One sentence of event: on Friday, four days into the job, Prime Minister Andy Burnham opened "No 10 North" at Heron House in Manchester, where he plans to work at least one day a week. Now let's talk about who covered the opening and who covered the building. * The Guardian went full launch-partner. A live blog narrated the PM arriving "by police convoy." A news piece carried his claim that this is "the biggest rebalancing of power our country has seen." The editorial page declared his first week showed "polished politics allow an upbeat start." And — the cherry — the paper handed Burnham himself a byline to review his own policy: "It's not just a No 10 in the north, it's an engine for growth throughout the whole UK," signed Andy Burnham. That's four different sections of one newspaper, all facing the same direction, and one of them is literally written by the subject. * Nothing in there is false. That's not the point. The point is what nobody in the building thought to ask, which brings us to Al Jazeera's headline: "Andy Burnham's Number 10 North changes the postcode, but not the politics." * The Qatari-owned desk — watching from well outside the Westminster honeymoon — did the unglamorous thing: it checked the plumbing. Literally, in the words of the IPPR North researcher it quoted: the new office "establishes the plumbing, but the water isn't flowing yet." It noted the office runs on existing budgets with "no additional cost to taxpayers," which sounds thrifty until you realize it also means no additional anything. It quoted a University of Leeds academic saying "genuine devolution means spending, taxation and regulatory power, not just relocated functions." And it dropped the number that makes the whole ribbon-cutting wobble: the UK is the most fiscally centralised country in the G7, with some 95 percent of tax revenue flowing straight to Whitehall. A desk in Manchester doesn't move a single percentage point of that. * Here's the uncomfortable bit for the Guardian. Its readers are exactly the people this project is pitched at, and its coverage of week one read like the brochure — convoy, quote, editorial, guest column by the man himself. It took an outlet with no stake in British politics to ask whether power actually moved or just got a second mailing address. * Honeymoons are real, and every new PM gets one. But a newspaper's job during the honeymoon is to be the one sober guest at the wedding. This week, that guest flew in from Doha.