One of the earliest – and most striking – segments of Head North deals with your experiences growing up in the 1980s, and what went on in Hillsborough on 15 April 1989. Should we start with that moment, and how it shaped you both?

In many ways, I wonder if either of us would have gone into politics if we hadn’t lived through that experience. I don’t think I would have done. It was the day that changed everything. I was younger at the time, growing up in an area where the Miners’ Strike was a big thing, and Hillsborough came at the end of a tough decade for the North West. It sort of turned us; you went from feeling that things were a bit unfair to being… I’ve called it absolutely radicalising, but it was like that. When you saw what happened – and the way the media went for Liverpool – it was life-changing.

Hillsborough was a terrible ground, but at least the year before there were ticket checks and barriers that slowed down the crowd, and then you’d get a flow through the turnstiles. In 1989, there was a build-up outside – it was a horrible feeling. Then the gate was opened, and we went in. I watched all of it unfold.

But it’s not really a story of Hillsborough itself – it’s about the way a country could react to something like that, and about the fight for truth and justice. For decades, until those families were able to pick up a death certificate that had the genuine cause of their loved ones’ death, because they originally said ‘accidental death’ on them, lots of them wouldn’t pick up the death certificates. Eventually their deaths were ruled as ‘unlawful killing’. And it’s the process that we got involved in that showed so starkly how inherently unfair this country is.

The north of England will never get fair treatment as long as we continue with the current political system, and Hillsborough is the standout example. It keeps coming through in different ways, doesn’t it? The dire nature of public transport in large parts of the North is the product of a system in Whitehall and Westminster that doesn’t prioritise us and never has.

Steve’s in his sixties, I’m in my fifties, and this divide has only widened in our lifetimes. That is because the fundamental wiring of the country is wired against the North. The reason why we shook hands in a pub and decided to leave Westminster is that we just decided the place was never going to work for us. It isn’t set up to work for us. You have to get out of it to start to make an argument for something different.

This happened so prominently during the pandemic, where Andy’s total rejection of the government prompted massive public sympathy and pushed a very anti-government sentiment across the North West. One mind-blowing thing you write about in Head North is how Boris Johnson had no idea what restriction tier Greater Manchester was under – a massive region that just didn’t figure in his outlook whatsoever.

You actually saw a government, during an international crisis, trying to manipulate situations in the North West to try and pit me and Andy and our regions against each other – that showed me how deeply ingrained it is.

I was doing the audiobook the other day and read the bit where I’m relaying the conversation. I had to portray his voice in that conversation. I don’t think anything will quite as directly reveal the ingrained bias against the North.

There was no support package for Manchester for weeks and weeks, even though we’d been in tier two for weeks – the highest tier at the time. But the minute London went into tier two, within a week, the chequebook was open – this was from a government elected on a promise to ‘level up’. Mind blowing. If there was ever any doubt, that removed all doubt.

Boris Johnson was saying things to us individually that were contradictory. But of course, we’ve got a close relationship, so we were asking each other, what did he say? Honestly, it was as if we wouldn’t speak to each other.

Wouldn’t you try and see whether the people you’re trying to play off against each other had any relationship? They couldn’t even tactically get it right, because most of the people down there, they’re not friends, they don’t have friendships. They’re acquaintances at best – they’re in the same political party or whatever, but they’d happily stand on each other’s heads, most of them.

But that’s the difference, isn’t it? I think that culture in Westminster, in the end, we just lost patience with it. Seven years on, we’re quite proud of what we’re building here and the way in which, I think, we’ve started to change the way politics works.

But hopefully the book will do even more. We’ve put out an analysis here of what’s wrong and hopefully a big plan for how you fix it. We hope to get a coalescing of people around that plan, because everything that’s wrong for the North West is equally wrong for other regions. Everyone suffers in the same system.

Andy, it’d be good to discuss your own growing uneasiness towards Westminster – a discomfort that led to the end of a parliamentary career there.

I’d been on a path in Westminster and was trying to get on within the system. But I began to have increasing doubts about the way things work. In the book, I write about my time as health minister. I’d been given this job to be minister for ‘reform’, and Tony Blair asked me if I could bring staff on-side with what Labour’s doing with regard to the NHS.

I really thought about that. I was honoured to do the job, but struggled as to how I would do it. I went in a direction I don’t think they thought I would – I started with a big exercise to go and listen to staff at every level and work alongside them, with a porter, a cleaner, and so on. It haunted me afterwards, because hearing them saying they used to be part of the team, and now we’re hived off and don’t feel part of the team while still doing the same work – I just thought, this isn’t right at all. I wrote that in the report, and you can imagine it didn’t go down particularly well.

