is best left to breathe. The laughter, should it ever come, will not need encouragement. It will arrive of its own accord, long, sardonic, and entirely deserved.