Now compare Burnham to Richard Parker. Politicos are still unsure what even drove him from the spreadsheet anonymity of a career in accountancy to mayoralty of the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) a year ago. Certainly, Parker’s pitch for the job didn’t stray far from vague lines on family ties to the region — and being unable to stand by while the Midlands rotted. Boilerplate stuff, topped off with pledges written in a say-nothing Starmerese so diligent they may have come straight from the Labour leader’s playbook. 

Parker’s lackluster style is even more striking given his peers. I don’t mean Burnham here, or indeed Sadiq Khan. Even in the West Midlands itself, there’s Parker’s predecessor Sir Andy Street, who elegantly dovetailed the region’s fortunes with his own personal brand. Mr Commonwealth Games. Mr HS2. Whatever you want to call him, Street was the Midlands for locals and outsiders alike. 

Parker’s failure to follow suit is especially remarkable given there’s so much he could plausibly build a political personality around. In a largely deindustrialized region, housing inequality, transport woes, and low-paying jobs are all urgent problems to be solved. Then there’s the Birmingham bin strike. It may be the responsibility of the local council, but with 26,000 tons of stinking rubbish left uncollected, it’s hard not to see the dispute as the ultimate symbol of Midlands failure. Parker’s electoral victory at least paid lip service to these issues, promising to boost regional skills, explore high street rejuvenation and, given top billing, take buses back into public control. But the wide popularity of these ideas hasn’t protected him from criticism. 

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For one, bus franchising isn’t projected until 2027 at the earliest. A retiring figure, albeit one well-liked by colleagues, Parker doesn’t seem to lead much on policy, only getting excited about housing — a hangover, I’m told, from his exposure to the issue during his accounting years. He’s happy to outsource the blue-sky thinking the mayoral role is known for to less political policy leads. There’s a joke that if you want to know what Parker really thinks, you should ask Rachel Reeves, to whom he lent a holiday home and donated £12,000 in cash the year before he became mayor. 

This closeness to the Treasury runs exactly contrary to the expanding mayoral model’s devolutionary principles. It also comes with risks, not least when the Westminster party’s poll numbers are in the basement. According to YouGov, after all, only 60% of Labour voters in 2024 plan to stay loyal next time. More than that, the latest polling has Reform UK on 30% nationwide, a far cry from the 5.8% the party won in last year’s West Midlands mayoral election. No less striking, May’s local elections saw Farage’s juggernaut pick up two mayoralties, with Labour pushed extremely hard by insurgent mayoral candidates in former Labour heartlands like North Tyneside. In such a landscape, it remains to be seen whether Parker can win in 2028; some insiders already whisper he may not stand at all.

It’s not just Reform that poses a threat to Parker either: his old rival Street retains plenty of popularity right across the Midlands. Many feel his 2024 loss was a repudiation of Tory rule rather than a personal slight, especially given Street himself is famous for his issues-first style. More than that, he lost to Parker by just 0.15% last year. Defeat, then, but one far less resounding than what his party suffered nationally. I know many across the Midlands, both to the Left and Right of Street, who admire his region-first approach. But as the former mayor is busy burnishing his centrist credentials — telling a recent interviewer that he’ll fight for a “moderate, inclusive conservatism” — Reform’s rise could yet stymie the careers of Parker and Street both.

Quite aside from that looming light-blue wave, meanwhile, Street’s tenure was far from perfect. For one thing, HS2 was a nightmare. It’s too early to know if this latest iteration of the Northern Powerhouse could belatedly link London and Birmingham to Manchester, but Street himself certainly failed, and that was despite the help of Burnham further north. For its part, Street’s cross-city rail project was also hit by waves of delays. In contrast, and to give Parker his due, the current mayor has attached his name to a mega-bucks tram project which might finally give him a political identity worth the name. Linking up a proposed “Sports Quarter” in Birmingham with the airport and NEC events space is an unqualified good, especially when the network will travel through some of the city’s poorest areas.

But the region has been burnt by doomed development projects before. Forget HS2: though it rarely makes headlines south of Warwickshire, a long-in-the-offing gigafactory, meant to be built on the site of Coventry Airport, has faced epic struggles too.

For years, people across the Midlands were promised that the huge battery-making facility, designed specifically to power electric vehicles, would secure 6,000 jobs and £2.5 billion in investment. As far back as 2017, Street told the Conservative Party conference that the future growth of the West Midlands would emerge from its car-making past. “It’s a modern industrial strategy,” he said. You could almost see the gigafactory materialize as he spoke.

