The opportunist: How Sir Howard Bernstein bent Manchester to his will

By Joshi Herrmann

The tributes came fast and they came from George Osborne (“one of the towering public servants of the last 50 years”) and Khaldoon Al Mubarak (“Manchester’s status as a leading post-industrial city is, in large part, attributable to Sir Howard”). He was the “chief author” of Manchester’s renaissance, a “Manchester giant”.

I posted the news of his death on Twitter just before 11am on Saturday, on my way to play tennis. By the end of my game, the Financial Times had published an obituary. By this point, the family had confirmed the news in a statement that featured bullet points. IRA bomb rebuild; Commonwealth Games; Spinningfields; Manchester City; devolution. Why stop there? Sir Howard wouldn’t have.

He came from the respectable shtetl of Cheetham Hill, a place of immigrant shops and pickled cucumbers and brine-soaked herring. Like the majority of north Manchester’s early twentieth century Jews, his grandparents had arrived from Russia, a migration of thousands of ostjuden marked by a tendency — quite unlike their gentile neighbours and surely born of traumas and pogroms and bankruptcies in the old country — to look unblinkingly towards the future. “We hadn’t got that liking for the past that seems to be so common nowadays,” one Jew of his generation said later. “We wanted to emancipate ourselves and to become more modern … In those days your whole idea was to get rid of all these old things.”

The Jews of north Manchester were a disappointment to political radicals but a boon to British commerce. It was here that Marks and Spencer first gained a foothold, where Britain’s first major department store, Lewis’s, was born. “There was thus an economic dynamism and boldness in the slums of Strangeways and Red Bank,” writes the researcher Tony Kushner. Bernstein’s father Maurice was in the raincoat trade on Cheetham Hill Road, a thriving sector built by enterprising Jews that continues to this day. Born in 1953, Howard left school at the age of 17 and joined the council as a junior clerk.

Three years ago, I was writing a profile of Manchester’s leader Sir Richard Leese on the occasion of his retirement after 25 years. But in the calls for that piece, “Howard” was inescapable. Manchester had been ruled by a duopoly from the late 1990s — Leese the elected politician; Bernstein in charge of the professional bureaucracy — and it was futile trying to ask about one without the other. Some felt they had the wrong jobs: Bernstein was the energetic visionary; Leese more careful, methodical. “They were always on top of the detail, both of them,” Andy Burnham told me. “But always with this sort of streetwise, clever approach that was about 'how we are going to deliver the government's objectives for you'”.

Bernstein spoke to me for that article too. He had a low gravelly voice and a wicked laugh. He dressed unlike any local government civil servant: chunky gold chains, silk scarves, big rings. “Manchester had lost its way — it had lost its way intellectually, it had lost its way politically,” he said of the 1980s city, the period when he gained prominence as a workaholic council officer fired up by Manchester’s risky new gambit: working with the Conservative government. To ministers, he talked about “co-designing” policy and how cities could drive growth. He knew that most of the levers of power were in London and laying even a pinkie finger on them required talking the language of Whitehall. Cooperation was needed, “Rather than spending all our time throwing bombs at each other”.

Bernstein would cite the rebuilding of Hulme and the transformation of east Manchester as fruits of his approach. But his legacy will be most defined by his deal with George Osborne that moved a few key levers to Manchester and created the role of mayor, a bargain characteristic of him in both scope and execution. “The Osborne-Bernstein deal was like two mafia bosses carving up Apulia,” wrote Simon Jenkins. “There was no white paper or consultative document, let alone a debate in parliament. Manchester’s deal with Osborne was reached by sleight of hand, by one man with a political problem to solve and another who saw this as an opportunity.”

More than anything, Bernstein was an opportunist – restlessly searching for openings to make things happen. His advisors recall endless requests to write two-page briefs for potential projects that would be pressed into ministers’ hands on stage at events or at cocktail parties. “It was very striking when I had been chancellor for a few years, the ideas coming from Manchester were very often the best,” Osborne told me. “Ideas about how to finance the metro system or how to get money into the cultural sector or how to support school reform in the city. And you just didn't get those ideas from the other big cities of England.” 

