'I can't imagine I'll ever live through a madder, more difficult year' (2025)

Today is going to be a difficult one for people across Greater Manchester. It’s five years since we were first told to stay at home to stop the spread of Covid – to protect the NHS, and to protect each other.

What followed was one of the biggest challenges of our lifetime, and one that took a devastating toll on families, on livelihoods, and on the frontline workers fighting to keep us all safe.

More than 7,500 of our friends, loved ones, and colleagues were taken from us in that time. We remember each of them, and our thoughts are with all those who will be hurting today.

When we think back to the intense and extraordinary year that was 2020, perhaps one of the memories people will have of that time is an image of me standing outside the Bridgewater Hall, empty streets all around, reacting to a text on a phone.

It would go on to spur a thousand memes - and a claim in the House of Commons from Jacob Rees-Mogg that I had put on an act for the cameras.

The truth is my reaction was painfully real - the culmination of seven long months, which began five years ago today, of growing frustration at the way our city-region and its people were treated in a national emergency by the London-centric powers-that-be.

For the first time today, I can reveal the exact wording of that famous message and the reason why it initially made my chin hit the floor but, seconds later, lit the blue touch paper.

“On call with Hancock: comes into effect 1 min past midnight on Friday; it’s going to be £22 million only; they are going to try to pick off individual councils. Getting loads of grief from Tories.”

The text was from our own Lucy Powell MP, who at that very moment was attending a virtual meeting in Westminster with the then Health Secretary.

Up until then, I had been hoping that the Government would listen to us and treat people here fairly when it came to the introduction of Tier 3.

After all, as I had explained to Boris Johnson on the phone earlier that same day, we had been under local restrictions since July without any financial support.

“What do you mean?” the then Prime Minister asked.

In that instant I realised he had no clue about the haphazard policies his own Government had been busy dumping on us. That stung me, because those restrictions on household mixing across our 10 boroughs were really hurting people.

He didn’t seem to know about them or care very much. I got the distinct sense that he was living a very different pandemic to everyone up here.

However, now that I had reminded him, perhaps he would finally understand why we had so fiercely fought against his half-baked plan for Tier 3?

No. Not a bit of it.

As Cabinet minutes released to the Covid Inquiry would later reveal, Johnson and his Ministers would choose to administer a punishment beating to Greater Manchester for daring to stand up to him.

The £22 million referenced in Lucy’s text was a third of what was being offered to other places.

The promised move to “pick off individual councils” was nothing less than a scurrilous attempt to divide-and-rule our city-region at a time of national crisis.

To their great credit, the 10 leaders of our councils would have none of it. It moved me then, and still does now, that the then Conservative leader of Bolton, David Greenhalgh, put his first loyalty to our place rather than to his party.

This is, and I hope will always be, Greater Manchester’s super-power: the ability to stick together for the benefit of people here, even across party lines, in our hour of need.

The truth is, as a group of 11, we had all year been on the receiving end of a series of chaotic and outrageous decisions that tried to treat our residents as second-class citizens.

In May, I remember being stunned when I got word that the Government had decided to end the first national lockdown and change “Stay at Home” to “Stay Alert”. Covid had spread up the country from London and, while their case rate had come down, ours was still high. There was zero consultation with us about the decision. In my view, it locked Greater Manchester in to everything that followed over the coming months.

In June, we had to fight the Government for weeks to give us data about cases in Greater Manchester from their outsourced Test and Trace system – by proving that refusing to do so was to break their own law passed at the start of the pandemic which made Covid a “notifiable disease”.

We also had to convince them to allow us to run our own local test and trace system, given the poor performance of the national one. That used a national phone number, made repeat calls to the same households trying to speak to every individual in the home, and had poor contact rates.

When we took control we used a local phone number, knocked on doors, and saw a dramatic improvement in results.

In July, Greater Manchester became one the first places to go under local restrictions – with no guidance issued until the early hours of the morning when they were due to be introduced. People whose jobs involved working in other people’s homes didn’t know if they could turn up for work. It was utter chaos for 24 hours.

In August, they tried to impose A Level results on our young people using an algorithm that unfairly discriminated against those attending larger institutions in bigger classes, as most young people here do, to the benefit of those in smaller classes, particularly in fee-paying institutions.

If they had not backed down under pressure, it would have led for instance to 20 or so young people at one of our colleges losing Oxbridge places.

In September, David’s borough of Bolton had seen hospitality closed overnight without any financial help. Can you imagine them trying that in London? It would be the harbinger for what would follow next.

And so, in October, it all boiled over with the Tier 3 debate and the attempt to give low-paid workers across the North a 67% furlough when everyone else had been sitting in their gardens sipping cocktails on 80%.

I can’t imagine I will ever live through a madder, more difficult year than 2020.

It felt like Greater Manchester and its people were in the firing line and yet, while I was confined to home and the sun was shining, I didn’t feel as though I could switch off for one minute.

I was in a unique position because I was the only living ex-Health Secretary who had faced a global pandemic. Although swine flu a decade earlier had been much milder, the experience of fighting it had given me an intimate knowledge of UK pandemic policy. I knew, from very early on, that the Johnson Government were effectively ripping up the rulebook.

So barely a day went by without me doing a series of media interviews from make-shift TV studios across the rooms of my house, with all the interruptions of home life to contend with, including teenage kids and a barking dog.

I remember one day a picture of a Belgian Mayor causing an internet sensation. He was doing an interview on his laptop at home in a shirt, tie – and, let’s just say, not much else underneath, as revealed by a mirror behind him. I can remember thinking: there but for the grace of God go I!

Despite all the challenges, there were many laughs and unique moments to celebrate. There was time together as a family which we didn’t expect, much of it spent watching every episode of Money Heist.

There was the joy of United We Stream, which brought Manchester music and culture into millions of households, and raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for charities, local artists, and businesses affected by lockdown.

But what it brought over, more than anything else, was the huge responsibility and privilege of representing this great city-region.

It was a time of real jeopardy for Greater Manchester but, when I would get reports every day of what different communities were doing to help each other, it would spur me on.

We were getting the rough end of the stick from the Government but that made the fightback even harder, as I knew people here deserved so much more. I will always remember the shouts of “Go on Andy” as I faced the media in that empty city centre.

Looking back, I know people will have different views of the rights and wrongs of it all, and perhaps of the decisions I took. I can certainly say it tested me on every level. But I hope I got more right than wrong.

Perhaps the abiding memory will be of a year which felt surreal at times and was full of bizarre contrasts; of trying to meet the seriousness of the moment with my political A-game, while the dog was busy knocking my laptop off the tower of books propping it up, with yet another delivery arriving at the door!