As it is, nothing much has happened, though those close to Street celebrate his ability to pull in private sector support for his embattled region. Perhaps — Street is certainly an enthusiastic booster for his patch — but apparent interest from Jaguar Land Rover and the Tata Group never went anywhere. Instead, a local manufacturer called Volklec, backed by funds from the Chinese battery sector, turned up instead. Yet even then, a £1 billion investment plan falls far short of Street’s grand words. All the while, the gigafactory itself is nowhere to be found, its promise of prosperity lost among the Warwickshire hedgerows.

In a sense, of course, these challenges aren’t the fault of Parker or Street. For if regional mayors occasionally show the strength of personality to make a difference, the fact is that they are never in complete control of their destinies. After all, even under boosted devolution deals, mayors rely on private partnership for success, a model that pits areas against each other. Tata, for instance, took investment that might have come to the West Midlands to Somerset instead.

A reliance on private cash also emphasizes risible public support. For the long-signaled gigafactory, the WMCA has only offered £23 million to the project. Whitehall might stump up another £65 million, but that’s not much either. “We hardly have the carrots to tempt investors with,” says one WMCA insider, a fair point when funding for projects comes from tightly controlled government pots. It’s impossible, here, not to mention the “Treasury Brain” adherence to environmental legislation and London-centric development logic — which together make it tough for post-industrial sites in the West Midlands and elsewhere to get off the ground.

In other words, then, for the mayoralties to really turbocharge their regions they first need to escape the clutches of Westminster. “Devolution is about driving economic growth, not societal or welfare change,” says Ben Brittain, a former advisor to Street. “You run the risk of low-energy over-promoted accountants or a chair of a council subcommittee as the region’s leader, which does a disservice to citizens of that region.” 

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At this point, it’s tempting to return to Parker. Even people less close to Street than Brittain miss his ambassadorial energy and soft skills: knowing when to bollock, reward, charm, or simply put in the hours to get things done. Of course, it would be unfair not to mention that every local and combined authority still battles austerity, which persists even under the Labour government in Westminster. “There must be a strong relationship between mayoral teams, No. 10 and No. 11, which can unblock a lot,” says Brittain. “But there is no formal structure for that.” 

Here, Parker might point to his relationship with Reeves as crucial to unlocking funds for his gleaming new tram project. But those same links, insiders worry, could be exactly what undercuts regional confidence and, potentially, renewal on the West Midlands’ own terms. Parker, after all, is Reeves’ man. And for a country like England, with its hyper-centralized political culture, it’s equally concerning that Labour may now plan to make its mayors more accountable to the party. What would this mean for Parker, who might need to take on Downing Street if his tramline goes the way of HS2? Then there’s the gigafactory which, as it stands, remains an underused airport. Hardly something to build a political brand around.

To cap it off, 13 minutes after the final whistle, Mark Selby, “the Jester from Leicester”, won the World Snooker Championship for the second time. Both Selby and the Foxes had followed in the footsteps of Leicester Tigers, who secured their eighth Rugby Union Premiership three years previously, and Leicestershire County Cricket Club, who won their third T20 Cup in 2011. Leicester, it seemed, was the centre of the sporting world.

In the years since, however, the cricket team has not won anything, while the Tigers only won the Premiership again in 2022 after a long drought. Although Selby, recovering from a run of poor form related to his depression, reached the final of the World Snooker Championship again this month, he lost to the Belgian Luca Brecel. Then, on Sunday, came the greatest disappointment of all, as Leicester City were relegated from the Premier League. Seven years after that glorious Bank Holiday Monday, the city’s decline has started to feel endemic. How did it come to this?

There used to be a bar at Leicester station — or rather, a counter selling pasties and sandwiches that also sold cans of lager and had a small room next to it, fitted out with perhaps half a dozen small tables. Having written their match reports, London-based journalists would meet there before getting the train home. Its walls were a celebration of great Leicester personalities: not just David Attenborough and Gary Lineker, but Willie Thorne, Engelbert Humperdinck, Kate O’Mara, Showaddywaddy…

The bar disappeared years ago and, on the day Leicester lifted the league title, its absence was unnerving but also, it seemed, rather fitting. Andrea Bocelli sang on the pitch before kick-off as the grimy traditions of its former stadium Filbert Street yielded to the slightly antiseptic surrounds of the King Power: here, the fans are obsessed, in a way no other club’s are, by those weird cardboard clappers, as though they suddenly felt banging their hands together was not quite the modern thing. It was better than what had gone before but just as surely something had been lost. If that bar still existed, Jamie Vardy, Riyad Mahrez and Wes Morgan, the heroes of 2015-16, would surely take pride of place.

A Champions League quarter-final followed, then two fifth-place finishes and, in 2021, a first ever FA Cup success. Even last season, widely seen as a disappointment, Leicester finished eighth. But did Leicester itself ever seem like a city on the up? Perhaps sport casts an illusory glow. Perhaps too much was read into the discovery of Richard III under a car park in the city a decade ago, but it served to underline the impression of Leicester as a place where exciting things were happening, even if 40% of the city’s population reside in the most deprived 20% of areas in the country.

