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None of those concerns are deterring Burnham, whose allies say he can succeed because he will drive the devolution agenda personally from No. 10 North in a way no prime minister has done — and that he genuinely trusts the councils and mayors he’s empowering to serve their areas. “It is already changing things,” said Simpson.

Burnham’s team has met chief executives of mayoral authorities and hosted mayors for a meeting of a revived national economic council, set up by Gordon Brown in response to the 2008 financial crisis. There was potent symbolism in the way Burnham ran the meeting, forcing Cabinet ministers to listen and take note of the mayors rather than the other way round. Those at the table included the prime minister’s business adviser Varun Chandra, who is more used to talking to U.S. trade negotiators than regional leaders.

The prime minister told mayors he wanted to meet every two weeks.

Burnham has spent the last two weeks on a tour of the country he now leads, focusing on areas where Labour has fallen behind — a trial run for a general election the PM must call no later than 2029 to earn his own mandate for governing. It stands to be a five-way contest for power, pitting Labour against Reform and the Conservatives, Greens and Liberal Democrats, alongside Restore.

Almost no one in the Labour Party believes Burnham will be able to repeat the 172-seat majority that Starmer won at the last general election in 2024, leaving him a narrow window to do something radical while he commands the sway of parliament.

Burnham is already trying to connect his technical reforms to real change on the ground. The PM crisscrossed England this week with stops at the Wolverhampton Bus Terminal, where he announced the local mayoral authority would take control of the bus network, and to a homelessness charity in Newcastle where he asked local leaders to help his pledge to end rough sleeping. Newspaper front pages this summer have splashed repeatedly on a long-running plan to release some prisoners early because England’s Victorian jails don’t have enough room; one interview this week was dominated by questions about messages that Burnham traded with a person impersonating White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.

All those issues are already crowding out his focus on reengineering the machinery of government. “I wish people might just engage with the seriousness of the proposition,” Burnham told The Times this week.

The vibes in Burnham’s inner circle remain good. “I’m not saying there aren’t going to be difficulties, but sometimes you’ve just got to get up and do it,” said one current government minister. “That was part of the problem under [Starmer’s] administration. There were always roadblocks; there was always a reason not to do something.”

And if Burnham is seeking to show he is among his people, the building itself does some of the work for him. Unlike Downing Street, imposing and behind iron security gates since 1989, Heron House sits on top of ordinary life in the city.

It faces a busy public square above a Slug & Lettuce chain cocktail bar, a branch of the ubiquitous pie store Greggs and trendy cafes serving Vietnamese drip coffee and matcha from Kyoto. Shoppers sit on a bench next opposite the low metal barriers and police guards on the door. The Ferris wheel at the square’s Christmas market is so tall that last year riders could see down onto the six-storey building’s roof. The local marriage registration office is on the ground floor. “You don’t really notice it,” shrugged a groom, Max Harris-Green, while his bride posed for photos a few meters from the new heart of government.

Put simply, it looks boring. The entrance goes unnoticed by many of those walking past, save for the occasional passer-by taking a selfie by the door.

Getting into the building itself is harder than Downing Street, whose custodians swing open the black front door for guests who have cleared the perimeter. Visitors to No. 10 North go through one of several discreet entrances — one of them next to a Chinese restaurant favored by the former Manchester United footballer Wayne Rooney — and successive doors. A Labour official said: “It’s like Fort Knox in there.” (No. 10 declined to give POLITICO Magazine a tour.)

Recent visitors speak of elevators with unmarked buttons, a bombproof room and special doors for agents who still work on other floors. Nearby during the lunch rush, one man in a shirt was overheard joking to three others: “Is this going on the MI6 credit card?”

But the success or failure of Burnham’s power shift will rest not on the building but the prime minister himself. Ironically for a man preparing to give up authority, Burnham will have to wield it firmly from the center to make his plan work. That even extends to where he sits.

No. 10 North will mean nothing without Burnham being there in person, said the official with knowledge of the process quoted earlier: “In the civil service, power always gravitates to the most senior people. You need the senior decision-making people there in person.” Former Chancellor Rachel Reeves was criticized for spending only five days working from the Treasury’s Darlington campus in almost two years after Labour took power. (Treasury officials insist she visited other places nearby.)

Burnham’s pledge to work from Manchester each week “can’t slip,” said one senior Labour aide, even as he faces more demands to travel abroad. “The whole center of power has to move there at the end of the week.”

Esther Webber contributed reporting from London.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/08/21/andy-burnham-manchester-10-north-01043333

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

Cambridge: “Please, boys. Don’t make my final years a misery.” The words of the future King Charles III as he pleaded with his two sons to patch things up at their grandfather’s funeral in April 2021 have just acquired a whole new resonance.

The “boys”, better known as Prince William and Prince Harry, never did make up. Indeed, their feud only darkened and deepened as the elder brother fumed at the younger’s treachery towards the royal family in general, and his wife, in particular. (Outrageously, in her interview with Oprah Winfrey, Meghan accused unnamed members of the family of racism in relation to her unborn baby’s skin colour.)

