There has been much speculation over whether devolution and the Northern Powerhouse is a dead duck or at least a very poorly one. The Resolution Foundation trawled the party manifestos to see how often the word ‘devolution' was mentioned and discovered it was 0.3 per 1,000 words in Labour's and 0.4 per 1,000 in the Conservatives', a drop on the 2017 manifestos' count. The foundation's chief executive Torsten Bell, a former Treasury official, concluded at a briefing last week that therefore ‘devolution is dying a death'.

This, however, was not borne out in the subsequent discussion. For a start, Gavin (now Lord) Barwell, a former housing minister and Number 10 chief of staff to Theresa May 2017-19, pointed out that this time the Tory manifesto – launched on a Sunday – is deliberately low key after the disaster of the 2017 election ‘when the manifesto torpedoed the campaign'. He told the audience at the foundation's briefing last week that, on the contrary, he regards Boris Johnson ‘as much closer to George Osborne's vision of devolution than May's' and said ‘we will get more emphasis on devolution if the Tories win'. Labour's difficulty is resolving its age-old struggle between its devolutionist and centralist wings, the latter reluctant to hand over the levers of power just when they have them in their hands.