Andy Burnham’s plan for Britain starts above a Manchester cocktail bar

MANCHESTER, England — On the day in June that Andy Burnham ended his nine-year term as mayor, Manchester’s authorities sent him off with a parting gift: a wingback chair whose shiny fabric was printed with the city’s trademark worker-bee symbol and its rallying cry “we do things differently here.” One month later, Burnham moved to 10 Downing Street, the sprawling Georgian terrace in London replete with mice, net curtains, cranky heating and patchy phone signal from which six other prime ministers have struggled to run Britain in the last decade. But the worker-bee chair did not accompany him on the trip south. It moved just a half-mile, through a city that was once the engine of the industrial revolution but for more than a century has struggled for balance against the political, economic and military power consolidated in the capital. The chair now sits beside a 10-seat conference table in what Burnham calls “No. 10 North,” a refurbished 1980s office block he has chosen as his auxiliary seat of power. What remains of the largest empire the world has known is now governed most Fridays from above a discount cocktail bar, where Burnham has replaced Downing Street’s concentric rooms of gatekeepers with clinically lit floors of open-plan desks. Staffed by several political allies from his time in Greater Manchester and decorated with a gold record of The Queen Is Dead, the 1986 album by Manchester band The Smiths, it is Burnham’s “comfort zone,” a person who has worked with him said — “an homage to his time” as mayor. No. 10 North is more than Burnham’s own Manc-a-Lago, where he retreats ahead of weekends at his family home nearby. The prime minister, who succeeded Keir Starmer as the benefactor of a Labour Party putsch on July 20, has made it a central aim of his premiership to move power and money out from limestone buildings on Whitehall, the old heart of London’s civil service — by centralizing some of Whitehall’s power further in No. 10 North, and handing other parts of it to local leaders outside government. He is banking Labour’s political future, and that of the British center-left, on being able to reverse a decades-long decline of England’s former industrial heartlands, one that fueled a political polarization and drove the 2016 vote for Brexit. “What we’re bringing is a different type of energy,” Caroline Simpson, the mayoral authority’s former chief executive whom Burnham has tasked with heading up his new northern outpost as deputy chief of staff, told POLITICO Magazine in her first interview since assuming the role. “That’s really the point about No. 10 North — to connect our places, connect devolution back into the heart of governing.” Burnham’s political opponents — and, privately, some civil servants, who have seen past prime ministers try to move power out of London — have derided the Manchester office as a gimmick, a soundstage for a politician attuned more to optics than policy detail. (No. 10 North is “absolutely not” a gimmick, insists Simpson.) The office is already up and running, but some of the basic details of how it will geographically redistribute power — such as how funding or boundaries will be configured — have not been worked out. An early test of Burnham’s commitment to redistributing his government’s sparse finances will come on Oct. 28, the day of his first budget, and in a cross-government spending review in 2027. POLITICO Magazine spoke to 28 current or former civil servants, political officials, regional officials, advisers and politicians to illuminate what life is like inside No. 10 North and the broader policy vision it reflects. Many were granted anonymity to speak frankly about the workings of Burnham’s government. Downing Street declined to comment on the specifics of this article, beyond making Simpson available for interview. Burnham took office on a pledge to “rewire Britain.” He has to rewire the house first. Moving to Heron House The incoming prime minister discussed the idea of se