‘Tory’ is a swearword in the north. Is George Osborne a strange exception? | Helen Pidd

Tempting though it is to tell George Osborne to butt out and stop interfering, now he edits a London newspaper instead of representing a northern seat, I must lightly applaud the former chancellor for still banging on about the north-south divide.

On Tuesday Osborne penned an op-ed in the Financial Times in which he urged Theresa May to commit to building high-speed rail links across the north – from Liverpool to Hull, starting with a line across the Pennines. “Far be it from me to offer advice to the prime minister on how to relaunch her premiership this autumn,” wrote the former MP for Tatton in Cheshire, doing exactly that, “but making this big commitment to the north at the Conservative conference in Manchester would not be a bad place to start.”

As the Guardian’s north of England editor, I have changed my mind about Osborne’s “northern powerhouse” weekly. On the one hand, it’s been quite remarkable to hear a Conservative chancellor talking seriously about rebalancing the economy away from London and the south-east, given that “Tory” remains a swearword in so much of the north. On the other, he cut so much from northern council budgets during his six-year tenure at 11 Downing Street that any bones he did throw to the region were devoid of truly transformational marrow.

(I also held a minor grudge that he never granted me an interview while in high office, apart from the one time he confused me for the lady from the Blackpool Gazette when I ambushed him at an ice-cream parlour in Cleveleys during the 2015 election campaign.)

But Osborne is right. Improving northern transport links is the best way of wooing not just investors, but talent. London is too full and too expensive, but it’s still where most of the decent jobs are. That’s why students at universities in Leeds, Newcastle, Liverpool and beyond reluctantly head down there after graduation. Nobody really wants to spend three hours a day commuting into the capital, or living in a flat share in zone 5. But neither do most aspirational young people want to be reliant on a car, as they would be in the north.

Wear are we?

I had not been in this job for long when I enraged the populations of Huddersfield and Harrogate when mixing them up in a report about the home of rugby league (it’s not Harrogate, in case you are wondering). Rochdale and Rotherham have also got confused in my addled mind, as well as Barnsley and Burnley, despite both sets being very clearly divided by the Pennines.

So I felt a little sorry for Jake Berry, the new minister for the northern powerhouse, when he made the front page of Tuesday’s Sunderland Echo for all the wrong reasons. In the city to open a new bridge over the River Wear, backed with £82.5m of government funding, he announced: “This historic… crossing of the Tyne will not just help Sunderland but it will also release growth all along this south bank.” The howls of derision could be heard all the way down Wearside. But perhaps it was not as embarrassing a gaffe as the bags Asda specially commissioned to mark the opening of its first “Isle of White” store this week.

Double tour trouble

The Ladies Tour of Norway cycling race went a bit wrong on Saturday when a river bridge opened to let a boat past. A four-woman break was denied a chance at victory as they were forced to wait, allowing the riders behind them to catch up. Leah Kirchmann, one of the riders held up, later tweeted her frustration: “Apparently a nice day for bike racing is also a nice day to go sailing!” I wondered whether the same thing would ever happen in a men’s race, which tend to be far better funded and organised. I got my answer on Sunday when Chris Froome and the Vuelta a España riders were held up at a railway crossing. A rare example of equality in professional cycling.