Andy Burnham, football populism, and the political trap of Manchester City

It’s coming for you. It’s coming for you. Oh Andy Burnham, the hugely problematic relationship between principle and realpolitik in post-cash Britain. It’s coming for you. We are going all in on football chat these days, aren’t we? Football populism, football blokeyness, the stylings of the football everyman. That was certainly the horse the prime minister rode in on a few months ago. And right now it’s a horse that’s still very much snorting around the cabinet room, and threatening to run right over the top of him.

Also: fresh plot twists. Previous governments have been thrown into early-term crisis by things such as war, sex scandals and economic meltdown. But never, and historians will have time to pore over this in the coming decades, by the urgent need to overpay for Jack Grealish. “The ramifications of this are MASSIVE,” the man on the radio said on Thursday morning. And he was right. There are ramifications here. And the ramifications, well, Clive, they’re massive. In this case the man on the radio was discussing the United Kingdom’s multilayered geopolitical meltdown through the prism of whether this means Spurs are less or more likely to get relegated. And to be fair there are very few global events that can’t be better understood through a Spurs-in-crisis lens.

The Arctic ice shelf is about to collapse. Chinese military scientists have worked out how to land three successive nuclear warheads in exactly the same spot, thereby causing not only standard mass destruction but disturbing the Earth’s crust at a tectonic level. Sounds bad. But break it down for me. Does this mean Spurs are more likely to be relegated or less likely to be relegated? Zombie apocalypse. People eating pine cones in bunkers. Yes, fine. But is there any upside here for Roberto De Zerbi’s troubled north London tenure?

Football has always loved a ramification, loved it when things are huge and sweeping, parcelled out in scrolling headlines and graphics that go whoosh. But this week there is a genuine sense of scaling up. When it comes to Burnham and Manchester City, football is not providing an analogy for politics. It is politics. The singularity has happened. We are the ramification. Football is the captain now. It’s in the room, taking the big chair, digging its great, dripping, bloody fingernails right into the key faultline in Burnham’s political persona.

There is a wild and vengeful irony in this, because football is so tightly stitched into Burnham’s own story. Abu Dhabi provided the seed capital for his political point of difference, the Manchesterism energy that carried him into Downing Street. Football gave him his lingua franca, the refreshingly relatable vibe, which is a fairly low bar given Burnham’s immediate predecessor addressed the public in the manner of a deeply disappointed human-sized water vole that is only now realising, as it stands at its lighted plinth, that it’s not actually supposed to be able to talk.

But football is also fire from the gods. Be wary of this thing. Nothing has cut through like this, but nothing has the same wild popular energy. And like the government of the United Arab Emirates, it will also come looking for its pound of meat in return.

Personally, I like Burnham and want him to succeed. I like that someone is talking about altering fundamentally the way the nation feels, not just its level of economic activity, acknowledging that the current version of net human happiness has fallen short, that we have created a country that sold itself off by the pound, outsourcing its social fabric to a series of shell companies in Panama.

I like the fact the person having this grand-scale vision is not called Ramsey Fartington-Smythe, but Andy Burnham, which sounds like the name of a mid-90s deep house DJ in a northern club called Flesh, or Paper, currently popping up on leaflets stapled to lamp-posts underneath people like DJ Flexxxx and MC Deathface (“plus Andy Burnham”). This Andy Burnham wants to change the country. Good. He’s right. At which point, enter football, and the deeper problem of whether the things Burnham says and the things he is required to do, as expressed perfectly in the football-centred culture that got him here, can actually exist in the same space.

Burnham gave two speeches this week. One of them was kind, soft, generous, seductive. This was chimney-sweep Andy, talking about restoring balance to society and control to our lives, little person versus big person, about chatbot life, waiting-list culture, the move away from living in a country that makes a good show of openly hating the people who live there. Then he said some other things, words that have now been toned down and walked back by Downing Street, but which seemed to express a bizarre degree of cognitive dissonance. “I would be really concerned to lose them,” the prime minister of the United Kingdom said, expressing sympathy for an oppressive monarchical regime throwing money at an effort to escape the rules that bind everyone else.

He went on to say it would be “wrong” to “jump to a conclusion” here. Which, to be clear, would be a conclusion based on the application of English law by an independent judicial panel, with the potential for far more serious sanctions. Andy, you’re the actual prime minister. This isn’t an Everton message board. It’s an issue of deep public and regulatory concern. There is no place here for tribal gripes or pub-level football chat. Finally Burnham said the quiet thing out loud. “They’ve been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester.”

Here you have the spectacle of a man trying to live two ideological lives simultaneously. What is Manchesterism anyway? In its base form, it’s the same as Londonism. Many other things have contributed and taken this on. Political devolution. Local talent. Tech companies. The Intelligence Economy. But Abu Dhabi’s investment was the big fast-forward after the 2008 financial crisis.

This was nine years before Burnham became mayor. But he benefited hugely, politically and personally, from the investments of the Abu Dhabi United Group, the same people pumping money into Nolito, who were also putting a billion into the New Islington transformation, another billion into the Manchester Campus, a place on the Manchester tram map that is now literally called Etihad, with all the talk of locals being moved out, unaffordable housing, civic leaders shying away from the human-rights record of their partners.

Follow the money and you never know where you might end up. Look at this from a certain angle and Abu Dhabi basically gave us downtown Andy Burnham. He’s another Etihad academy graduate, the Phil Foden of Downing Street. And this is a living, breathing channel to power.

One of Burnham’s first calls as prime minister was to Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the UAE. Who is of course the brother of Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, owner of Manchester City. And who also employed as a key aide one Jaber Mohamed, said to be personally responsible for payments through Etisalat that form part of the alleged cooking of the Premier League books. When Burnham says he is bringing the great Manchester success story to government, this is an umbilical part of what he’s describing.

This is, of course, not a problem of Burnham’s own making. He has to live in the world as it is, required by the job to cosy up to investors whose behaviour is a perfectly realised example of the overclass billionaire-ism he sets himself against.

But Burnham also has a choice to make. He could, for example, stop thanking the UAE so profusely. What does he think this is, a favour? It’s a business deal, with something very clearly going back in return. It brings to mind the “Thank You Sheikh Mansour” banner at the Etihad Stadium. What is this for exactly? You’re already thanking him by promoting the brand, cheering the soft power, allowing him to own the streets beneath your feet.

In the end what we have here is not an analogy for modern Britain, a parable of loss of control and alienation, of being hostage only to power. It is instead these things being enacted right in front of us. The wider choice for Burnham, and also for Manchester City’s fans, is: what do you want to have, what do you want to be? Billions will come and go. There will be hard economic consequences if the UAE takes its ball away. But the rule of law, not rolling over in the face of power, retaining your sovereign assets. Do these things feel good too? And in a way that money can’t actually buy? Isn’t this exactly what Burnham No 1 was talking about?

The alternative, as we have now discovered, is being pushed around in a bath chair and made to dance for cash. This is all right there in the cabinet room as we speak, asking what you want to stand for. Realpolitik? Or some sort of stab at real things, real principles? Even, in some glorious reconditioned future, Spurs being relegated of their own sovereign, self-governing accord.