I went to the Hacienda exactly once, in the early nineties, a Londoner up for the weekend who queued for an hour, paid over the odds for a warm lager and was condescended to all night by men in bucket hats. Years later, as an investor in an online recruitment marketplace based in Manchester, the walk to board meetings took me past the site of the club, by then reborn as apartments.
The most famous nightclub on earth is now posh flats. On Monday afternoon, watching Andy Burnham outside Number 10 promising to be a circuit breaker for Britain, it was the flats I kept thinking about.
The universe does not often hand you a metaphor that cleanly. The Hacienda was the Manchester nightclub that defined a decade, launched a thousand bands and lost money on very nearly every pint it ever sold. It was run by Factory Records and Tony Wilson, a man so allergic to paperwork that he signed his artists with a contract written in his own blood, promising them everything and the company nothing.
Which brings us, with grim inevitability, to our new Prime Minister.
Burnham arrived in Downing Street this week as the seventh occupant since 2016, a churn rate that would embarrass even a Manchester band. Joy Division lost a frontman and simply rebranded as New Order. Labour has now pulled the same trick twice in two years and is hoping nobody checks the back catalogue. Starmer has gone, and the party is trying very hard not to look back in anger.
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