The Times, the newspaper of record, has been invited to witness proceedings in No. 10 North – which is Andy Burnham’s Mancunian analogue, I suppose, of Donald Trump’s ‘Winter White House’. They witnessed, as you’d expect, some blethering on about planning permission and mayoral powers, a joke by Angela Rayner and a humorous cardboard cut-out of Larry the cat. And at the centre of it all: the man of the hour:

Sitting in his trendy new office in Manchester, open-collared shirt, cup of tea on a table in front – milk in first – Burnham is keen to talk about this new policy that he hopes will help him deliver the biggest council house building programme since the war. 

Sitting in his trendy new office in Manchester, open-collared shirt, cup of tea on a table in front – milk in first – Burnham is keen to talk about this new policy that he hopes will help him deliver the biggest council house building programme since the war. 

Three words. ‘Milk in first.’ This is, isn’t it, an odd thing to notice. And it’s a tricky one to parse. The immediate conclusion must be that it’s intended to make a statement about Andy Burnham’s class position. But what statement? That is not so clear.

Is it that the Prime Minister is an honest, salt-of-the-earth Northerner with a non-nonsense attitude – that he is, in the phrase of my colleague Julie Burchill, of the ‘working-class blood royal’? Or is it that he’s an effete member of the woke metropolitan liberal elite cosplaying a prole?

The tea/milk order is these........

© The Spectator