Andy Burnham's new book isn't exactly subtle. But can it rally a movement?
In Head North, Burnham teams up with Steve Rotheram to stick one to the fakers down in London
Dear readers — welcome to our book club. Today’s offering: a new “half memoir, half manifesto” co-written by Andy Burnham and his counterpart in Liverpool Steve Rotheram, which has just been published.
The book — Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain — tells the story of how Burnham and Rotheram, despite their very different paths into politics, joined forces and, well, headed north, leaving behind the so-called Westminster bubble and returning to their roots. Is it any good? We gave staff writer Jack Walton the plum job of finding out. And a warning for the major Burnham heads among our readership: he didn’t love it.
Before that: If Burnham and Rotheram aren’t big enough political fish for you, how about US Senator and former presidential contender Bernie Sanders? We’ve made a special podcast episode about Bernie’s very exciting visit to the Mill office on Monday and you can listen to that here, including some audio of the senator’s chat with Joshi. "It is a disaster for democracy," he tells us about the collapse of local news. Listen on your preferred listening platform by clicking here.
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Your Mill briefing
🏟 There was some inter-stadia beef at a recent Manchester City Council meeting between the owners of the AO Arena and Co-op Live, the 23,500-seat arena set to open in April. The AO owners objected to Co-op Live being granted a licence to operate after midnight and operate 24/7 for certain events. The objection was made on “public safety” grounds, but Oak View Group, the developer behind Co-op Live, felt it was “competition based”. Co-op Live will replace the AO Arena as the biggest indoor arena in the UK.
🎧 Canvas, an underground club and gig venue on Oxford Road, has quietly closed. The venue hosted Neighbourhood Festival, the afterparty to Green Island Festival (Mills Passim) and once even promised a plunge pool, but this never materialised. Bruntwood SciTech said: “We, along with many others, are saddened by the closure of Canvas, an ambitious business that we have supported since its launch in 2019.”
🎞️ There’s a lovely letter in the Guardian about the history of the Salford Workers’ Film Society, which had its first screening in 1930. It continues today as the Manchester and Salford Film Society, with 102-year-old Marjorie Ainsworth as its president, who joined the society aged 17 after being persuaded by her boyfriend (and later husband) to come along.
🐸 It was The Frog & Bucket’s 30th birthday yesterday. One of the longest-running comedy clubs outside London, it has hosted the likes of Peter Kay, Johnny Vegas and Sarah Millican. We’d be remiss to mention “the frog” without referencing the time we forced Jack to perform stand-up there. Good times.
Andy Burnham's new book isn't exactly subtle. But can it rally a movement?
By Jack Walton
Meet Andy and Steve. Andy went to Cambridge. Steve was a brickie. Andy mixed it with the politicos and the nepo-babies down in London. Steve stayed in the North. The hardy-but-humble North. Andy learned the ugly truth of how the system really worked from the inside. Steve wouldn’t learn this until later.
They’re chalk and cheese, you must be thinking. Such strange bedfellows: Andy with his MP pals and his champagne flute at the Spectator summer party. Steve up here in the North, laying bricks. Perhaps mixing cement or eating a butty. But as fate would have it, their paths converged — and in the new book Head North, we learn how they hatched a plan to join forces and fight the good fight against the corrupt Westminster system.
Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain is a book about an authentic pair of blokes — good, honest, down-to-earth sorts; the type you don’t find south of Crewe — palling about and sticking one to the bloody fakers. The joint book from Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram — mayors-in-arms for Manchester and Liverpool respectively, or more specifically, the city regions of each — declares itself “half memoir, half manifesto”. It does a decent job on the memoir front. There are more than ample anecdotes from the pair’s adolescences: both hail from Merseyside towns four miles apart, with lives that diverged before reconverging. In these early pages, they listen to The Smiths and The Jam, dress in Sergio Tacchini clothing, and chat up girls.
On the manifesto front, things are more iffy. Head North has a defining preoccupation: both men hate London. Sure, there are plenty of reasons to hate London. Busy, expensive, home to that M&M’s store. But is hating London a manifesto? I would propose, gently, that the answer is no. (Post-publication, Burnham’s top aide asked me to clarify that his boss does not hate London specifically but more the London political scene and the system of power that resides there. I think that was pretty obvious to readers, but I’m very happy to make it more obvious. Burnham has after all written reguarly for the London Evening Standard).
A degree of self-mythologising is fine, I guess — it is a book, after all, and needs a narrative. But there is something painfully self-aggrandising about the pages documenting Burnham and Rotheram’s careers as MPs in Westminster (Rotheram joined Burnham in parliament as MP for Liverpool Walton in 2010). “I wasn’t interested in the dinner party circuit… it was all work,” writes Rotheram.
“From very early on during my time in Parliament there were feelings starting to germinate inside me about whether I could really fit into this establishment,” says Burnham. That’s the same Andy Burnham who served in multiple cabinet positions and twice attempted to become Leader of the Labour Party — you wonder what he would be saying had he won, or even become Prime Minister.
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