There is also some fascinating insight into the civil service and how it operates. You repeatedly mention how, at any given point, about fifty people run Britain, and only a few of them are in Parliament. That type of honesty about the system’s undemocratic nature is relatively rare from a frontline politician.

There’s a kind of a consensus down there from people on a sort of dinner party set, both Tory and Labour. There’s a sort of in-crowd who are in with certain private sector interests, with the media. It doesn’t feel like the world that we’re in. And therefore, I kind of was on a path that was beginning to peel away a little bit.

When Steve invited me to the twentieth anniversary [commemoration of Hillsborough], I knew that I was making a real fork in the road if I accepted. When I went and made the commitment to the families to seriously pursue truth and justice, I definitely had taken my step out of Westminster. I’d checked out of the kind of way of working down there. I was having my doubts, but I’d fully checked out by that point when I was in Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet. I’d really decided it wasn’t my world, and I was not in politics to just try and make my way within it. I was trying to do something else.

Steve, in those years of reorganisation after the 2010 defeat, you became an MP. How did you find getting into such a clearly wounded Parliamentary Labour Party which – from the outside – looked like it had no clear idea of what it wanted, except for a very small but organised force which seemed to be saying everything was perfect under Tony Blair.

I didn’t feel like it was that disorganised on the inside – I thought it was probably the most disciplined that I’ve experienced politics, and so isn’t that weird, that juxtaposition and difference in how it’s perceived by external forces? For me, going in there, I’d never been in there before. I was sort of the new boy at the big school, and a bit overwhelmed by it all, trying to learn the ropes. I needed to learn this strange protocol of speaking through the speaker and calling these people this or that, most of them I couldn’t stand.

The honourable gentleman stuff, it’s all designed to throw people, and to make people from a more working-class backgrounds feel self-conscious.

For me, one of Head North’s most unexpected suggestions to overcome this sort of culture are the arguments to abolish the whip system.

I think this is something that will provoke discussion. Everyone seems to have adopted a thing about the dysfunction if we didn’t have [whipping]. But I take the opposite view. If the Labour government I was in had actually listened more to the heartbeat of the PLP at times, it would have been better.

The effect of the whip system is to, in effect, hand over elected people’s power to unelected people. It diminishes MPs – often they even call themselves lobby fodder. If you removed it immediately, the status of MPs would rise because they’d be thinking about issues. They would have to be courted by civil servants and it would allow people to work more in a place-based way. This kind of thing about the party tramlines of Westminster through the whip system often creates the wrong climate, basically.

Did that climate influence your vote for the Iraq War, for instance?

Yeah. I agonised. If I had my time again, I wouldn’t have voted for it, knowing what I know now, particularly over the lack of a plan for the aftermath in terms of the actual decision that I was asked to make, that which was simply — should we remove Saddam or not? Should we allow military action to do that? And this is the thing, such a massive thing to be reduced to such a sort of simplistic ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

But the thing about the whip system is it brings extraneous issues into consideration. It allows whips to say, ‘Well, maybe you won’t get that job.’ It brings in this idea that you’ll be ostracised if you go this way to the outside world. When you’re taking a decision like that — on military action — it’s actually important to the rest of the world that only the issue itself has guided decision-making. To have all that other stuff swirling around, it doesn’t feel appropriate, and it feels to me that the whip system corrupts politics in that way. Westminster’s got to wean itself off this thing, that the whip system is the only thing that holds the country together. It really isn’t at all.

But at the same time, is this not just a negation of politics? During those years, the situation always seemed to me – and this is tied into the aggressive briefings against Andy – that there was a very organised, connected group of right-wingers inside the PLP who were incredibly effective at developing a climate of fear. Whipping was used, but a hyper-paranoid internal culture developed in Labour, which made it incredibly difficult to get talented individuals who strayed from right-wing orthodoxy into the PLP. You saw this under Corbyn – whenever talented people were touted for seats or won selections, a flood of hostile, anonymous briefings against them followed.

I would say it does create the wrong culture internally, where too few people have too much power, and that’s never a good thing. You see it in Westminster all the time, there’s plenty of examples of bullying to show it’s not a healthy culture. The anonymous briefing that you mentioned – Steve and I have had it. Even in these jobs, you still see that going. For me, it just feels like all of it is out of time. People talk about regaining trust in politics. I would say it’s almost impossible as long as the whip system remains in place.

