Mayors With Airs
The King of the North has headed to London. After his thumping win in Makerfield, Andy Burnham, recently the Mayor of Greater Manchester and, more distantly, a C grader in the administrations of the Dark Lord, aka Tony Blair, and the lamentable Gordon Brown, has gone off to save the Labour Party.
How a middling, leftie, jovial Northerner just means to do this, isn’t really clear. Just like Australia, modern day Britian is two nations, with divides both geographical – the one that Burnham’s voters know too well – and ethnic. His campaign theme was “For Us”. People on the right, and probably everyone, sooner or later, will be wanting PM Andy to define “us”.
I said PM. Readers will know that Britain’s last PM, Sir Queer, Two-Tier Keir, has resigned, following his personal Starmergeddon. The mother country’s most hated PM – he made Margaret Thatcher look like everyone’s favourite aunt – has finally dispelled the erstwhile widespread view that only two things would ever survive a nuclear war.
Andy’s other problem – apart from his institutional and political ability to fix a British mess that is beyond fixing – is that no one knows remotely what he stands for.
The messiah meme is well known to Australians. The most famous was Bob Hawke, who came in from the outside, not to “save” a dying Labor Party, but to lead a Party already bound for government. Hence Bill Hayden’s joke about the drover’s dog, baked into our political folklore. Then we had all the eighties Liberal messiahs on the outside who were going to come and save the Libs from the Howard-Peacock stasis. Anyone remember John Elliott? No, I didn’t think so. It turned out that John Howard was the saviour in plain sight. Of course, it did take him a wee while.
The King of the North has created a vacancy at the Manchester City council offices. Another local election where national pundits will be training their field glasses, what with Labour hovering in the low twenties on a good day, and the right split in two directions. There is the badly stalled Nigel Farage and the insurgent but still not fully formed Restore Britain.
Will the North get a new king or queen, or a dissident party? To the extent that Reform UK can still be called “dissident” in any sense. Or might they get the classic modern Brit mayor? A leftie, woke Muslim. One who is the very embodiment of red-green alliance. A Muslim trapped in the body of a rainbow coalition funkster. Like you-know-who in Londonistan. Or Zohran Kwame Mamdani in the Big Apple. He is once again the news, with Mamdani mini-me’s storming the local US primaries.
It is a funny old world.
Back down under, I have been wandering around Sydney. When you are on the streets of the emerald city, you are inevitably drawn to thinking of … mayors with airs. Sydney’s is called Clover Margaret Moore, who seems to have been around since when Muhammed was a Jew-hating boy.
When you look up from dodging folks on the streets who look like they would be more at home in Hong Kong than here, your eyes are drawn to myriad examples of that peculiar modern invention. The electronic sign-as-propaganda.
There is something slightly menacing about a sign which simply says “You are on Gadigal Country”. That’s it. Not even a “welcome”. From the same sitting position on one of George Street’s benches, you can look up and see the flags draped along past the Queen Victoria Building. “Refugees are welcome here”. Or look back along the street and see the many rainbow flags.
What does it all mean, this local government-level obsession with gays and people with brown skin? I wonder what it achieves. The obvious answer is virtue signalling. But we all already know what their worldviews are. And what would enforced public obeisance to our very first settlers (probably immigrants themselves) mean to the average Chinese on the streets of our fair convict town? Are they all thinking – good onya, Clover Margaret, let’s stick it to the far right. Rub their noses in it! Positively Blairite. Would they be thinking – thank Confucius we decided on Sydney?
What do the tourists from Texas think? Who knows? Perhaps it reminds them of Austin. The weird woke oasis in the ideological desert that is Texas.
What are mayors even for?
The ones with which I am most familiar are either property developers or greenies, who have as their personal religion NEVER to do the things for which they are elected and paid – basically, to fix the climate-change created potholes in your street and to ensure the garbage is collected, in its variously coloured wheelie bins – but to spend their time and budgets “attracting investment” and attracting homosexuals and other right thinking types.
A more sinister interpretation of the workings of our ideological mayors is that they are not so much the advance party for the progressivist revolution, whose main work has already been done at higher levels of government and by the non-government but government-adjacent, ideologically aligned institutions (media, education, NGOs), but are the mopper-uppers on the streets. It is Orwellian, of course. It reminds the punters they have lost.
Whether the mayoral King of the North, as he wafts into Mayor Sadiq Khan’s London, with its largely replaced population with whom he appears to identify, and with its culture of post-liberal street violence, will see either irony or sadness or opportunity for “saving”, who knows?
Sadiq Khan, Mamdani and Clover Moore, all global(ist) city leaders, have all defined their “for us”. One thing is for certain, when the next (inevitable) stabbing attack on, or rape of, an Englander occurs, how will saviour Andy respond?
Paul Collits
26 June 2026
"What are mayors even for?"
a). To provide the illusion of representation for ratepayers, and,
b). To take the heat off state MPs who are actually responsible for Council-level services.
When I immigrated to Australia (sight unseen) in 1981, I cried at the sight of Sydney in the dawn flight approach. She was such a jewel then. She still has her hidden harbour charms but, like an old whore, she was beautiful once but now she’s just fuqed.