Reports that Gary Neville could one day seek the Manchester mayoralty initially sound faintly absurd.

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Reports that Gary Neville could one day seek the Manchester mayoralty initially sound faintly absurd. Then again, so does much of modern British politics.

Neville’s name has apparently surfaced as a potential successor should Andy Burnham eventually depart Greater Manchester to attempt a return to Westminster. With Labour NEC approval apparently secured, and Josh Simons MP having stood aside in Makerfield, that return now appears increasingly inevitable.

At first glance, it feels like politics is continuing its drift to a television soap opera. Surely there must be some difference between running a region of nearly three million people and delivering monologues on Sky Sports?

Yet the more one thinks about it, the more realistic it begins to seem.

In many ways, Neville is precisely the type of character contemporary politics now produces. He is already media-trained, permanently visible with a regional brand and is fluent in the language of public grievance. The old route into politics – local councils, years of internal advancement – matters less than it once did compared to name recognition and public profile.

Metro-mayors have accelerated this trend. The original case for English devolution was........

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