There’s a new political game in town - and it’s towns themselves.

The debate over the economies, identities and futures of our towns has been gathering steam for some time, particularly in the North and the Midlands and especially since the EU referendum.

It has been rumbling within Greater Manchester for several years, too, as leaders in the former mill towns that surround the city have privately aired frustration at what they've increasingly felt to be a Manchester-centric focus, one that created visible growth in the middle but - at least according to some - trickled outwards too slowly or not at all.

But since Brexit there has also been a discernible and gathering national narrative about ‘left behind towns’, places now languishing under a rather patronising label that has already slipped into cliché, but whose Brexit votes blindsided politicians and journalists in Westminster three years ago.

These are towns in which many of those working in that very machine grew up, before leaving for the jobs and opportunities of the capital - a living embodiment of the debate itself.

(Image: Getty Images)

Yet as is so often the case, the problems faced by post-industrial towns have only really now come into their own as a result of hard-nosed political expediency.

It’s worth repeating this analysis from Boris Johnson in central Manchester last weekend, arguably the most significant part of his speech.

Just a few miles away from where he stood in the Museum of Science and Industry, said the new Prime Minister, ‘the story is very different’ to the city centre’s tale of rebirth and regeneration.

How different this was to the 'northern powerhouse' speech given in the same building by George Osborne five years earlier , when the EU referendum was a distant and winnable threat for a Chancellor speaking only of the city, of other cities and the need to join those cities up.

Instead this new PM spoke of the once-industrial towns whose wealth fuelled the rest of the empire; of their ‘famous names’, ‘proud histories’ and ‘fine civic buildings’, towns where ‘unfortunately the stereotypical story of the last few decades has been long term decline’.

(Image: Copyright Unknown)

“Endemic health problems. Generational unemployment. Down-at-heel high streets,” he said.

“The story has been, for young people growing up there, of hopelessness, or the hope that one day they’ll get out and never come back.

“And in so far as that story is true - and sometimes it is - the crucial point is it isn’t really the fault of the places and it certainly isn't the fault of the people growing up there. They haven’t failed.

“No, it is we, us the politicians, the politics, that has failed.”

Not that he visited any of those places while he was here. In fact when I went to look for pictures of Boris Johnson in any of Greater Manchester's towns for this article, either as a minister or while on the Brexit trail, the best I could do was some snaps of him in the not-especially-struggling Stockport suburb of Marple a few months after the 2015 general election.

Nevertheless his 'towns' argument echoes themes threaded throughout the features I have written about Oldham in recent weeks, focusing on the area’s challenges and human stories of powerlessness, particularly on the heels of almost a decade of austerity.

(Image: Joel Goodman)

There was a similar theme, too, in our coverage of the local elections, as new upstart local parties sprang up across the conurbation demanding change, frustrated at declining public realm and irritable at what they saw as a greater political focus elsewhere.

Many of our towns encapsulate Boris Johnson’s analysis reasonably well and, indeed, I’m told six of them - Rochdale, Oldham, Bolton, Wigan, Stockport and, despite admittedly being a city, Salford - are on the government’s current longlist for major giveaways in the next election, through a ramped-up £3.6bn ‘stronger towns’ fund.

This was a pot derided when it was originally unveiled by Theresa May during the string of crunch Brexit votes in the spring, many Labour MPs dismissing it as an obvious bribe to vote for her deal.

A bribe it may be, but it is clearly at the heart of the Tory electoral strategy. Boris Johnson seeks to steal post-industrial Labour towns from under Jeremy Corbyn’s nose, aiming to mitigate losses in more remain-leaning areas to the Liberal Democrats.

Doubtless the towns eventually selected for this first wave of funding will contain a ruthless political imperative: they will be potentially winnable.

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

Yet, of course, we know nothing of how much money these places would get, what form that money would take, or how much power would come with it.

Will it be one-off capital funding for a new ‘thing’, or will ongoing cash for creaking local services finally come alongside?

And how will these towns fare if we leave without a deal on October 31? Local leaders fear the worst, Manchester council's Sir Richard Leese warning last September that the poorest places are always hardest hit by recession. "The areas of Greater Manchester that are behind the curve economically," he told colleagues , "are the areas that are most likely to suffer from no deal."

Meanwhile not everyone believes this debate should even be framed as town versus city at all, including Lord Kerslake’s recent UK 2070 commission report, which pointed out cities outside the south east have long struggled to hit their stride too.

Despite its successes Manchester itself continues to have some of the highest levels nationally of poverty and, indeed, of the ‘endemic health problems’ to which the PM refers. Manchester, too, is still emerging from the post-industrial shadows.

Still, in the same vein as Donald Trump’s appeal to America’s rust belt, the Tories spy an electoral advantage in town decline, decline that in many cases began in earnest on their watch in the 1980s.

A populist, perhaps even a winning strategy. But if that’s all it turns out to be, the politicians and the politics will have failed all over again.