How did Andy Burnham reinvent himself as king of the north?

Handing power to directly elected mayors has created trouble for central government – but that is the point of devolution, says John Rentoul

Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester, and leader of ‘the north’ (AP)

Coronavirus has had an unexpected effect in strengthening politicians representing parts of the UK against the whole. Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, has become a power in the land, speaking as leader of a group of fellow mayors for much of the north of England. 

His insistence that new measures to control the virus in his fiefdom must come with financial support helped to force the chancellor to announce the new mini-furlough scheme on Friday. And Burnham’s demand to be consulted about the three-tier system of measures created such turbulence in Westminster that the prime minister is coming to parliament today to make the announcement. 

Like Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland, Mark Drakeford in Wales and Arlene Foster in Northern Ireland, Burnham’s profile has been boosted by the differing public health regimes developed in different parts of the UK. 

It is a remarkable turnaround for the twice-defeated Labour leadership candidate, who would otherwise be dependent on the calculations of Keir Starmer to save him, like Ed Miliband, from the obscurity of the back benches in the Commons. Instead, three years ago he gave up his parliamentary seat for the new post of directly elected mayor of Greater Manchester. 

Some Labour MPs joined him, such as Steve Rotheram, mayor of Liverpool city region. Others hedged their bets, such as Dan Jarvis, mayor of Sheffield, who is still the MP for Barnsley, part of the Sheffield city region. Others still are likely to join the trend: Tracy Brabin, MP for Batley and Spen, announced this week she was running to be mayor of the new West Yorkshire region. 

These “metro mayors” were created by George Osborne and David Cameron, overriding a series of local referendums that tended to reject the creation of another layer of politicians. 

The idea of elected executive mayors was promoted by Michael Heseltine, deputy prime minister in the 1990s, taken up by Tony Blair in government, but had stalled by the end of New Labour’s time – mainly because of the difficulty of winning local referendums. 

Blair’s enthusiasm for the idea flagged only a little when the most powerful of them all, a directly elected mayor of London, turned out to be a persistent challenge to his authority. Failing to observe the basic political rule that you do not create a powerful position unless you know who is going to fill it, Blair created a platform for Ken Livingstone and then for the current prime minister. 

Cameron and Osborne were in a different position: they knew that they were creating powerful posts that were likely to be taken by their political opponents. But they reckoned that, as northern councils tended to be Labour controlled in any case, this would be no great loss – and the Conservatives stood a better chance of winning at least some of these mayoral elections than they did of gaining majorities on local councils. Ben Houchen, mayor of Tees Valley, and Andy Street in the West Midlands have proved that this can work for the Tories. 

All the same, the rise and rise of Burnham has proved one of the iron laws of devolution: that it makes life difficult for central government. This is after all the point of it. But this is not just a matter of power and who holds it, it is a question of identity politics. 

It was the Scottish National Party that discovered the alchemy of defining itself against government in London. Everything bad in Scotland can be blamed on Westminster, while an idealised state of Scottishness is identified with the SNP. The coronavirus crisis has intensified this kind of politics, with Sturgeon’s popularity soaring as some nationalists feel a strong desire to block Gretna Green against the plague from England. 

Now Burnham and his fellow northern mayors are doing the same, portraying northernness as some kind of before-the-Fall paradise that has been stolen from the people by the Tory government in London. If devolution was intended to strengthen the identity of parts of the UK, it is succeeding, but the price is an anti-Westminster sentiment that is dangerous to UK democracy.