When Emperor Diocletian decided the Roman Empire needed more than one capital, he got a generation of civil war for his trouble.
He at least had the decency to abdicate and grow cabbages.
Andy Burnham, our presumptive Prime Minister, is not troubled by this historical precedent.
On Monday he confirmed that, on entering Downing Street, he intends to promptly leave it.
Two days a week will be spent at “No10 North”, a Manchester outpost he grandly calls the “nerve centre of a rewired Britain”.
Let us do what Mr Burnham won’t, and see how much this could cost.
The Scottish Parliament building was budgeted at £40million and delivered, three years late, for £414million.
No10 North will need premises, staff, and the security apparatus that follows a Prime Minister everywhere, plus travel for the retinue shuttling up the West Coast Main Line.
The warnings already run to hundreds of millions.
A chief executive (an ally from his mayoralty, naturally) is reportedly already pencilled in; I wonder how much they will be paid?
My old colleagues at the TaxPayers’ Alliance put it well: “Taxpayers should not be forced to fund a duplicate Downing Street so Mr Burnham can ‘play Prime Minister in Manchester'”.
The civil service has swollen by more than 100,000 since 2016. Quality of governance has not noticeably improved as far as I can see.
The Treasury has had a Darlington campus for five years, yet the “Treasury orthodoxy” Mr Burnham says he must escape managed to graft itself to the North East as much as it has in London.
Consider, too, Mr Burnham himself.
The man demanding a duplicate Downing Street spent £100million of taxpayers’ money on a Clean Air Zone that never charged a single driver, and oversaw a police force put into special measures.
Besides, defence, a failing economy, civil unrest and more will be on his desk regardless of where that desk is, and more time wasted on this move is less time he has to fix what really matters.
But the deepest objection to this plan was written in 1651.
Thomas Hobbes, writing amid our own civil war, diagnosed divided sovereignty as the disease that kills states: “Powers divided mutually destroy each other.”
His image was a man with a second man growing out of his side. Two heads, one body, no health.
An outpost with its own chief, its own economic advice, and its own claim on the Prime Minister’s diary creates a rival court and a 160-mile gap for responsibility to fall through.
A body with two nerve centres is not “rewired”, as Mr Burnham put it in his ghastly corporate babble.
It will be expensive, confused and allow for even more shifting of blame.
The experiment will fail, and it will be yet another mess for Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage to clean up.
Mr Burnham should give up on the idea. With the Parliamentary party he will inherit, he will already have enough cabbages to deal with.
