Why I fully support Andy Burnham’s brave decision to stop pretending he wants to be in Manchester

Now, the NEC has granted him a shot at the Makerfield byelection. Some critics, mostly those dreary people who live north of the Watford Gap, are complaining. They point out that he still has two years left on his mayoral term. They whine that abandoning his post will trigger an expensive and disruptive mayoral byelection.

To these people, I say: grow up. Politics is not about serving the immediate administrative needs of Greater Manchester. If it were, we would let accountants run the country. Politics is about being seen in the right corridors, having the right factions brief against you in the Sunday papers, and eventually angling for a minor cabinet position before writing a lucrative memoir.

By choosing to stand for Makerfield, Burnham is demonstrating the truest form of political courage. It takes immense bravery to look your constituents in the eye, shrug, and loudly declare that you have better things to do with your life than fix their buses.

Let us consider Makerfield for a moment. I confess I had to ask my researcher to locate it on a map. It is, apparently, a constituency near Wigan. One assumes it is full of the sort of earnest, hard-working people who feature in Labour party broadcasts right before the acoustic guitar swells. Burnham does not want to be in Makerfield any more than he wants to be in Manchester, but it is a necessary vessel. It is the grim, industrial turnstile through which one must pass to get back to the Strangers' Bar in Westminster.

The NEC approval process itself is a testament to the sheer, unadulterated pragmatism of the modern Labour Party. There are rules, of course. Under Labour regulations, sitting mayors need explicit NEC approval to stand for Westminster. These rules were ostensibly designed to prevent local leaders from treating their mandates as disposable stepping stones.

But rules, as any seasoned political operator will tell you over a perfectly chilled Chablis, are for the little people. They are for the backbenchers and the local door-knockers who actually have to canvass in the rain. When a star of Burnham’s wattage decides he is bored of cutting ribbons at regional enterprise zones, the rules miraculously bend.

Vane is exactly right. We cannot expect a man of Burnham’s caliber to spend the rest of his career pretending to care about bus franchising. It is beneath him, and frankly, it is beneath us to pretend we care about it either.

I recall a conversation I had with a former Conservative Chancellor at a garden party last summer. We were discussing the tragic trajectory of politicians who actually start believing their own rhetoric about localism. He noted, while sipping a Pimm's, that devolution is a sickness. You send them up there to cool off, he explained, and suddenly they are demanding fiscal autonomy and complaining about the Barnett formula. It is like sending a man to manage a provincial branch of a bank, and he tries to mint his own currency.

Burnham almost fell into this trap. There were moments during the pandemic where he genuinely seemed to believe he was a head of state. He stood on those steps, railing against the government, looking every inch the rebellious northern lord. It was good theater. I wrote three columns praising his cheek. But theater must eventually end. The curtain falls, and the actors must return to London where the real money is.

The cost of the resulting mayoral byelection in Greater Manchester is estimated to be in the millions. Is this a waste of taxpayer money? Only if you view taxpayer money as something meant to benefit the taxpayer. If you view it correctly, as the operating budget for the Westminster reality television show, then it is a small price to pay for a good plot twist.

We need Burnham back in Parliament. The current Labour frontbench is devastatingly competent, which makes them terribly boring to write about. We need a bit of swagger, a bit of that trademark Burnham ambition to stir the pot. He will arrive in Makerfield, do whatever it is one does in Makerfield to secure votes—eat a pie, point at a factory, mention rugby league—and then he will be back where he belongs.

What happens to Greater Manchester now? Who will replace him? Does it truly matter? They could elect a moderately successful local businessman, or perhaps a particularly charismatic golden retriever. The function of the office remains the same: to absorb the blame for central government cuts while occasionally opening a new tram stop.

I have already told my editor that I intend to take Burnham to lunch at the Garrick the moment he is sworn in. We will order the Dover sole, we will drink something staggeringly expensive, and we will toast to the end of his northern exile.

Because ultimately, the experiment of regional devolution has proven exactly what I always suspected: there is nothing outside of London worth governing. The provinces are simply a place where ambitious men go to wait for a vacancy in Westminster. Andy Burnham has done his waiting. He has served his time. It is time we welcomed him back to civilization, and time Greater Manchester learned its place as a footnote in a successful man’s Wikipedia page.