𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

‘Ange, your mic is off!’

Isn’t it a bit odd of the Housing Secretary to conduct the business of No10 North without deigning to grace Manchester with the benefit of her presence at all?

Cynical readers may suggest that Andy Burnham’s new digs is little more than a vanity project stuffed full of social media staff, with us mere taxpayers picking up the tab.

But not me. Obviously having an office in Manchester will immediately improve the sleek Rolls-Royce like operation of Whitehall.

After all, Manchester worked so well under Andy Burnham – so why wouldn’t the rest of the country benefit from having the part-time relocation of government up there as well?

Yet, there’s a problem. Angela Rayner, we are told, held a meeting at the government’s new Manchester outpost via video call.

Now call me a cynic but doesn’t that rather defeat the point?

Of course, I applaud her commitment to devolution – I just am left to wonder from which of her several addresses the devolution was taking place.

Was it Ashton-under-Lyne where she serves as an MP? A place she adores so much that, if rumours are to be believed, she wanted to ditch it for coastal Brighton next time she faces the ballot?

Or perhaps it was down south, in her glossy £800,000 pad in Hove? Personally I hope it was the latter. Why not get the most of the place now you’ve settled your tax bill, eh Ange?

It’s hard to see how it makes sense to spend millions on a new office up north if ministers cannot be bothered to motor on over.

Andy must be fuming. Weeks of churning out vain platitudes about handing more power to you and me, and he gets a part timer refusing to come into the office.

For all we know Ange was dialing in on a laptop propped on a south-coast windowsill with sea glittering pointedly in the background.

Even worse, she could have been just ten minutes by bus up the road in Ashton.

Devolution, it turns out, is something some in Labour are rather keen to arrange for other people, than to personally undergo themselves.

Now I am sure the meeting was unproductive.

Video calls are, after all, an efficient use of time – but here is a certain comedy in the minister for bricks and mortar rocking up to her own meeting by avoiding attending the new seat of power all of us forked out for.

Must have made the civil servants who relocated north (at great expense to all of us as well) feel like mugs.

Staring blankly at the screen, wondering, much like the rest of us, what the point of No10 North was anyway.