Bernstein was “hugely demanding and challenging of others, but in a way that people respond to,” remembers Chris Oglesby, the chief executive of property firm Bruntwood. Staff would receive calls from the chief executive’s office summoning them to meetings at 8am, meetings that would never run on time. In manner he might come across as stubborn or inflexible, but “he was always listening,” says Mike Emmerich, the former Downing Street advisor chosen to shuttle between Manchester and Whitehall during the devolution talks. “He would take positions in order to draw people out, and then work out what was the right thing to do.” I spoke to Emmerich yesterday as his phone lit up with messages from old friends about Bernstein’s death. “Howard was truly unique in that role,” he said. “Literally a once-in-a-generation mercurial talent.”

Many of those eulogising Bernstein this weekend offered the same proof for his greatness: look around you! Look at the Etihad Stadium, built for the Commonwealth Games and then provided to Manchester City by Bernstein, a lifelong blue, as the key building block of the club’s dizzying success. Look at the apartments of New Islington and the towers of Deansgate Square. Few municipal leaders leave a record as tangible as this, a legacy as easily measured in steel, brick and glass.

Bernstein was “an amazing property developer disguised (not very well) as a town clerk,” tweeted Tom Bloxham, himself a property developer. And from early on, Bernstein was clear about what kind of housing he thought Manchester needed. When he joined the council, “The whole idea was, ‘Let’s put council housing wherever we can’ — thinking that the only way we could drive the future of the city was by building hundreds and thousands of council houses,” he told the Guardian after his retirement. “There was no understanding that successful cities are really about how you attract people who have got money.” Bernstein and his coterie believed “you had to do something fundamental with the housing market,” one colleague of his once told me. “That obsession with the demographics and population profile is imprinted in the city”.

It’s a measure of his success that the radical left, such as it exists in centrist Manchester, has mostly formed in opposition to Bernsteinism. He is the obvious bogeyman for those who think the city paid too high a price — financially, ethically — in its deals with Abu Dhabi or that Manchester has ceded too much power to the private sector. By the end of his tenure, questions were being asked about the small club of developers, planning consultants and architects who seemed to be getting all the plum jobs. When he retired from the council in 2017, Bernstein took roles advising Deloitte and the Abu Dhabi United Group — a fact that earned criticism from some who thought it slightly too convenient.

But was it really money that drove Bernstein? Surely not. Most of those he schmoozed with at the property industry’s annual get-togethers in the south of France earned more than him, and friends note that he could have left the council several times for more lucrative offers. “I think he was motivated by a fierce loyalty and the most optimistic outlook on life I think I have ever come across,” former council leader Graham Stringer told the MEN. “He always thought he could achieve the dreams he had for Manchester.”

Unique characters often have an unusual hinterland and Bernstein’s genius — a striking mix of optimism, singlemindedness and entrepreneurial energy — can perhaps be traced back to the unusual milieu of postwar Mancunian Jewry, in a community made up of people who had lost everything and wanted nothing more than to build the future and build it quickly. “We wanted to emancipate ourselves and to become more modern,” as that earlier quote said. A man renowned for assembling disparate people on boards and development committees — “working in partnership” in the official lingo of local government — emerged from a world where everything was achieved together. Few in Manchester seemed to understand where he came from – they mentioned his Jewishness in trivial ways (his star of David ring) and antisemitic ones (a Jewish property developer) but missed the bigger picture: that his was an immigrant story.

Bernstein died in the early hours of Saturday morning. Friends had known since last summer that he was suffering from cancer, but his passing came as a shock — he had recently seemed in fine health. “The last time I saw him, a couple of weeks ago, he was still enthusing about the next stages of regeneration in East Manchester, around Ancoats and the Etihad Stadium,” Sir Richard Leese said in a statement, having learned of his death while on a trip abroad. "Howard was a friend and valued colleague for more than 30 years and I'm devastated he has died.”

It's a sign of how little his colleagues and associates understood Bernstein’s Jewishness that no one from the council was amongst the 200-odd mourners at Rainsough cemetery yesterday afternoon. Plenty of mayors, ministers and municipal dignitaries would gladly have made the trip to Prestwich if they had known how these things work, but Abrahamic ritual waits for no one. The Torah commands "You shall bury him the same day,” and within 36 hours, the body of Sir Howard Bernstein was being slowly lowered into the ground.