Can the new Northern Powerhouse supremo make Leeds and Manchester work together?

A doff of my flat cap to Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs economist who has been made a peer, a Treasury minister and George Osborne’s ‘Northern Powerhouse’ supremo. The metro-politan media is busy trying to find reasons why this project for improved links between northern cities plus elements of devolution is a bad idea, or has ulterior motives behind it. The Guardian, for example, reports that ‘critics of’ Manchester’s Labour leader Sir Richard Leese think he has been ‘lured’ into championing Osborne’s plan ‘by the prospect of a bigger empire’; and that while Leese and his chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein have pulled off ‘breathtaking property deals’ (there’s a damning phrase for you), that doesn’t qualify them, or whoever Greater Manchester’s first elected ‘metro mayor’ turns out to be, to run the £6 billion worth of NHS services that will come their way as part of a package infelicitously labelled ‘Devo Manc’.

The powerhouse, if seriously driven forward, will be a bold undertaking in all its aspects — worth pursuing if for no other motive than to adjust the imbalance that saw 12 net additional jobs created in cities in the south of England for every one created in cities elsewhere in the country between 2004 and 2013.