Moving deeper into Head North’s ideas, how deep and fundamental do you think the crisis in Britain is today?

You saw with Boris, with Brexit. I think the seeds of Brexit were sown in Whitehall and Westminster, as well as things happening in Brussels and Strasbourg. That’s because people didn’t feel that place was representing them. There wasn’t a question that said, ‘Do you like this government’? ‘Would you like to change your system in this country?’ Lots of working-class areas wanted to punch somebody in the nose, and Europe got it. I reckon it could have been a million other questions that would have given us similar sorts of outcomes.

We talk about our experience of Hillsborough, which brought over to us the idea that this country doesn’t work properly for us. When Covid happened – with everybody watching the briefings every day, people saw for themselves in real-time how this country is set up, how it’s run and who it works for. We all lived through that experience of fifty or so people foisting decisions on millions of people that they hadn’t thought about. This public mood is now more widespread – that this country isn’t working, things are going backwards, there’s sewage in the sea and the rivers, the transport system is broken, nothing is functional.

The frailty of the British state and justice system is a frequent topic in the book – and you mention that the political legacies of Orgreave and Hillsborough are inseparable.

There’s the randomness of the exposure of the Hillsborough lies, and how it could be traced back to something as arbitrary as Peter Hain’s expenses and being unexpectedly moved out of his position. The randomness of Westminster has kept a lid on Orgreave – Steve and I had got Theresa May to the point where she believed you couldn’t separate Hillsborough and Orgreave – same police force, same tactics. If you wanted to understand Hillsborough fully, you had to understand Orgreave.

We repeatedly made that point. I think she had come around to that because there was quite an advanced plan for an Orgreave inquiry when she left the Home Office. The reason why we know that is because when we met with a group of South Yorkshire miners, Margaret Aspinall from the Hillsborough families and Amber Rudd, Theresa May’s successor. We could tell Rudd was not in the same place as May, because May had been giving encouraging signs. When I was challenging her about her decision not to have an inquiry, she stood up in her sort of high-handed way and just went, oh, nobody died, and therefore there’s no need.

On my holiday a few years later, Marie-France, my wife, had bought a published Diary of an MPs’ Wife. I picked the thing up at the pool, and with a book like that, you can’t really stop because it was describing Cameron and Osborne. About two-thirds of the way through, it said something along the lines of being out for dinner with Rudd, and her telling the author she’s under pressure to have an Orgreave inquiry, but there is no way she would allow it to tarnish Margaret Thatcher’s legacy.

The real reason, but the randomness, is that May was moved. Cameron suddenly resigns. May goes forward with the leadership, things change at the Home Office. The plan that’d been developed – all of a sudden, the lids closed. So it’s that justice in this country hinges on random turns of events.

This sounds like this sparked off Head North’s wider interest in seriously reforming Britain’s constitution.

Massively. We talk about a Hillsborough Law and linking that to a written constitution, that’s an important foundation to build a new British state. We love this country and don’t ever want to see it break up, but it might do if you don’t correct some of these things now. People don’t feel like this country’s working. We’re at a really important moment – everyone’s got to decide what kind of country they want. The one thing I would say to Labour is: don’t consider constitutional issues as secondary.

This intermingling of constitutional and economic questions in the book is fascinating. There are plenty of ideas here, but one of the most ambitious is a segment in which you essentially argue for the decommodification of housing and health — the ‘right to the basics’.

If you have a ‘Grenfell Law’ that enshrines in law the right to a good home, a safe home – that empowers people in a way that they’re not empowered. What we talk about is council homes being sold off, buses being deregulated – moves that empower private vested interests over the public and disempower the public. In Greater Manchester, we’re also retaking control of buses, and Steve’s about to do it in Merseyside. The 1980s basically took power off people and handed it to vested interests in all kinds of forms – landlords in housing, private transport operators, other corporate entities. And it’s left us in a pretty poor state.

Too much has been allowed because of attacking ‘red tape’. For me, the thing that saved builders’ lives is ‘red tape’. Look at the Shrewsbury pickets and the building workers’ strike – I mean, people were dying every single day. There was hundreds of people dying on British building sites. The pickets didn’t just fight for the pound-an-hour – they wanted improvements. With Grenfell, it’s all about red tape – they loosen the red tape, and it allows somebody to put combustible material as insulation on a building. I don’t think many Tories have worked on building sites, and certainly not many of them are living in eighteen-story flats covered in combustible material. But it’s all right for other people, is it?

In the book, I love that bit when [Steve] says to Jacob Rees-Mogg, ‘All that money your parents spent on your education, and you’ve ended up working alongside a brickie.’

