As the sun dips below the horizon over Didsbury Cricket Club, the neighborhood’s vibrant energy comes alive. Along the bustling high street, wine bars and gastropubs brim with patrons, soaking in the evening ambiance.
This lively scene echoes the cultural vibe that’s earned Didsbury the moniker of ‘the Notting Hill of Manchester.’ It’s a more verdant version of London’s famed neighborhood, once a hub for the Conservative Party’s influential ‘Notting Hill Set.’
With Andy Burnham ushering a wave of Britain’s political powerhouses northward to establish roots at what’s becoming known as ‘Number 10 North,’ whispers of a new ‘Didsbury Set’ may soon follow.
Yet, such notions may not sit well with Lucy Powell, Burnham’s steadfast ally and now appointed Education Secretary, who remains unpretentious about her origins.
Powell, a lifelong resident of Didsbury, paints a different picture of her hometown. Far from being a posh enclave, she views it as a place that has risen through its own efforts, transforming from humble beginnings into the vibrant community it is today.
But then, quite a few aspects of the Lucy Powell life story don’t quite add up.
For a start, we have her claim that she alone out of everyone at her allegedly impoverished Catholic sixth form college made it to Oxford in her year.
‘I was the only one out of that very big sixth-form college, 2,000 people, to get into Oxford that year. I cried the day I got the offer because I didn’t want to go,’ the MP for Manchester Central told the BBC’s Nick Robinson last year. The Financial Times has since discovered that this was clearly not the case, according to at least two contemporaries at Xaverian College.
In talking down her past, Lucy Powell is of course loyally echoing Andy Burnham’s mantra that northern Britain has been wronged by ‘Westminster” South’
Her Tory opponents wasted no time highlighting the howlers in her first social media post in the new job
In fact, there were several Oxbridge successes. Alumni recalled teachers going to great efforts to get their star pupils prepared for entrance exams and interviews.
A spokesperson for Ms Powell has now said that ‘she is more than happy to be corrected’ and ‘was in no way diminishing the achievements of others’.
I arrive at Xaverian (now closed for the summer) to find a rather fine campus with a handsome, well-tended green quad at its centre. Some buildings are Victorian, others brand new.
The whole place exudes a sense of purpose, as does its website which goes out of its way to stress that the sky is the limit. I can’t imagine that the current staff are too thrilled that the Education Secretary remembers it as a struggling backwater with a single bright star – Ms Powell herself.
Nor was she remotely grateful for her passport to Somerville College, Oxford, to read chemistry. She gave it a year and then quit for King’s College, London, citing the elitist atmosphere.
‘Oxford was not for a state school girl from the North doing maths and chemistry. I was like a duck out of water,’ she told the Times Education Supplement.
How on earth did Margaret Thatcher – another northern state school girl who studied chemistry at Somerville – survive when she turned up in 1943?
Ms Powell’s claims are met with snorts of disbelief from other northern state school girls who went through Oxford University at around the same time.
‘Everyone arrived feeling like a duck out of water. Then you just started swimming. There were far more northern girls doing science than Etonians,’ says Miranda, a Mancunian at a neighbouring college who went on to be a successful London lawyer.
Ms Powell, 51, has also complained about her early encounters with ‘mansplaining’ men, though that would not have been an issue at Somerville College.
It did not admit men until the year after she left.
One of the first to arrive there was Sam Gyimah. He might arguably have felt more of a duck out of water than Ms Powell, not only being a man but from an ethnic minority to boot.
He had also come from a state school but had, previously, grown up in Ghana. Mr Gyimah somehow stayed the course, was later elected president of the Oxford Union and, like Ms Powell, went on to be elected to Parliament (he now has a career in finance).
No one could accuse Oxford of being a Right-wing citadel of Tory toffs. After all, it famously refused to give the first female prime minister in British history an honorary degree because of her Conservative credentials.
Ms Powell welcomes members to a Labour Party press conference in central London earlier this month
There are similar holes in Ms Powell’s stories of life growing up in Didsbury, now a byword for bourgeois respectability. Ms Powell recalls it, simply, as ‘Manchester under Thatcher’, a place where schools were ‘starved of resources’. ‘It wasn’t that posh then,’ she has said.
All the residents I talk to acknowledge that Didsbury has been upwardly mobile for years, while the older ones say it was never that bad in the first place.
‘If you wanted a fight, you’d go up to the centre of town. If you wanted a drink, you’d come to Didsbury,’ says retired surveyor Frank O’Brien, recalling the 1980s and ’90s. ‘They used to put up the prices a little bit here to keep the riff-raff out.’
Ms Powell’s first secondary school was Parrs Wood High School, which can’t have been too bad since it also produced fellow Cabinet minister Lisa Nandy. Indeed, it was recently dubbed ‘the new Eton’ by the Manchester Evening News.
Ms Powell hails from impeccable middle-class educational aristocracy. The Times Education Supplement has reported that her mother was a headteacher who led a multi-academy trust, while a grandfather, two aunts and an uncle were also heads (one aunt was awarded the CBE).
She has acknowledged that her father, a social worker, benefited from the ‘social mobility’ of a grammar school education, though she is of course adamantly opposed to grammar schools now.
Ms Powell has joked about her own middle-class credentials. ‘I’ve married a doctor, you know – nothing more middle-class than that!’ she told the BBC (she has two school-age children and an adult stepson).
She is also an ardent fan of Britain’s largest annual jamboree for the middle-classes, telling Vogue that she has attended the Glastonbury Festival 23 times.
Quite how far she is removed from the mean streets of Britain’s inner cities was highlighted by last year’s famously haughty response on the Radio 4 current affairs show Any Questions, when a fellow panellist (from Reform) raised the sexual abuse of young girls by grooming gangs.
‘Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we?’ Ms Powell retorted. ‘Yeah, OK, let’s get that dog whistle out.’
Following instant Tory and Reform calls for her dismissal from her Cabinet post as Leader of the House, she apologised the next day. Her values, she insists, remain shaped by her working-class roots: ‘My mum is the daughter of Irish immigrants. My dad grew up in a two-up two-down with an outside toilet. I have the ethics and pride that comes through that, being respectful and polite rather than ‘mucky middle class’ as I call it – the posher you are the less you bother.’
So how will she compare to her predecessor, Bridget Phillipson, the dour scourge of the independent sector? There seems little sign of ideological change.
The woman who proudly wore a ‘Never Kissed A Tory’ T-shirt to Manchester’s 2022 Pride parade has previously said that she thinks private schools should not just have VAT slapped on them but should lose any charitable status altogether.
Nor are the omens too hot for literacy standards. Her Tory opponents wasted no time highlighting the howlers in her first social media post in the new job: ‘Absolutely thrilled the [sic] be appointed Education Secretary.’
In talking down her past, she is of course loyally echoing Andy Burnham’s mantra that northern Britain has been wronged by ‘Westminster” South’. It is Ms Powell’s story and if she prefers to be seen as a victim rather than an inspirational Mancunian success, so be it.
But a batsqueak of gratitude to all those teachers who set her on her way would not go amiss.
