In a tight-squeeze booth of a Corn Exchange café Jennifer Williams sits with a deflating Coke. It’s 11am, her eyes are work-worn and that arson-red Mills & Boon hair falls sensibly about her features. “Why am I leaving?” she repeats. There’s a short sigh. The answer seems to circle something she’s reluctant to fully unpack. “…going to be a big emotional wrench…not an easy decision to make…you make a connection to the city…the pandemic had something to do with it…a tough story to cover and I wanted to try something new…” Quite possibly it’s nothing more than native ambition. Or, as she indicates: the legacy of two years putting together a newspaper with colleagues she could no longer be in the room with.
As the MEN’s outgoing Politics & Investigations editor she has dignified the profession as few journalists do – having by some seemingly superhuman application across her eleven years in the job managed to burn through the fog of local news coverage…the shabby optics, the name-and-shame crime reports, the C-list sleb snippets, the thickets of popups and whizzbits which ensnare the online reader…to somehow suggest her work as something approximating what we might imagine a local reporter’s to be if our thoughts were made of Frank Capra films. Like something that doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did in a local context, but which has always been supposed to. “What I tried to do is understand complicated policy areas and write about how they play out on the ground,” is what she says. A fervid eye trained on the mayoral podium as she scribbles furious shorthand into a notepad before hot-dashing it back to the news-desk to expose the calumny is what you see.
The stuff of her time has been unpicking the consequences of austerity for the Mancunian general reader: the housing crisis, the spice pandemic, Brexit, Covid, the tussle with central government and the shift in focus from council to mayoral politics. “I’m proud of the policing stuff” she says, of the reports she wrote examining GMP’s unique dysfunction. “I could never quite get to the bottom of health…I don’t understand how the NHS works.” Her new brief, as 
Northern Correspondent for the FT, will of course see her pound a much bigger beat…those red wall towns not previously thought to be of consequence, and the new breed of Northern mayors. “Levelling-up will be an important part of the dynamic,” she concedes. “But I’d like to push myself, try a different style of writing. Can I write about similar things but in a different way?
“I’m conscious that the Financial Times is a newspaper that’s read in powerful places…in Whitehall and boardrooms and in Westminster. I’d like to tell stories that some of the people reading it in those places haven’t heard before.”
Manchester’s loss is, as they say, the North’s gain. But what a loss.
Bouncing back
FC United boss Neil Reynolds is the man who, when I interviewed him back in September, told me he’d taken a £30k pay cut to go from secondary school headmaster to non-league football manager.
In his bid to knock the debt-ridden club back into shape he said it might be a good thing for the Moston revolutionaries to regard themselves as “just another football club now.”
“I see,” I nodded, mentally spitting my tea.
“Are you sure your manager gets FC United?” I asked board chair Adrian Seddon next time I saw him. Reynolds had been at the club for a couple of seasons by this point – in coming back to it it was me that was the newer face.
“Neil was appointed for his football expertise and his competence with budgeting and finance,” Seddon told me. He seemed relaxed.
In December, as I shared a lunchtime brew with club captain Michael Potts, he despaired at the loan signings brought in to patch up a hospital sized injury list…talented kids from football league clubs freezing in the thick of the men’s game.
“These lads, they’re afraid of kicking the ball in the stand for fear it’ll get back to their parent clubs,” he said.
At that stage, with Reynold’s men hoofing about near the drop-zone he appeared to be staring down the barrel of another pay cut.
After that, though, with the regulars back, they moved through the gears, as form players such as (goalkeeper) Dan Lavercombe, (defender) Aaron Morris and (striker) Regan Linney stepped up. Eight wins and two draws from eleven games saw them scramble up the table to a berth just outside the play-off places, before a seondary stutter checked their progress.
A promotion push now, though, I suggest, when I meet up with the manager this week.
“Promotion?”
The puffed-cheeks / rolled-eyes combo Reynolds produces on mention of the word leaves little room for doubt as regards the trouble that could cause – at the start of the season he described it as the worst thing that could happen to the club
“We have a three grand playing budget,” he says. “Some of these clubs in the National League are paying fifteen, twenty grand a week…”
So a poisoned chalice.
“Oh no,” he says. “We’ll be giving it everything, don’t worry about that.”
Hard rain
Wolodymyr Kowalyszn mans a minuscule desk in the foyer of the Ukrainian Cultural Centre, Cheetham Hill. A little girl in the next room is rapping on the glass pane of a connecting door. “My girlfriend” he quips, as she peers through. The centre is filling with bin-liners…clothes, clothes and more clothes as an unending stream of concerned Mancunians from every corner of life stops by to drop off whatever they can spare.
A delegation from the Royal Exchange are milling, here to view the premises where there is talk of staging a special theatrical performance. “Pole dancers! Strippers!” grins Wolodymyr. He leans in toward me. “Excuse my humour. You saw in Ukraine they give sunflower seeds to
the Russian soldiers? At least you can be of use when they find your dead body.” He tells me how his wife got out on the last plane before the rains came.
A cell phone rings, as it does every two minutes. “Excuse me.” Then he says the same thing he said two minutes ago, and two minutes before that. He’s been saying it all day, and all day yesterday across eight-hour shifts. “Hello? Thank you. Clothes? Thank you. Please, sell them. Give us the money, we have clothes. We need helmets. Body armour. Scopes. Walkie-talkies. Thermal imaging. And Celox for stopping the bleeding. We need a country, then we can think of the humanitarian aid after.”
FC United host AKS Zly in the European Fenix Trophy at Broadhurst Park, 3pm today. DETAILS HERE.
