Manchester has marvellous wines, and it’s not finished yet

It will seem an ungrateful comment after the lunch which I am about to describe, but Manchester has some way to go. In the Midland Hotel, the principal Tory conference hotel and a grand edifice redolent of civic self-confidence from an earlier era, the northern powerhouse could sometimes be mistaken for a 40-watt light bulb. The business centre had been closed for the duration of the conference. The management person who told me this had enough nous to wilt under my incredulous stare. But it remained closed.

At a bar, two girls struggled to do half of one girl’s work. Whenever anyone tried to pay by plastic, inaccuracy and chaos reigned. The girls were not to blame. Increasingly panic-stricken, they looked sweet and were obviously under-educated and under-trained. But they were hopeless. It was horribly reminiscent of Blackpool.

The lunch. It had two aspects. The first was a superb wine list which would have graced any restaurant in the world. The second, the food. It was pretentious: nouvelle cuisine in portions which would not have satisfied one of L.S. Lowry’s stick men. That said, there was nothing wrong with the taste. Indeed, the ceviche of sea bream would have justified a Michelin rosette. But the main course arrived an hour and a half after we sat down.

We hardly noticed and did not complain, because of the wine. Our host, a prosperous Mancunian who has been a one-man northern powerhouse for some decades, was in a mood to gloat. A devotee of George Osborne, he wanted to celebrate the end of an era of civic decline and hideous council architecture: the bitter harvest of Labour dominance. On his way in, he enjoyed bantering with the anarchists, telling one dungareed girl that if she changed into a skirt and washed her hair, she would scrub up into something better than cat food on hind legs.