Q: Who wrote the mayor’s new book? A: The Echo journalist in charge of covering him!

In Head North, Steve Rotheram and Andy Burnham team up to stick one to the fakers down in London

Dear readers — Christmas has come early for fans of metro mayor politics. A new book, or “half memoir, half manifesto”, penned by Steve Rotheram and his counterpart in Manchester Andy Burnham, has been published. And we’ve got our hands on a copy.

Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain — tells the story of how Burnham and Rotheram joined forces and, well, headed north, leaving behind the so-called Westminster bubble and returning to their roots. And get this! Rotheram has found an intrepid journalist to help him and Burnham tell their inspiring story of self-discovery. It’s the Echo’s chief political writer Liam Thorp: the very man whose supposed to be holding him to account…

But is it any good? Well, that’s the topic of today’s edition. And if you want the answer you’ll have to sign up as a paying member of The Post. It costs around £1.25 a week if you go for the annual membership, and for that you’ll receive eight extra editions every month.

We’ve smashed our target of 75 new members already this month — a huge thankyou to all the newcomers. If you haven’t yet, do consider supporting us in our mission to restore quality journalism to Merseyside. Maybe we can even break the 100 barrier this month! Many thanks.

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Your Post briefing 

The Serious Fraud Office have said they will not name the four people arrested as part of a criminal investigation into Liverpool firm Signature Group. The company, founded by businessman Lawrence Kenwright, collapsed in 2020 owing investors up to £140 million. Four arrests were made during dawn raids on Monday — two raids in Liverpool, one in Manchester — with the SFO saying it had found people “up and down the country” who were left out of pocket. Nonetheless, it also said that it would not be confirming the identities of any individuals arrested.

A bitter row has erupted after planks for Southport Pier were discovered for sale online. Wooden boards from the pier were advertised at £50 a pop by Lawson’s reclamation yard, a supplier of reclaimed flooring in the UK. The pier was closed in 2022 due to structural issues with the decking, with Sefton Council stating it would need £13 million to repair the problems — a cost they could not meet. Local councillor John Pugh has since accused the council of “acting with secrecy” over the sale of the planks, however they hit back stating they had not “directly entered into an agreement” with Lawson’s to sell the boards. Know any more about this story? Email abi@livpost.co.uk. 

And the sub-postmaster who led the national campaign to expose the Post Office scandal has been nominated for the freedom of the city of Liverpool. Alan Bates, who ran a post office in Wales but was born in Merseyside, spent two decades fighting for justice for the victims of Horizon: a faulty computer software that led to over 900 sub-postmasters across the UK being accused of stealing thousands of pounds. West Derby MP Ian Byrne has called for Bates to receive the honour in recognition of his "resilient and determined campaigning". Last week Abi went to visit Pete Murray, another post office worker whose life was ruined by accusations of theft due to Horizon. You can read that piece here. 

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Q: Who wrote the mayor’s new book? A: The Echo journalist in charge of covering him!

By Jack Walton

Meet Andy and Steve. Andy went to Cambridge. Steve was a brickie. Andy mixed it with the politicos and the nepo-babies down in London. Steve stayed in the North. The hardy-but-humble North. Andy learned the ugly truth of how the system really worked from the inside. Steve wouldn’t learn this until later. 

They’re chalk and cheese, you must be thinking. Such strange bedfellows: Andy with his MP pals and his champagne flute at the Spectator summer party. Steve up here in the North, laying bricks. Perhaps mixing cement or eating a butty. But as fate would have it, their paths converged — and in the new book Head North, we learn how they hatched a plan to join forces and fight the good fight against the corrupt Westminster system. 

Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain is a book about an authentic pair of blokes — good, honest, down-to-earth sorts; the type you don’t find south of Crewe — palling about and sticking one to the bloody fakers. The joint book from Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram — mayors-in-arms for Manchester and Liverpool respectively, or more specifically, the city regions of each — declares itself “half memoir, half manifesto”. It does a decent job on the memoir front. There are more than ample anecdotes from the pair’s adolescences: both hail from Merseyside towns four miles apart, with lives that diverged before reconverging. In these early pages, they listen to The Smiths and The Jam, dress in Sergio Tacchini clothing, and chat up girls. 

The boys head north. Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.

On the manifesto front, things are more iffy. Head North has a defining preoccupation: both men hate London. Sure, there are plenty of reasons to hate London. Busy, expensive, home to that M&M’s store. But is hating London a manifesto? I would propose, gently, that the answer is no. (Post-publication, Burnham’s top aide asked me to clarify that his boss does not hate London specifically but more the London political scene and the system of power that resides there. I think that was pretty obvious to readers, but I’m very happy to make it more obvious. Burnham has after all written reguarly for the London Evening Standard).

A degree of self-mythologising is fine, I guess — it is a book, after all, and needs a narrative. But there is something painfully self-aggrandising about the pages documenting Burnham and Rotheram’s careers as MPs in Westminster (Rotheram joined Burnham in parliament as MP for Liverpool Walton in 2010). “I wasn’t interested in the dinner party circuit… it was all work,” writes Rotheram. 

“From very early on during my time in Parliament there were feelings starting to germinate inside me about whether I could really fit into this establishment,” says Burnham. That’s the same Andy Burnham who served in multiple cabinet positions and twice attempted to become Leader of the Labour Party — you wonder what he would be saying had he won, or even become Prime Minister.