Simon Tormey

The upside is that he was rather successful as mayor of Manchester.

And I think this is what the Labour Party is looking at, that in his kind of rather limited budget in terms of mayor, he's attracted inward investment.

He's brought a lot of kind of good companies and bright eyed and bushy tail sort of innovation into that city, whilst at the same time being quite true to that social democratic route.

So he's brought the bus services and the public transport infrastructure under his control as mayor.

So it kind of looks like a sort of a halo story there.

And I think this is what the Labour Party and a large chunk of the general population are hoping that he can do, because sprinkle a little bit of fairy dust there.

over the British economy, get things back on track, improve productivity, and hopefully begin to get those kind of wheels of the economy turning again, which will in turn then release a bit more investment into the much needed public sector, schools, universities, health, and so on.

It is incredible.

And I still think there's a kind of a doppelganger sort of issue here.

Is Britain a rich country with some poor people in it?

or a poor country with a lot of wealthy people in it.

And I think what Burnham is also saying, and part of his pitch, is that I understand what the kind of outside of London exterior looks like.

I was in Manchester.

Manchester does have lots of areas of deprivation, as do areas like Sheffield and

and Birmingham and so on.

So he's very much sort of pitched himself as an outsider, not in that sort of populist way of saying I'm against the elites, but I'm from another part of the UK, which perfectly well understands the cost of living crisis.

I've turned it around in Manchester, give me a chance to do this nationally.

That's been very much part of his pitch.

And he really plays on that kind of ordinary Northern roots, Everton FC supporter,

Someone who's kind of very much at home talking to the ordinary guy in the street, running around in a pair of shorts and all these kind of images and hoping to use that as a way of kind of building credibility, but also then leveraging that what they call Manchester-ism, a sort of Burnham's ideology for national purposes.