Is this this beefiest tweet ever sent by a member of the House of Lords? My old boss letting loose over this story www.the-londoner.co.uk/falling-stan...

Craig resents the idea that she’d have to define herself against Leese and Burnham, who she describes as “two men that have dominated Manchester politics for the last two decades”. But drawing a few comparisons is interesting, I think.

New Sacha Lord reporting from @theipaper.com: “An ally of Andy Burnham shut down an events firm after it was told to repay £400,000 of taxpayers’ cash.” It reveals Primary Event Solutions was liquidated in February. So the public money is gone.

I wanted to end my piece on this lovely quote from former colleague Jonathan Prynn, who worked at the paper for many years and left recently. “I loved it. I’ve always loved it."

It's been sad to see what has become of the Standard over the past couple of years: a very thin weekly edition, lots of layoffs and a bizarre "free speech" campaign (Lebedev's response to being snubbed by the Hampton Court Flower Show after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine).

Last year I got a call from a recruiter who had been tasked by Lebedev with finding a new editor for the Standard. I told him I was busy... I had just started @londonermag.bsky.social to fill the hole left by the paper. But the future of the paper didn't sound promising.

Lockdowns proved an unexpected boon for publications like the FT. But the Standard, which had never even created a digital subscription and relied on giving out newspapers on the tube, plunged into heavy losses overnight. It lost £20m in 2023.

And obviously the biggest thing that cost The Standard was the fact that it relied on people reading it on the tube. When it went free, and the business model worked, huge complacency set in about what might happen in future - when smartphones could load up more content and the tube got WiFi.

One thing that really cost us credibility was the paper’s politics. Appointing George Osborne as editor was one part of it, but it was also being a Tory-backing paper in an increasingly Labour city. “Election after election we would back the Tory candidate and it became unsustainable”.

I remember we all got to know who was on the Friends Of Evgeny list. “You’d have a classic Standard splash like ‘Travel Chaos’ and they would say ‘Evgeny wants this picture of Rita Ora on there’.”

The Lebedevs saved the Standard. But when Evgeny came to the fore as the main proprietor, senior staff realised what he was like to work with. “We were characterising him like Henry VIII in Wolf Hall… Everyone was being run ragged by his absolutely ludicrous requests and tantrums.”

At the heart of the story is this man, Evgeny Lebedev, and how he ran his newspaper. “Fundamentally very unhappy, like anyone would be if you had no sense of work or purpose,” one of his former advisers told me.

How it begins…

Burnham has promised to end rough sleeping across the country. It was his biggest promise when he became mayor of Greater Manchester and he didn’t come close. Here are the numbers, as revealed by @manchestermill.bsky.social last month.

Great stuff 👏👏👏

Enjoyed my visit to parliament yesterday to talk about the serious challenge facing journalism from SLAPPs. All power to Baroness Tina Stowell and Sir John Whittingdale for their private members bills that would make it easier to throw out abusive lawsuits before costs become ruinous.

As it happens, tomorrow will be Mollie’s 5th year anniversary at @millmedia.bsky.social! She joined straight out of Manchester Uni (UofM, that is…) and has become such a star. If you value this kind of work and you want is to find more Mollies, please join up 🙏 manchestermill.co.uk#/portal/signup

Playing this on repeat

The arrests are now being reported across the media including BBC, MEN, Indy etc. There is obviously more detail to emerge here, but it's exceptionally rare that people working for a UK university are arrested in relation to fraud, bribery etc. Fantastic reporting by @manchestermill.bsky.social.

Police said the alleged offences took place between 2014 and 2025 and involve some 60 transactions in which up to £1.7m in university funds were used for private purposes, including the purchase of a heated dog kennel.

Let’s gooo - nearly half way there

Love to see this - readers getting behind @abi-whist.bsky.social and The Post to help pay for the massive legal bills it incurred fighting off Laurence Westgaph, who launched a year long campaign to force Abi to reveal her sources. Aiming for 300 new or upgraded members. 11 days to go.

This FT op-ed is the best piece I’ve read about the difference between talking about growth and actually *prioritising* growth. From observing him over the years, I think Burnham is mostly concerned about rebalancing and equalising the economy rather than growing it.

Political power is such a magnet – it attracts money, ideas and talented people. It creates opportunities. The city will fill up with investors, think tankers, lobbyists and attractive spies.

The idea of having a prime minister who is at least partly governing from Manchester will be incredibly powerful. Burnham will apparently spend “a minimum of a day a week” in this office, and his “primary home” will continue to be up here, rather than Downing Street, according to briefings.

Finding this morning podcast very insightful. Today explaining how the defence spending boost has meant cancelling a big road project in Derby that was seen as important for growth. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/p...

Just to be parochial for a second: The No10 North thing might sound gimmicky but it’s clearly, unambiguously a great thing for this city. Whether it works for the country? I don’t know. Hope so. But Manchester is going to be a much bigger power centre for at least a few years. Very exciting.

When the case came to trial, Westgaph had watered it down. He was no longer claiming for most of the damages he had initially claimed for. “There is no evidence of distress caused by delay,” the judge said, noting that Westgaph’s case had “changed dramatically since he first filed it.”

The creepiest thing Westgaph did was sending SARs to various ex-partners of his, demanding that they hand over messages. He must have known that individuals processing data for purely personal reasons are not required to comply with SARs, but he gambled that the women in question did not know this.