Thing of the week: Winter is coming!

It’s been a good few weeks/months since Midlands Thing last turned up for work, but all it took was a change of Prime Minister and the opportunity for a few cheap Game of Thrones references.

Few will have escaped the news that the self-styled “King of the North”, Andy Burnham, is now head of the UK Government in Westminster, and this is quite a feat for a man who wasn’t even an MP two months ago.

The parliamentary Labour party, eyeing some truly dismal polling prior to a round of local elections in May that went as well as most people expected(not very), clearly called time on Keir Starmer months ago. It was doubtless a relief to party apparatchiks when he finally exited stage left this week.

As a veteran and strictly neutral politics understander, Midlands Thing reckons Starmer’s appeal to the electorate was, in the main, “not being the Tories”, alongside the vague promise that he held the keys to more than a decade of good ideas and frustrated talent stored up during Labour’s wilderness years on the opposition benches.

Two years after his landslide victory, handing Labour a mandate to enact all the much-anticipated “change” one could shake a stick at, we’re still waiting for the dam to burst.

One of the main criticisms of Starmer, a man whose critics would suggest is not blessed with an abundance of natural charisma, was that he was poor at communicating his government’s ideas. Famously, he could chair a meeting, and draft a minute. But can he do a Facebook Live on a cold, rainy night in Stoke-on-Trent?

Unfortunately, but perhaps appropriately for a famous Arsenal supporter, Starmer frequently found himself fending off the PR equivalent of a Rory Delap-style long throw into the penalty area in front of the Boothen End. But, as this brief but painful metaphor mercifully meets its natural conclusion, the same can’t be said of his successor.

Burnham’s intentions for government are yet to be fully articulated, but the man certainly knows how to make a TikTok.

To that end, Midlands Thing has already heard a great deal about “Manchesterism”, Burnham’s business-friendly socialism pitch to the country, honed over the last decade as mayor for Greater Manchester.

Thing is, to be quite honest, not entirely sure what Manchesterism is, beyond a turbo charged regional devolution agenda, and perhaps a long overdue rebalancing exercise, which will see government powers distributed in part via a new cabinet office in the north west.

That in itself would be a welcome development.

However, Thing also reckons it’s a bit of a shame that visitors to the No.10 North will sail straight through the UK’s second largest city to get there, indeed future administrations may well hop off their HS2 at Curzon Street and jump on a connection to Manchester across town by 2036.

How much more convenient would No.10 North be if it was, in fact, No.10 Midlands, in Digbeth? And if you’ve got to change trains anyway, why not to one of the other famous old English cities which have been left behind by England’s obsession with putting everything in the south east?

Has Manchester had enough Manchesterism yet? Would Nottingham or Derby benefit from a bit of Manchesterism too, perhaps?

Nonetheless, apolitical Midlands Thing welcomes anything which brings a bit more cash, and a bit more consideration to issues which occur north of Watford. And who knows, we may even get to feature in the background of one of the PMs TikToks on his way through New Street, so those No.10 North benefits are trickling down already.

Only time will tell as to whether other aspects of Manchesterism will work out for the Midlands and anyway, as all true GoT pendants will doubtless point out, it’s the King IN the North, and the trip down south didn’t end so well for Ned Stark.

Burnham will walk into number ten with a chunk of goodwill on the back of his achievements as Mayor of Greater Manchester, and perhaps a more radical plan for change. He will be hoping he doesn’t lose his head in the process.