One aspect of recent history that I found to be too absent in the book was the 2017 general election, and that first era of Corbynism. Is there anything in the future that you believe can be learnt from that moment?

The bit I would just touch on was that I’d lost to Jeremy, and I’d lost because partly – well not partly, but I openly say that it was in many ways – because the Westminster world was trying to pull me. It was a nightmare. I made a lot of mistakes. But what I remember most about that period is that in the 2015 leadership election, I tried to talk about this growing alienation that I was seeing in places like Leigh.

I remember the meltdown in Westminster [after the referendum result] – they just couldn’t handle what had happened. They tried to make Jeremy the lightning conductor for it, without any self-reflection, although the political class had basically created this result. It was all about Jeremy’s failure in the referendum, but it really wasn’t that.

They wanted me to join the coup, and I just said, ‘No, I lost to him.’ I know why I lost to him. I’m not going to disrespect the members who voted for him. But that period, for me, was the worst of the worst. The public were telling them something much deeper about things, and they just wanted to make it all about Jeremy.

That was a bit of a turning point. I remember an MP coming to me [in the role of Corbyn’s parliamentary private secretary] and handing me a resignation letter. Later on, Andy said, ‘I’m not going to step down.’ So that person came back and took the resignation letter back. I was getting loads of people saying that if I stepped down, that could be it. I thought, ‘Nobody even knows who I am. Why would I step down? Right? ‘But if he’s lost the confidence of his PPS, then he’s finished’, they said. It was like a game of dominoes.

What parts of that era do you think could be salvaged for the future? I’m thinking particularly of 2017 rather than 2019 – that manifesto was very serious about tackling the questions Head North is serious about addressing – questions of place, industry, community regeneration, addressing regional divisions and so on.

It’s not just the manifesto. I mean, if you have a look at Gordon Brown’s constitutional review, that’s excellent, too.

I think what we’re saying with the Head North plan – it’s a package. We keep saying the word ‘rewiring’, but it is about making power work differently and empowering the public to get what they want from politics.

Voting reform has to be part of it because the first-past-the-post is the feudal system, basically. The ‘rotten boroughs’ is where it grew from, and it’s not that different. So a written constitution, reforming parliament and then taking more power out into devolution and empowering the public through rights in the ‘Grenfell Law’ on housing rights, in the Hillsborough Law about legal representation, to level the country up to equivalent living standards. We’ve deliberately constructed this to appeal to voters of other parties; this is a plan to just make the country more functional and fair at the same time.

Finally – how are you going to do this? Because right now, it’s clear that an incredibly tame Labour government is about to take power – an administration that seems almost intentionally preparing to disempower people. That isn’t a great signal for the sort of change Head North is pushing for.

The thing is, we’ve lived through this promise of ‘levelling up’, and it’s come to nothing. We have to explain to people why it’s come to nothing. It can’t be done overnight. But I think we’ve got to say really clearly that if you want this country to be more equal, to close the north-south divide, there are some fundamental changes you’ve got to do. If you want the twenty-first century to be different from the twentieth century, you’ve got to do some pretty major rewiring.

But it feels like across Westminster, there is a conscious political intention to deprive people – there is no particular drive to rectify these gigantic social and infrastructural issues. Surely it will take a huge level of effort and organisation to force these challenges onto the agenda? 

If they don’t listen to us, we’ll be rallying everybody at Knutsford Services to move south on the capital (laughs). Head North is the product of our political lives – we’ve poured ourselves into it. We’ve come this far and now know this much. We came into politics to change things, but you can’t do it in the current political system. It’s impossible. It’s up to people now what they make of it and whether they support the plan or elements of it. This book lands at a time when the public mood seems to want something more substantial and different to what we’ve been living through.

Do you think that mood is present in Labour’s national leadership?

I think what we’re encouraging them to do is to stick to some of the commitments around reforming the House of Lords. The book finishes around a commitment to a green transition – I can appreciate that if you’re just talking about a green fund or whatever, but if you turned it into a northern industrial strategy fund, basically any industrial strategy is going to have to be green to succeed in the future. That’s why we’re saying you can use it as a catalyst to build a new economy in the North.

There’s no reason to be downbeat. But it requires people to sort of recognise that you’ve got to change the wiring. If Labour is in a position of ‘oh, voters don’t care about these constitutional things’ – the truth is you can’t get better jobs, better homes, better transport until you actually change the whole wiring. And that’s the problem.

But people are ready for it. I think people are ready for it.