Is Oldham’s Eton dream becoming an Eton mess?

Dear readers — Eton College, in the town of Eton, Berkshire, is a boarding school with a capacity of just below 1,400 pupils, which has delivered 20 prime ministers for the country in its history, most recently Boris Johnson. Oldham, a borough of more than 250,000 people in the north-west of England, has delivered one, sort of: Chadderton-born Suranne Jones’ character in the Netflix series Hostage.

But at the end of last year these strangest of bedfellows confirmed a new partnership: Eton College was to open a spin-off school of sorts in Oldham’s town centre. They would spend £1 million a year on the project and welcome 480 academically talented pupils, most of whom from disadvantaged backgrounds.

From the off, the project’s biggest backer in Oldham has been its council leader, Arooj Shah. But after Labour’s dismal showing in the recent local elections, Shah is set to walk away after five years running the borough. That leaves Oldham with a gap to fill (all eyes will be on Oldham’s council chamber tonight when a new governance structure is to be decided upon), but it also leaves Eton Star at a loss for a champion. In today’s piece we ask if the project could be about to fall apart.

But first, here’s your Burnham by-election fix…

Burnham latest: What you need to know

On Tuesday, Burnham gave a speech to the Great North Summit in Leeds. It was his first speech since being cleared by the Labour NEC to run to be selected as the candidate for Makerfield. He was confirmed as Labour’s candidate yesterday, with the party saying nobody else was shortlisted for the seat. In Tuesday’s speech, he made a similar case to voters as he did in his ITV interview over the weekend: Thatcher put the UK on the wrong path; the Labour Party hasn’t delivered for people in the north of England; and he wanted to be its agent of change. 

Here is a tight rundown of the rest: 

• Burnham wouldn’t have the UK rejoin the EU, despite previous statements to the contrary.
• A vote for him was a vote to “reindustrialise the north” and reverse the damage of Thatcherite privatisation with the nationalisation of services like water and energy.
• He reiterated the way said privatisation has benefitted the lives of the rich while making it harder for working people to access/afford basic services.
• He wants to maximise the devolution of power from Whitehall to local governments across England, many take this as a nod towards devolving tax powers.
• He wants civil servants to be living in the places their decisions are affecting, essentially spreading the civil service more evenly throughout the UK instead of just London. 

Meanwhile, in his first video of the campaign Burnham walks around Makerfield shaking hands with locals, pointing out the local school he sent his kids to and plugging his work as mayor. He also takes a turn around the city centre, being thanked by various passers-by for everything he has done for the city. “Working side-by-side with business, we have built the country’s fastest growing economy”, he says, calling “Manchesterism” the end of neoliberalism. It is all, of course, soundtracked by Oasis and Elbow. You can watch it here.

Not that it’s just the Burnham Show. We now know Reform’s candidate in the race. Self-employed plumber (clearly the plumber-to-politician pipeline is a real thing in the north-west these days) Robert Kenyon, who came second in the constituency for Reform in 2024’s general election, has been announced. Reform leader Nigel Farage is already framing the contest as a “David versus Goliath battle” between Kenyon and “open borders Burnham”. We’ll have much more on Kenyon and any other candidates in coming editions, but for now, please do send us any tips or juicy gossip about the Makerfield by-election here. Confidentiality guaranteed.

Eton Star or Eton Mess?

Sitting in her office in Oldham’s town centre, Arooj Shah, the Labour council leader here for the past five years and the next five or so days, listens carefully to the criticisms of one of her flagship projects. The office is a stone’s throw from the newly rebuilt ‘Parliament Square’, watched over by six owls on tall plinths, otherwise known as a parliament of owls, so the council’s website informs me. 

Shah has heard these criticisms before. That Eton Star, a spin-off college courtesy of the nation’s most prestigious schools, which is set to arrive in Oldham in the next few years, is a vanity project on Eton’s part, that it’ll take up a prime town centre spot that could be much better used and that actually, if we’re going to get down to the numbers, Eton College doesn’t help students improve their scores from GCSE to A-Level as much as Oldham’s existing largest college. “The voices that have aired some sort of grievance, or some sort of issue with it, are, really, middle-class people who have had opportunity naturally,” Shah tells me. “That’s not what I represent as leader of Oldham.”

The problem she faces is that she won’t be leader of Oldham for much longer. This week, the borough’s councillors must decide on a new governance structure. The recent local elections left no party with an overall majority, with Shah’s Labour reduced to 18 seats and an insurgent Reform up to 16. Labour are insisting Reform must lead from now on, as promised in their campaigning, while Reform say no one will work with them. The Oldham Group, a new pro-Gaza group with their own tranche of new councillors, are the pariahs of the chamber, while the Lib Dems are working on trying to build allegiances, and could play a crucial role. The Lib Dems are also the biggest opponents of Eton Star.

And this is why the loosely screwed helter skelter of Oldham politics suddenly matters to Eton, one the world’s most prestigious private schools, hundreds of miles south down in Berkshire. With Shah about to leave the stage, the Eton Star Oldham project could be dead in the water.