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Earlier this week, just hours after giving a speech to Labour party conference that was praised by pundits and sent party delegates into raptures, Andy Burnham got himself into \u201cperhaps his biggest self inflicted tangle since he arrived in Downing Street,\u201d in the words of the BBC\u2019s political editor Chris Mason. Answering a question from Mason about Manchester City\u2019s Abu Dhabi owners and the financial scandal engulfing the club, Burnham said he would be \u201creally concerned to lose them\u201d, adding: \u201cThey’ve been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester.\u201d<\/p>\n
The backlash was swift. \u201cAstonishing, alarming comments,\u201d wrote the veteran football journalist Henry Winter, while government officials told Bloomberg he had risked breaching the government\u2019s neutrality on the case. Downing Street soon saw the need to backtrack. On Thursday, it issued a new statement, this time emphasising that no one could be \u201cabove the rules\u201d. Half an hour later, this too had to be amended. “If wrongdoing is established, those responsible should face the appropriate consequences\u201d was replaced with \u201cWherever wrongdoing is established\u201d.<\/p>\n
After all, the independent commission had already found<\/a> Manchester City guilty \u201cof all charges related to serious breaches of the Premier League\u2019s financial rules\u201d, including filing misleading accounts and repeatedly creating \u201csham\u201d contracts that inflated the club\u2019s commercial revenues by over \u00a3800 million over nine seasons. The club, several of whose witnesses were accused by the commission of lying during the 12-week hearing, has lodged an appeal.<\/p>\n Burnham\u2019s intervention has drawn unwanted attention to the close ties between Manchester and Abu Dhabi. The media\u2019s whiplash mood shift was best exemplified by the popular News Agents podcast, which went from praising Burnham for delivering \u201cone of the great political speeches\u201d on Tuesday to discussing \u201cAndy Burnham\u2019s dirty political secret\u201d on the following day\u2019s show, asking if his legacy as mayor is \u201cnow tarnished by accusations of dirty money\u201d.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s another way of looking at what Burnham said \u2014 less as a gaffe than as a rare glimpse of the Mancunian political doctrine that propelled him to Downing Street, but that he has largely expunged from his public platform. You might call it Bernsteinism after Sir Howard Bernstein, the council executive whose commercial genius shaped modern Manchester. You might even say it’s \u201cReal Manchesterism\u201d.<\/p>\n Whatever you call it, it\u2019s the uber-pragmatic model that has held sway in this city since the late 1980s and which says: Manchester\u2019s economic interests trump all other concerns. It has delivered massive overseas investment and has driven the economic growth that Burnham touts in every speech. But it also requires, as local leaders are remembering this week, a very high threshold for embarrassment.<\/p>\n Back in 2018, a year after Andy Burnham was elected and ten years into Abu Dhabi\u2019s ownership of Manchester City, a small group of staff at Manchester City Council held a strained meeting. It was March 21, and a council officer called Dominic Hayes had just resigned from his role as a director of development and corporate real estate, which he had been doing for just seven months.<\/p>\n Hayes had been assigned to take over various council development projects, and his resignation was surprising and swift. The meeting was designed to work out how the corporate real estate department would operate without a director while a replacement for Hayes was sought. But what made the meeting tense was the letter Hayes sent to the council, outlining his reasons to resign. One of Hayes\u2019 criticisms was particularly awkward: it was about the council\u2019s relationship with Manchester City.\u00a0<\/p>\n We haven\u2019t seen the letter, but have seen contemporaneous notes from the March 21 meeting, written by a development manager called Gillian Boyle. When we contacted Boyle for comment, she confirmed she remembered the meeting and the notes she took: \u201cI was in the room at the time, I wrote it down in the notes,\u201d she told us. \u201cI thought: \u2018hm, this is an important meeting\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n This post is for subscribers only![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/3FN82A2.jpg\")
Burnham speaks to City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak at the Vincent Kompany Testimonial at the Etihad in 2019. Photo: Martin Ricketts\/PA Images licensed via Alamy.<\/p>\n
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