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The prime minister-presumptive Andy Burnham arrived for his coronation in London last week, vowels freshly flattened for the occasion, and the Westminster journalists anointed him King of the North.
But trouble may lie ahead. He promptly called a press conference back in Manchester, his former mayoral seat, promising to create a “Number 10 North”. If he starts treating Manchester and something called “The North” interchangeably, his fissiparous notional kingdom will be threatened by a series of subregional peasants’ revolts.
The idea of a unified northern identity with accompanying northern values is strong in the minds of the London media-political complex and gets projected on to a succession of north-whisperers. There is no clear definition of said values, but they seem to involve a combination of gritty industrial authenticity, solidarity in adversity, blunt but friendly plain-speaking, performative imperviousness to cold weather and a diet heavy in saturated fats.
Southern types regard north-whisperers with a fascination simultaneously intimidated and patronising, as they might a honey badger that has learnt to talk. London’s Evening Standard in 2021 employed Burnham to write a column and, ignoring his mild-mannered temperament, billed him, bafflingly, as the “Northern Firebrand”. The obverse would be the Manchester Evening News signing up the urbane London mayor Sadiq Khan to write the “Cheeky Cockney Chappie” column with a photo of him mocked up as a Pearly King, eating jellied eels and doing the Lambeth Walk.
By now “The North” is what semioticians call a floating signifier, detached from geographical reality. As a native of the prosperous city of Chester, I’m frequently informed I can’t be northern “because Chester’s posh”. And yet it is in the northern county of Cheshire, the North West government region and the Northern Province of the Church of England; it’s northern by accent and self-definition. But northerner-than-thou types say we Cestrians forfeit that identity because our most successful industries are tourism and financial services, not hewing lumps of coal out of the ground.
Attaining northerner status is somehow a desirable mark of moral authority. I’ve never met anyone north-adjacent actively choosing a Midlands identity. A friend from Buxton in Derbyshire, which borders Cheshire, insists she’s a northerner while I contend she’s a Midlander. Our debate is now deep into its second decade without any prospect of agreement.
Before Burnham, the media’s appointed north-whisperer was Ben Houchen, the ebullient Conservative mayor of the Tees Valley. Before his administration became mired in questions of financial mismanagement, Houchen enjoyed a flourishing career sounding off about Teesside and demanding reparations for the region, his manner earning him the sobriquet — not one he chose himself — “the Boris Johnson of the north”. Houchen is mayor to around 700,000 people, 4 per cent of the north’s population. Imagine taking the leader of Bristol city council as a proxy for the entire south of England outside London.
In reality, a kingdom of the north would fracture into ever-smaller fiefdoms. Yorkshire-Lancashire rivalry is infamous, but attempts to rationalise Yorkshire’s local government in the 2010s got tangled in a thicket of internally rancorous civic rivalries. Carving up the former Yugoslavia was nothing: try mediating between Leeds and Sheffield.
Within the north-west, Liverpool and Manchester famously dislike each other. Surrounding towns trust neither. In Chester, a failed campaign in the 2000s for a north-west regional assembly aroused micro-nationalist resentment. “DO YOU WANT TO BE RULED FROM LIVERPOOL? OR MANCHESTER?” bellowed the leaflets. Better oppression by the imperial capital down south than life under a regional satrap.
So far, Burnham’s genius has been to embody generic northernness. He grew up in an unremarkable Cheshire village called Culcheth. It’s not Merseyside, it’s not Greater Manchester, it’s not the wealthy mid-Cheshire belt. Culcheth is geographically northern but not much else — perfect for the monarch of this fantasy kingdom. Swapping the abstraction of The North for the specificity of Manchester and running Britain from there will multiply his enemies.
The great 19th-century constitutional scholar Walter Bagehot said of the royal family that you should never let daylight in on magic. Burnham must beware mundane Mancunian reality defiling the purity of the northern ideal. No sensible monarch aspires to govern a realm when he can reign over a vibe. Long live the new King of the North! May God preserve him and keep him from ever having to define what the title actually means.
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