Andy Burnham just slapped half the country in the face – all he cares about is Manchester!

Are you already getting tired of hearing about Manchester? Because I am. Sadly, I think we may need to grin and bear it, because Andy Burnham could be here for several years. For those of us who believe our leaders should represent the whole family of nations, we have instead been presented with a glorified mayor pretending to be Prime Minister.

Given he will not call a General Election, we are stuck with him as well. Since sweeping into power, Andy has spent most of his time avoiding talking about anything of national importance. Instead, he has focused on bus routes, pub snacks and infantile remarks about football. Sure, interesting for some, but hardly the job of a Prime Minister.

Foolishly, I believed that Andy might have been biding his time. I convinced myself that the Mancunian Messiah was waiting to use his conference speech to speak to the country, and not just his members.

Yet all we got was a shopping list of costly state interventions, delayed for a few years, and a diatribe about Brexit, partnered with a scheme to change the voting system.

Given none of this will happen for years, perhaps the most interesting topics were those that barely featured in his speech.

Defence, immigration, farming and the increasingly obvious assault by parts of his own party on the rural way of life. None of that was deemed important enough for Andy to make even a basic reference to.

Instead, his speech focused on handing the state, and Labour, more power over our lives.

I fear we should have seen this coming. After all, his first act as Prime Minister was to hand himself, a Roman Catholic, the right to advise the Monarch on the appointment of Anglican Bishops.

Presumably the Vicar of Dibley will soon be attending the papal conclave under this vibrantly progressive regime.

Now, since delivering his uninspiring socialist diatribe, Andy has returned to his safe space: talking about Manchester.

When asked Thursday about Heathrow, the hub of tourism and trade for Britain, he could not quite bring himself to give an answer – instead choosing to comment on why Manchester should get the upgrade instead.

Now, perhaps I am a bit out of touch, but being Prime Minister does not mean you can just behave like the Mayor of Manchester with a better car and a nicer house.

He is supposed to look after the country as a whole. Not doing so is something of a slap in the face for the rest of the country. How about he improve somewhere other than Manchester?

Britain is rather bigger than Manchester. There are farmers in Norfolk and fishermen in Cornwall who may want a moment of the Prime Minister’s time.

There are even millions of people in London and the South who might quite reasonably wonder when their Prime Minister is going to start talking to them.

Mr Burnham has spent years telling Westminster that it should listen to the regions. Now he is in Westminster, so perhaps he should listen to the rest of us.

Because the Prime Minister is not the Mayor of Manchester, he is supposed to be the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

And Britain – rather inconveniently for the Mancunian Messiah – does not stop at the M60.