I’m not sure how often John Major visited Wigan or Leigh or the other parts of Andy Burnham’s new Makerfield constituency during his time as Prime Minister. But from the sound of it, he doesn’t exactly think much of the place. ‘He [Burnham] suggested in a speech the other day, in a rather curious phrase, that if things didn’t meet the “Makerfield Test” they wouldn’t happen,’ Sir John icily observed in an interview last week.
‘Well, I’m not sure how widely he spreads that, but if he really thinks he’s going to put his discussions with Mr Xi or Mr Trump through Makerfield before he goes to meet them – in terms of discovering whether they satisfy the good citizens of that constituency – he’s going to find himself in grave trouble.’
Similar criticism – and condescension – has greeted Burnham’s proposal for the establishment of a No10 North. One prominent commentator claimed the plan was actually hatched because ‘Andy’s missus wasn’t keen on moving to London, so he’s basically arranged to work from home, as every civil servant does’.
Former Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill warned the scheme risked becoming nothing more than a ‘Manc-a-Lago’ gimmick – a reference to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago retreat.
We are still almost three weeks away from Andy Burnham setting foot inside Downing Street. But elements of the Westminster establishment have already made up their minds. This ignorant oik shouldn’t be allowed to get his grubby Northern mitts anywhere near the seals of office.
‘We knew we’d face attacks right from the beginning,’ one Burnham ally observed, ‘and that’s OK. That’s the game. But I’ve got to be honest, the nature of the criticism has surprised me.
‘There’s a real class snobbery at the heart of it. It’s like, “Who does this guy think he is? He’s from Manchester and thinks he knows how to run a government?”’
Based on snobbery or not, there has certainly been a surreal hypocrisy surrounding much of the reaction to Burnham’s modest proposal to transfer some of the functions of the Prime Minister’s office out of London, and to spend a couple of days a week beyond the capital.
Criticism – and condescension – has greeted Burnham’s proposal for the establishment of a No10 North, writes Dan Hodges
‘If he really thinks he’s going to put his discussions with Mr Xi or Mr Trump through Makerfield before he goes to meet them… he’s going to find himself in grave trouble,’ Sir John Major said
For years, the cry has been for politicians of all persuasions to ‘get out of their Westminster bubble and start to listen to real people’. Now that has become, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing! Get back to SW1 and don’t you dare try to set foot outside!’
To John Major, and a fair few of his contemporaries, the idea of a Prime Minister taking into account the views of the ordinary voters of places like Makerfield – especially on an issue as rarefied as foreign affairs – is clearly anathema.
Though if Major had paid a little more attention to their opinions it might have spared him from the Maastricht debacle, which ended up fracturing his party, destroying his government and handing Tony Blair a decade in power. Similarly, if Blair had bothered to consult the British people, he may have managed to avoid the catastrophe of Iraq.
Either way, the Missionary Model of politics – in which Britain’s rulers decided what they feel is in the interests of their people, and dispense wisdom and laws on that basis with scant regard for their actual views – is what has led to our current political fracture. And it’s an error Andy Burnham is determined not to repeat.
‘People may not like it but this is Andy’s vision,’ one adviser told me. ‘He’s not going to back away from his commitment to ensuring power is finally transferred to those parts of the country that have never held it. The reality is Westminster has left a lot of places behind. And he’s going to keep reminding people of that.’
There are legitimate criticisms to be levelled at Burnham’s devolution proposals. One of which is that they are not entirely new. ‘When he was Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak spent almost every Friday working up at the new Treasury office in Darlington,’ a former Cabinet minister revealed to me. ‘The problem was he couldn’t really talk about it for security reasons.
Suddenly our national discourse is being deluged with references to Coronation Street. Our next Prime Minister is, apparently, fond of using phrases such as ‘eck as like!’ and ‘ooop North’
‘Burnham’s going to have the same problem. It sounds great when you announce it but in reality it’s hard to get people to focus on.’
A former Downing Street adviser questioned how the fragmentation of No10 would operate in practice.
‘The reality is that whatever you think you’re going to be spending the day working on when you start at seven in the morning, by noon you’ll be dealing with something completely different. I’m not sure they’ve properly thought this through.’
Nor are the concerns restricted to Burnham’s political opponents. Mutterings of disquiet from Labour MPs defending seats outside of the King of the North’s former fiefdom are starting to grow louder.
Last week Gillingham and Rainham MP Naushabah Khan spoke for a number of her Southern colleagues when she said: ‘I’d be really keen to see how Andy, in the next few weeks, sets out his stall for the wider country.’
Asked if he was too heavily focused on the North, she replied: ‘It’s certainly something that’s said about him, isn’t it?’
But the reality is that much, if not most, of the initial criticism has been underpinned by thinly veiled arrogance and pomposity.
Burnham’s proposal to try to incrementally recalibrate the balance of power between North and South has generated a backlash that goes beyond the political. Suddenly our national discourse is being deluged with references to Coronation Street, stout and Vera Duckworth. Our next Prime Minister is, apparently, fond of using phrases such as ‘eck as like!’ and ‘ooop North’.
All of which is instructive. It is not yet clear whether Andy Burnham genuinely has what it takes to reconfigure Britain’s crumbling, dysfunctional structures of governance.
But one thing is already certain. The traditional gatekeepers of those structures are not planning to relinquish them without a fight. And over their dead bodies will they let them fall to someone who was born in Aintree, grew up in Warrington and represents the ‘good citizens’ of Makerfield.
I don’t know how Prime Minister Burnham will perform when he first sits down opposite Xi or Trump or Putin. But if he actually takes a moment to consider the hopes, fears and wishes of the British people when he does, then that would already represent an improvement on John Major and some of his other elitist and out-of-touch predecessors.
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