The last time Harry and William stood together, just the two of them, was in July 2021 at the unveiling of a bronze statue of their late mother on what would have been her 60th birthday. The pair could barely look at each other. For William, Harry’s deeply personal and spiteful revelations two years later in his biography, Spare, were an unimaginable betrayal by the human being he once trusted best.

A lid could be kept on that seething Shakespearean sibling rivalry, as long as Diana’s beloved boys, now men in their 40s, were separated by an ocean. Harry and Meghan found freedom in California from the stultifying Windsor ways they so publicly scorned. The Waleses were left to steady the ship after the turbulence of “Megxit”. They did so admirably and to universal acclaim despite Princess Catherine’s shocking brush with cancer.

The sudden announcement on Wednesday night that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are returning to the UK later this month – a typical piece of Sussex melodrama, both blithely selfish and utterly ruthless – threatens the uneasy truce between the brothers. It also heralds a moment of intense danger for the monarchy because almost anything could happen – and very little of it good.

The King has shown immense fortitude during his cancer treatment, and continues to carry out his duties with charm and aplomb, but the 77-year-old Charles is ailing. Understandably, there is speculation that Harry has seized this moment to shore up his family’s position while a fond Papa is still on the throne and able to bail him out.

With a commitment to a slimmed-down monarchy – probably comprised of his own three children, George, Charlotte and Louis, and their immediate heirs – things would look very different under a future King William V. The duke and duchess, and Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet (the children’s faces unknown to the British public even though they are sixth and seventh in line to our throne), might well lose their titles and their access to the only thing that they have left to sell, apart from tens of thousands of jars of Meghan’s jam. A sticky position, you have to agree.

Cynics point out that Harry’s newfound enthusiasm for Britain follows a humiliating failure in the United States. After the duchess’s teeth-rottingly glutinous lifestyle show, With Love, Meghan, was panned, Netflix drastically watered down the couple’s lavish deal. When they were dropped by Spotify, allegedly for not creating enough content to earn out their $US20 million ($28 million) payment, a furious senior executive called the royal couple “f---ing grifters”.

Americans love success and stampede like startled bison from its opposite. People began to mock Harry and Meghan’s claim to want a low-profile, secluded private life dedicated to “service”. South Park’s “Worldwide Privacy Tour” episode, a hilarious satire on the shy, retiring Sussexes, burst the dam of deference. They became social poison and couldn’t blag an invitation to the Oscars. Even Oprah Winfrey appeared to distance herself from the pair on whom she lavished such sympathy when they were revealing how ghastly those heartless royals were while poor Prince Philip was on his deathbed.

The truth is, however cynical you are about Meghan and Harry, it’s not cynical enough. Their jaw-dropping hypocrisy is only exceeded by their lack of self-awareness and contrition. A champion reciter of his own grievances, Harry can be astonishingly obtuse when it comes to appreciating the pain and embarrassment he has caused his own relatives. For Team Sussex, it’s “my truth” that counts.

Only last year, a tearful Harry was telling the BBC: “It’s impossible for me to take my family back to the UK safely. I can’t see a world in which I would be bringing my wife and children back to the UK at this point.”

So what changed? Is the UK no longer so racist that Meghan couldn’t bear to live here? Is she no longer worried about being “silenced” by her terrible in-laws? Has Queen Camilla ceased to be “dangerous”, as Harry claimed in his book? Is their personal safety no longer a priority? Did they get the apology from the royals they loftily demanded as a condition of returning?

Well, they’re coming back anyway. And we don’t want them – we really don’t want them. Thousands of caustic jibes and angry outbursts mushroomed overnight on social media.

“What have we done to deserve this?” wondered one man.

“Maybe they got an offer to appear on Celebrity Traitors,” quipped another.

“Never-ending attention seekers, they just want to cause more aggravation for William and Kate.”

“On the lookout for more material for their Diana documentary and next books no doubt.”

“With luck it will speed up the divorce.”

The outpouring of hostility and bitterness is overwhelming, with the odd enthusiastic comment heavily outnumbered. (Judging by the remarks, Meghan will be lucky not to be booed should she ever venture into Waitrose.) Has any couple ever burnt through so much goodwill so quickly?

How different it was back in May 2018 when I wrote for London’s Telegraph about Harry and Meghan’s fairytale wedding in St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. It was a glorious day, the Union flag waved, and the people cheered for their favourite young royal. Everyone was so happy that Diana’s lost boy – that shell-shocked 12-year-old we had watched as he walked, ghost-pale, beside his mother’s coffin – had finally found a bright and beautiful woman to love him.

Admittedly, alarm bells rang when Meghan commandeered the engagement interview, promising to “hit the ground running”, more like a pushy contestant on The Apprentice than a doting fiancee, but doubts were vanquished by a beautiful ceremony that combined the best of British and American. In his Blues & Royals uniform, Harry looked like the foxiest Salvation Army sergeant ever, but was pensive and nervous.

READ MORE OF THE BORING ROYALS: https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/the-sussexes-selfish-return-spells-peril-for-the-royal-family-20260824-p60r0a.htm

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

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