There is a particular sort of Englishman who can walk into a room full of sceptics, sceptical bankers and business owners like me, sceptical councillors and sceptical journalists with their arms folded and their expense-account pastries going cold, and leave forty minutes later having quietly persuaded the lot of us that the country is not, after all, finished. Andy Street is that Englishman.
I spent an afternoon recently listening to him lay out Prosper UK, the movement he has launched with Ruth Davidson to win back the seven million voters who feel they have nowhere left to put their cross, and I came away thinking something I had not thought in a worryingly long time. Competence, it turns out, is a political philosophy all on its own.
From having headed up CBM, the publishers of Business Matters, for over two decades I have spent enough years watching politicians promise the moon and deliver a damp car park to be cured of any romance about the lot of them. But Street is a different animal, and the reason is dully, gloriously unsexy: he has actually run things. He spent the best part of a decade as managing director of John Lewis, a shop that, last time I checked, managed to sell socks without bankrupting the nation. Then he spent seven years as Mayor of the West Midlands, during which something like 100,000 jobs arrived and roughly £10 billion of investment followed them through the door. He did not tweet the economy into existence. He went out, in an unfashionable suit, and got it.
Prosper UK is, in a sense, the same instinct dressed for national service. Davidson and Street reckon there are seven million Britons who believe in enterprise, sound money and public services that actually work, yet feel that no party will own all three at once. Tens of thousands signed up within a fortnight, which tells you the hunger is real. You can sneer at the centre ground all you like, and plenty of clever people do, but it is where most of the country quietly lives and works and pays its taxes.
Which brings me, inevitably, to the other Andy.
By the time you read this, Andy Burnham may well be measuring the curtains in Downing Street. The man who spent years as the King in the North, having decamped to Westminster as the new Member for Makerfield, is now the overwhelming favourite to lead the country, and he has arrived with a genuinely interesting prospectus. His “No 10 North”, the plan to physically wrench decision-making out of Whitehall and plant it in Manchester, is the boldest thing anyone has said about the British constitution in years. You can read the full sweep of it in TIME’s account of his economic and devolution agenda, and whatever you make of the politics, the ambition is real.
Here is the thing that nobody in either tribe seems willing to say out loud. These two men are, on the economy, arguing for almost exactly the same thing.
Both believe the British state is too centralised, too timid and too obsessed with the square mile around the Treasury. Both have spent their careers proving that a metro mayor with real powers can shift the dial in a way no Whitehall mandarin ever has. The Institute for Government has documented how Greater Manchester’s mayoralty became the template the rest of the country now copies. And the case for going further is hardly some fringe obsession of mine; Business Matters has been making it for years, from the academics arguing that regional disparities can be tackled by more devolution to the London business lobby that, remarkably, agrees Burnham is right to put devolution front and centre.
So why am I urging the incoming Prime Minister to take a quiet cup of tea with a Conservative he beat to nothing? Because Burnham has the mandate and Street has the manual.
Burnham is a brilliant campaigner, a man who can summon a crowd and a cause with equal ease. But running a national economy is not a rally. It is procurement, planning, skills funding, the unglamorous grinding business of getting a tram line built before the next election rather than the one after. Street has done precisely this, at scale, and he has done it while keeping the private sector in the room rather than haranguing it from the steps outside. When Japanese investors poured £118 million into Greater Manchester, business leaders rightly warned that Whitehall must now match that confidence. Confidence is built by people who deliver, not people who announce.
There is a national vice we really must shake off, and it is the belief that wisdom only ever comes wrapped in your own colours. The Americans call it tribalism; I call it self-harm. If the next Prime Minister genuinely wants to rewire Britain, he could do a great deal worse than borrow the wiring diagram from the one man who has already done the job and lived to tell the tale.
Sit down with Street, Andy. Order the good biscuits. Listen. The economy you are about to inherit is far too important to leave in the hands of people who merely agree with you.
