I find the patronising of northern people by the London media bubble intensely frustrating. As a Yorkshireman who has accidentally lost his flat vowels after living in London for six years, I know a thing or two about the sort of people SW1 writes about with the fascination of David Attenborough observing a rare species.
Time after time, people with provincial northern accents are portrayed as caricatures, especially when it comes to politicians. They are one-dimensional. They’re not clever or conniving or scheming. People from the north get something of a free pass.
They’re less scrutinised, and get away with claims and self-designed brands that southern politicians would never. We saw it with Angela Rayner, who, despite coming from an authentically working-class background, was able to continue playing up to a certain stereotype despite enjoying an increasingly feathered nest out of reach to most Britons.
And we now see it, perhaps most strongly of all, with Andy Burnham. We are told over and over by Mr Burnham himself that he is ‘Mr North’. A boy from Liverpool who now rules over Manchester.
A man who, when asked by Mumsnet in 2015 what his favourite biscuit is, genuinely answered ‘chips and gravy’. He claims to speak honestly and from the heart, with the reassuring lilt of a former Coronation Street actor trying to flog an underwhelming car insurance package.
And unfortunately very few people seem to properly challenge this. He gets away with it, I believe, because too many southern media types fall hook, line and sinker for his accent.
But after years of shifting his political beliefs to suit whatever type of centre-left politics in is vogue at any one time, the Q&A I sat through this afternoon proved he is exactly the same as every other politician in Britain. It was full of flip-flopping, manoeuvring, backstabbing, self-aggrandising, and lying as you’d hear from anyone in his position.
He claimed he had never told the Telegraph that he’d been called by MPs asking him to launch a leadership challenge against Keir Starmer, but instead he’d had chats with Labour MPs on many issues, and was pure embellishment to report they were about his leadership hopes.
Minutes later he was asked to rule out that his MP chats had involved discussions about replacing the Prime Minister. He flatly refused to do so, because they had. He claimed the stories about his leadership hopes were a media concoction. Another lie.
He claimed all he’s done is “launched a debate” about how best to defeat Reform. He claimed he had done “everything I could to ensure this conference would be a success”.
But now he says he endorses Keir Starmer to remain as Prime Minister, and is the best person for the job. All of this is to be expected from a politician, but people should remember this weekend the next time he trots out his claims of being a normal guy and not part of the political establishment.
You can take the man out of Westminster, you can’t take Westminster out of the man.