Andy Burnham’s relationship with our last Prime Minister was not exactly plain sailing.
The mayor got into a major row with Boris Johnson when our region was placed into a Tier 3 lockdown in October 2020.
A dramatic press conference followed outside the Bridgewater Hall and the mayor caught national attention and sparked a million memes by refusing to accept more restrictions.
This interview first appeared in the Mancunian Way - sign up for analysis of the biggest stories
But almost two years on and the Labour mayor says he still struggles to reconcile how Mr Johnson treated Greater Manchester that summer.
“I won’t remember him favourably because of the way he treated us over Tier 3,” he says.
“I did try to resolve it with him behind closed doors. He didn’t seem to know that we had effectively been in Tier 2 for three months before that.
“I think this is the Johnsonian phenomenon - the gap between the communications and what he actually did was too big for it to not creep up on a politician. There was just such a chasm.”
So a Prime Minister with admirers ‘from Kyiv to Carlisle’, but perhaps not within the M60.
Things weren’t always so sour.
Just days into his premiership Mr Johnson gave a rousing speech in Manchester in front of Stephenson's Rocket.
He made a series of pledges about everything from affordable housing to tackling crime. It was a speech Mr Burnham admits he could have written much of himself.
But he says the Tories have made too many promises they haven’t kept, and people are running out of patience.
“The Conservative Party is running out of time in the North. It’s made a lot of promises but failed to deliver on a lot of them,” he says.
Among that flurry of promises made back in 2019 was a commitment from Mr Johnson that HS2 would connect Northern cities. It’s yet to materialise.
Even in his final speech as Prime Minister outside Number 10 this morning, Mr Johnson claimed Northern Powerhouse Rail has been delivered - a claim most Northern leaders would likely dismiss as hyperbole given their ongoing efforts to have the project delivered properly.
It is however, something Liz Truss has promised.
During a hustings event in Manchester last month she reaffirmed her pledge to build NPR in full saying she wanted to ‘make the M62 the superhighway to success’.
“That caught my ear,” Mr Burnham says. “Those two words ‘in full’ are critical. To me that means a new line, not half a line via Bradford, and the right solution at Manchester Piccadilly. It means doing it properly. I would of course welcome that.
“I think she has an opportunity to reset the Levelling Up narrative in the North. And we stand ready to work with her on it.”
So how will his relationship with the new Prime Minister pan out?
Given that she recently branded him a ‘miserablist mayor’ , accused him of backing ‘militant’ trade unions and said he doesn’t want opportunities for people in Manchester, you’d be forgiven for thinking he might feel bitter.
In the wake of those comments, he tweeted: “Tories rock up in Manchester lecturing us about opportunity. Don’t think so. You killed the EMA. We created @OurPassGM.”
And when he speaks to the Mancunian Way not long after the results of the Tory leadership campaign he admits he is feeling ‘not much more cheerful’.
But he insists he is prepared to give Ms Truss - a self-confessed straight talking Yorkshire woman - the benefit of the doubt and work with her government to help residents facing the cost of living crisis.
He remembers the ‘argy bargy’ of political campaigns and says he always got on well with her when he was an MP.
“A lot gets said in leadership campaigns. But I don’t think it was true what she said. The fact is I’m all about opportunity for young people. It was the government that took away the Education Maintenance Allowance and we brought it back.
“We are ready to work with her and we can actually do a lot to get things moving in terms of the plans we have got that could bring growth to the economy that she spoke about.”
Mr Burnham hopes the new government will approach the cost of living crisis in a similar way to the pandemic - with cross party working and policies that really help people rather than ‘picking fights with public sector workers’.
So as a Northerner, does Ms Truss understand the North?
“I remember getting on quite well with Liz when I was in Parliament,” the mayor says. “She is down to earth which is a Northern characteristic and I think growing up in Leeds she had inherited a bit of that.
“But some of the stuff that was said is the polar opposite of what people in the North need right now.
“She was preaching a diet of deregulation and Thatcherism. These are the things that got us in a total mess. If anything we need the opposite.”
Whether Levelling Up will remain the government’s flagship policy, or whether it will be scrapped altogether, remains to be seen. But the mayor says the whole policy needs a major rethink.
He believes pitching other areas against each other for Levelling Up funding is ‘absolutely the wrong way to go’. “They need to call time on it. They have over politicised the allocation of public money. We need to get back to a way of working that’s about fairness.”
And he says the current problems with Avanti - which has slashed its timetable and blamed striking workers - is a good example of ‘basic services grinding to a halt’ under the last government.
“It’s about getting solutions to that basic stuff actually,” he says. “Avanti have been fighting with the unions rather than making the service work.”
So to the new PM Mr Burnham proffers a warning.
“Liz Truss has an opportunity here but that window is closing. If she lets the North of England down again the Tories will be in trouble.”
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