The Burnham tell

I returned from Andy Burnham's homecoming conference in Liverpool to find people here mulling the broader reputational impact on the city of the Premier League's findings against Manchester City.

The prime minister has been thinking about that too. It was a little surprising to see him highlight Abu Dhabi's investment in Manchester at this particular moment after tending to sidestep it up to now in his narrative about the city's growth model.

While Abu Dhabi's investment here has undoubtedly transformed huge swaths of post-industrial Manchester, it was also contentious long before the Premier League's conclusions, be it for the price of the homes developed in partnership with the council, the opaque nature of the public-private relationship or general antipathy towards the rights record of the United Arab Emirates.

So it hasn't always felt as though Burnham particularly wanted to dwell on that aspect of the city's economic turnaround -- until, unexpectedly, the club's finances hit headlines for the wrong reasons.

Anyway, with growth models in mind, on to Tuesday's extraordinary conference speech.

Authentically Andy

I've written before about how responsive Burnham is: you can often spot when someone absorbs a criticism by how often they repeat it back to you.

"He'll be down in London more than here and his attention will change from Ashton," said one woman out doing her shopping in Ashton-in-Makerfield the day after the by-election was declared. She had voted Reform in the local elections a few weeks earlier and was yet to be convinced by Burnham.

He responded to such critiques, which were common online, in vox pops and while canvassing, very quickly.

First came the social media videos and posts in which he promised to make Makerfield the most important constituency in the country; then there was the "Makerfield Test"; and finally there was the linguistic tell: over and over again, including in his acceptance speech, he stressed that the by-election was no "stepping stone".

By his conference speech, he had a new tell.

Manchester doesn't quite answer enough questions to function as a national growth narrative, and it isn't apparent what philosophy is likely to guide any painful fiscal trade-offs coming down the track at this month's Budget.

Why do we know Burnham has clocked this? Because he's already told us.

"I have to evolve it," he told the New Statesman of "Manchesterism" in an interview published a few days before conference. "It was right to . . . localise it when I was the mayor of that area, but now I think you can broaden it out . . . it is about broadening it out into a theory of growth."

Less than a week later, he told conference: "I have a theory of growth."

He repeated, later in the speech, that he and other mayors had a "theory of growth", after telling chief executives the same thing at Monday's business day.

According to his remarks this week, his theory starts with public control and devolution.

Burnham believes that only strong institutions on the ground can understand what makes a place tick and therefore create the necessary conditions for growth and investment, whether that's skills or housing or infrastructure; and that privatisation and deregulation have resulted in an extractive economy that gives the taxpayer and communities poor returns, leaving the country overexposed to the whims of bond markets.

I think he probably knows that this is only a partial answer, though. Repeating "I have a theory of growth" feels like the September version of May's "this isn't a stepping stone", almost as though he is trying to convince himself as much as his audience.

One government figure agrees. "That is absolutely his tell," they say, admitting that he still needs to fill in some "blanks" on the economy.

One such opportunity may arise at a Gordon Brown-organised summit on innovation in Manchester next Friday, at which Burnham is set to speak. Brown is keen to see the agenda promoted ahead of the Budget.

Watch this space. We've heard little from the prime minister so far on innovation (or indeed competition), but under Burnham there was nonetheless a significant agenda in Manchester on that front.

He worked closely with universities, including on a reciprocal research and development partnership between Manchester and Cambridge; Jim O'Neill, his erstwhile informal adviser, has a successful venture capital outfit busy investing in university spinouts across the north of England.

Indeed the original "northern powerhouse" agenda that gave birth to the mayoralty, of which O'Neill was an architect, had R&D at its core. Immediately prior to Burnham's arrival as mayor, George Osborne seemed to be here every five minutes opening a new advanced materials institute.

Burnham himself published Greater Manchester's new growth strategy last year -- "a concrete plan to reindustrialise the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution" -- outlining the city-region's existing and emerging growth clusters.

Some of this was very much focused around the strengths of the Oxford Road research corridor, even if the vibes imply a new era of mills and factories.

Nonetheless, he still always seemed more at home, to me, selling Atom Valley on the edge of Rochdale and Bury. This vast brownfield site is his vision for how Oxford Road's growth can reach out into the former mill towns on the fringes of Manchester, translating the city's abstract but fast-growing knowledge economy into tangible change in places much like Makerfield, where he instinctively wants to revive the sort of employment that anchored those communities when he was growing up.

That is probably more what he feels in his political bones than the whizzy economy of the university ecosystem, even though he knows its value on an intellectual level.

Tuesday's speech was therefore authentically Andy: more the stuff of emotional instinct than of growth theory. It was partly why it jumped out of the TV screen and transfixed the conference hall.

It was also so well delivered that its strengths went a long way towards masking its weaknesses -- even as the prime minister himself subconsciously signposted where they were.

Now try this

You can't actually try this until they next go on tour, but the highlight of my conference was watching the Sugababes do a brief turn at a Labour Students event at Camp and Furnace, just over a year after I saw them at the Salt and Tar in Bootle (which was right up there with the most fun I've ever had at a gig).

Back with the original line-up, in my view they have more than stood the test of time, quietly packing out bigger and bigger stages at Glastonbury, and they are one bit of 1990s nostalgia I am more than happy to indulge in.