‘It’s basically a dictatorship,’ one insider tells me. If you want to build anything in Britain’s second city, you have to get permission from the so-called ‘Manchester mafia’. These are the officials who have overseen the city’s extraordinary redevelopment. The number of towers in Manchester has increased sevenfold since Andy Burnham became mayor in 2017.

‘Manchesterism,’ Andy Burnham declared in his Makerfield by-election campaign video, ‘is the end of neoliberalism.’ The path to power, he believes, lies in the Mancunian Way. Not…

‘It’s basically a dictatorship,’ one insider tells me. If you want to build anything in Britain’s second city, you have to get permission from the so-called ‘Manchester mafia’.…