Jeremy Hunt

No, I won't be his chancellor for sure.

But there is a chapter on devolving power to elected mayors.

which he profoundly agrees with, would make an enormous difference.

We are literally the only country in the Western world where a city the size of Leeds or Sheffield or Manchester doesn't allow elected leaders to solve their own problems.

Literally everything that Andy Burnham has wanted to do as mayor, he's had to bang on the door of number 11 Downing Street, whether to me or to Rishi Sunak or to Rachel Reeves.

It's crazy.

And if you look at

You know, if you look at cities like Bilbao or Denver in the US, that 40 years ago were just like Manchester, totally suffering from deindustrialization.

Bilbao has caught up with Madrid.

Denver has caught up with New York in terms of per capita wealth.

Manchester is still about half London's wealth.

That's what's so depressing.

Manchester's the city we've given the most devolved power to.

And it is still, I accept it's done better than other places, but it is still struggling as compared to London and the South East.

And the core reason, which I think Andy Burnham would totally agree with,

is that we don't give the people elected to run Manchester the power to sort out their own problems.

And in fact, we make it worse because we give electoral legitimacy to the mayors who are elected, but we don't give them the agency to sort out problems.

And that is something he could do in his first months as Prime Minister.

He could say, I'm going to give the mayors in our cities and the mayors of our counties...

the same powers that they would get in Denver or Bilbao, and we're going to make it easy for people to solve their own problems.