Should the Prime Minister regularly work from outside London?

Andy Burnham's move to govern from Manchester was pitched as the end of an era of SW1 hoarding power, yet the vote it prompted here was no landslide against the old order — No edged it with 17 votes to 13, a margin that leaves the devolution symbolism looking more contested than declarative.

No opinions were left on the page, so there is no record of why voters split as they did — whether sceptics worried about the machinery of government scattering, or whether Yes voters simply wanted the gesture without the argument. That silence is itself notable: a question touching the balance between Westminster and the English regions usually draws strong feeling, and here it drew none.

The result nonetheless sits squarely on a live fault line — the same one running through metro mayors' demands for fiscal devolution, the "levelling up" agenda, and long-standing gripes about Whitehall-centric government — without the chamber pausing to argue it out. A near-even split, reached in near-total quiet, is its own kind of verdict on how settled this question really is.