“Hi guys, welcome to Manchester. My name’s Andy. Yes, yes, I know, the prime minister. These things ’appen. Repeat after me: Fatcher, Liz Truss crashed the economy.”
Mr Burnham stood before us in a floor-tiles, carpet-tiles, and shiny-desks meeting room at Number Ten North.
The ambience, set by lanyards, loud ties and murmuring in the presence of authority, lent itself to a recalcitrant, all-knowing upper school, familiar with the rules — written and unwritten — and now faced with a young new head of house.
Miss Blod and I have blagged our way into a gathering of the off-the-radar Group of Sixteen, as Number Fourteen and Number Fourteen A.
Outside, stories below, an accidental Renaissance tableau unfolds in the drizzle. Cleared slumland, awaiting a Chinese skyscraper, is dappled with Lowry-esque figures hunching towards a football match. A Boys’ Brigade band marches and skip-steps along the remains of a cobbled street. Is it Gary Neville who shivers in a hard hat and hi-vis vest, staring at plans?
However, it became apparent that myself, Miss Blod and the Great British public weren’t the only ones unaware of the surreptitious goings-on regarding the G16.
“I’m a simple northern sort,” continued Mr Burnham, clutching his hands before him and wearing an earnest frown. “Not going to lie, bit baffled by this Group of Sixteen carry-on. Kier and Morgan McSweeney and Labour Together and the Islington crowd are a bit above m’ payscale, as the first PM from the North since forever.”
A murmur went around the room. The prime minister had to parry loud stage whispers noting Harold Wilson being from Huddersfield. Then Mrs Thatcher’s Grantham laying, depending upon the compensation for the curvature of the Earth taken by the cartographer, (just) above a line drawn between the Bristol Channel and the Wash. Tough crowd.
“I’ll be honest with you. Back to basics. What I want you to do is forget about meself being a Cambridge graduate, married to a Euro-plutocrat with a stack of directorships. Oubliez vouz mon growing up in a Cheshire village, leaving for London at the first opportunity and never having a job.
“I want you to imagine I’m a working-class sort from the North West, somebody a bit thick, like…” He laughed in anticipation of his own punchline. “…like the Minister for Housing, in whom I have full confidence. And she’ll hate me for saying this; imagine you’re talking to Angela Rayner. Who wants to go first?”
No-brainer: first to speak can say anything he wants, while not being able to contradict himself with anything that’s already been said. All who follow are on the back foot. Open field. Send me.
Powder dry, none of my good lines already delivered by somebody else, I raised my hand, stood up, and set off, repeating from the leaked document passed to us on a memory stick by Jerry Westerby. The late Jerry Westerby who is now residing, according to the tributes on that morning’s radio news, stone cold on a mortuary slab in Kowloon City.
Miss Blod nodded throughout my presentation, even, from time to time, tapping the table. Uniting the school before the new master, more than one or two others joined in. Particularly, a tall, thin man with hen-pecked features sat behind a diminutive female figure who was covered in the Islamic style.
Perception management: Operation Stable State. All’s well if the political bubble extends no further than from the middle of the Labour Party to the middle of the Tory Party. Mass immigration. Net zero. Shadow the EU. High tax. Big state. Farage and Reform UK, bit iffy. Lots to do. Look what we did to Corbyn and the Sturgeons. Let’s get busy.
As I ran out of things to say, it was time to pass the baton: “My colleague [pick a number between one and sixteen, excluding fourteen and fourteen A], Number Four can elucidate.”
A tough, experienced crowd. Rather than being flummoxed by the hand grenade landing in their lap, Number Four glided through their brief.
They represented RICU, the Research Information and Communications Unit: a back-office operation of spies, spinners, soldiers, actors and agent provocateurs. It had replaced the old Information Research Departments, staffed by civil servants and, apparently, a little too impartial. Contractors were now employed to monitor and challenge criminality and sub-criminality, and to covertly engineer events to generate content intended to move opinion in a particular direction.
On the journo-for-hire side, this very day, they were creating an artificial environment designed to test whether Reform personnel would cross a boundary. Recording the resulting behaviour, the material would be used for maximum political impact, just before the Reform Party conference.
“Actors?” queried the PM.
“Big lads causing trouble and making racist remarks on behalf of the Pink Ladies outside migrant digs, that kind of acting.”
Big lads, actors, soldiers. I couldn’t help but think of Widders. A tingle ran down my spine, not discouraged by the fact that I couldn’t help but notice Hen-Pecked was still glancing in my direction.
“Who are you answerable to?” asked a concerned Mr Burnham.
“Nobody,” replied Four, before correcting themselves: “Oh, the Home Office, I suppose.”
“Who’s next?”
A hand shot up. It was Eight, aka Mr Prevent.
“The aim of Prevent is to prevent terrorism being linked to Islam. Rather, to associate it with the extreme far, hard, ultra-right. We work with the intelligence services, the courts, police and the legal profession to prosecute more white people than brown people.
“Blokes in pubs, kids in bedrooms, that kind of thing. The model railway and Dad’s Army-watching classes. Maniacs with knives making ricin in the kitchen? Not our brief.”
“That’s the Home Office as well, isn’t it?” said the Member for Makerfield. “Anybody else from the H.O.?”
A forest of hands sprouted upwards.
“I’m an optimistic type, but is this a bit sinister, folks?” asked Mr Burnham.
One hand remained raised. A black girl with multiple extra needs, wearing a kaffiyeh. Non-verbal, she communicated using a box attached to her wheelchair, as though the unnatural progeny of a union between DEI and Stephen Hawking.
“Let me put your mind at rest, Prime Minister. I’m from the BBC. No, not sinister; we’re here to help the Prime Minister — or prime ministers. For instance, you’ll recall Mr Starmer’s firebombing?”
She beamed with pride as she recalled a flagship Panorama programme blaming it on Russia and, somehow, making Muslims the real victims.
“The convicted young Ukrainian gentleman had nothing to do with the louche party lifestyle of a Metropolitan legal class with odd-shaped families,” she reassured him, before adding, “What’s more, we could do the same for any PM.”
Then, ominously: “If we wanted to.”
The G16 nodded in unison, as if everyone in the school knew — from a sixth-former’s nine-year-old brother, via one of those inconvenient one-degree-of-separation coincidences — why the new head of year left his previous prep-school appointment in a panicked hurry.
“I’ll tell you what, lads and lasses,” announced a perspiring prime minister. “It’s coffee time.”
An orderly tea and biscuits interlude of small talk and pleasantries broke out.
The room, after all, had more in common than just the subterfuge of kiboshing Reform.
We had all spent the previous night in miserable northern motels; all read the meeting’s briefing notes at the last possible minute; and all would, if offered the opportunity, have preferred to be somewhere else.
At that moment, we two interlopers had every reason to feel secure.
The calm waters rippled only because of Hen-Pecked. Having stared at us for some time, he now seemed to have made up his mind. With the purposeful gait of a man carrying either a message or a grievance, he set off in our direction with the grim determination of one who had just spotted something not supposed to be.
Up close, his demeanour was that of someone from a decent public school who’d been spoiled by attending one of the newer Oxbridge colleges (sponsored by an Arab).
Once within hailing distance, I heard him say, in a voice suffering a slight Low Countries lisp:
“Excuse me. Are you supposed to be here?”
We’d been rumbled.
To be continued…
© Always Worth Saying 2026