That illusion, though, was firmly punctured during the pandemic, when Leicester became the first British city to lock down following a spike that was largely blamed on Dickensian conditions in textile factories — a Sunday Times investigation later uncovered a string of sweatshops where workers were paid just £3.50 an hour. “Leicester endured the longest, most crippling lockdown of anyone in the UK,” says Lee Marlow, a Leicester fan and lecturer at De Montfort University. “You can see the effect of that in the city today. Empty shops, streets that have seen better days. Businesses, pubs, restaurants that clung on but never recovered.”

Then, in late summer last year, Leicester endured a month of unrest between predominantly British-Pakistani Muslims and predominantly British-Indian Hindus, seemingly sparked by celebrations of India’s cricketing victory over Pakistan in the Asia Cup; football is not the only sport to offer an emotionally fraught manifestation of identity. Over the following month, there were a number of outbreaks of violence and 47 arrests. While investigations agreed social media agitators bore the bulk of the responsibility, the Delhi-based Centre for Democracy, Pluralism and Human Rights blamed “ethnic enclaves” within Leicester. If there had been any naive sense of the city as a place of harmonious immigration, it disappeared then.

Yet tragedy had already interrupted the Leicester City story, when a helicopter carrying the club’s owner, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, crashed in October 2018, killing all on board. His son, Aiyawatt or “Top”, succeeded him as chairman of both Leicester City and King Power, the Thai retail group, his inheritance making him one of Asia’s five youngest billionaires. But King Power’s main business is duty-free shops in airports, and it was hit hard by the pandemic. This not merely restricted spending on players, but also reportedly made the owners reluctant to sack their manager Brendan Rodgers earlier this season despite the stagnation that infected the locker room.

What will happen next? Well, just as Leicester City’s success boosted the local economy, with EY putting its value at £140m, so relegation will damage it. Leicester’s games will no longer be broadcast worldwide; the city will slowly lose its name recognition. Less prestigious games mean fewer fans and lower footfall on matchdays for the city’s restaurants, shops and pubs.

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But there is also something less tangible. Often, especially now that industry is disappearing, the football club is the most visible emblem of a town or city. I remember the pang of pride I felt as a native Wearsider when, walking through Addis Ababa to find Sylvia Pankhurst’s grave, I came unexpectedly upon an ancient ship’s anchor bearing the legend, “Made in Sunderland”. Work in the shipyards, obviously, was brutally tough, but what a feeling it must have been to send a vessel out into the world knowing it might be spotted in Melbourne or Buenos Aires or Tokyo — or even, inexplicably, 500 miles from the sea on Ethiopia’s central plateau. How is Sunderland projected now? Almost entirely through football. That’s why when clubs from the great provincial cities reach Wembley finals, at least those not wearied by familiarity, they habitually take over Trafalgar Square: it’s not just a celebration of self, but also a reminder to the capital that, however run down they may be, however peripheral they may feel, they are still there.

Leicester, for their part, have done something extraordinary. They didn’t just get to a Cup final: they were the most surprising league champions in English history. Their legend will linger. If any outsider wins it again, it is against Leicester that they will be measured. “In April 2016,” says Paul Simpson, a Leicester fan and founder of FourFourTwo magazine, “most supporters I knew agreed on one thing: as long as we won the Premier League we wouldn’t mind if we ended up playing non-league football in 10 years’ time. We did better than that. As devastating as this relegation is, it is, in part, a reversion to normality. This doesn’t excuse the many bad decisions made this season but it does put this season into perspective. The city will absorb the blow because it is business as usual — this is our eighth relegation in the past 50 years.”

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Supporting a club, especially one below the elite level, is often frustrating. Disappointment is the default. Success can bring ecstasy but, even then, there can be a sense of taking out an emotional mortgage that will take a lifetime to pay off. But all of that is less important than football’s function as a projection of identity, perhaps especially for cities struggling with a sense of declining prestige. Go to Melbourne or Buenos Aires or Tokyo and ask what they know of Leicester, and some may talk of Attenborough or Kasabian or perhaps Joe Orton or Julian Barnes. But most, if they know the city, will know it through Vardy, Mahrez and Morgan. That’s why football matters.

“We’ve not had it easy of late,” says Marlow, “but there have been worse times. We’ll be back. We’ll dust ourselves down. What do they say? One day you’re drinking the wine, the next you’re treading the grapes. We’ll do a bit of that. And they’ll never be able to take it away from us, will they? The Premier League. The FA Cup. The King in a car park. This little city — known all over the world.”