A recent YouGov poll showed that 34% of Britons now believe Manchester has the best claim to be Britain’s second city. Only 30% ascribe that status to Birmingham, even though it has the second largest population after London. Does it matter? Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast all have some longstanding claim to a special political status, but Birmingham and Manchester are the products of relatively recent industrial growth. The former was not even formally defined as a city until 1889.

Notions of second-citydom owe more to culture than to demography. Significantly, young people are particularly likely to define Manchester as the second city. It seems cool, whereas Birmingham is considered naff. Oasis, one of Manchester’s premier cultural exports, attracted more than two million fans to its reunion shows last year. It’s hard to imagine Duran Duran, formed in Birmingham, exhibiting the same pull.

Cultural divisions have, in recent years, acquired a political edge. Manchester is the capital city of a certain kind of Leftism. Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester who is currently vying to return to Parliament and challenge for Labour leadership, has labelled his own political philosophy as “Manchesterism”. By contrast, as it tried to rebrand itself after the Brexit referendum, the Conservative Party seized on Birmingham as a symbol of provincial authenticity that might be pitted against the alleged cosmopolitanism of London. It was in Birmingham that Theresa May made her notorious speech of 2016: “If you believe you are citizens of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”

There is, though, an irony in all this. Far from being a bastion of unchanging values, Birmingham has been marked by change, especially through mass migration. The city was associated with working-class conservatism in the days when the Chamberlain dynasty was at the height of its power, but those days ended in 1945 when Labour took the city under Clement Attlee’s massive majority. In recent years, the Labour Party has continued to win the great majority of constituencies in the city, despite a disastrous performance at this month’s local elections and Reform UK’s growing presence.

One advantage of Birmingham’s uncool status is that those who grow up there learn to be indifferent to fashionable opinion, and no politician epitomises this quality more than the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who is the MP for Birmingham Ladywood. This was once the constituency of Neville Chamberlain, but Mahmood is far more like the original Chamberlain: Neville’s father, Joseph. Like him, she is an energetic outsider who seems to want to shake the establishment rather than join it. She attracts grudging admiration, and this admiration derives from character and style as much as association with a particular policy, just like Joseph Chamberlain. Winston Churchill said that Chamberlain “made the weather” of British politics. One wonders whether, after years of bobbing around on the waves of opinion polls and sheltering under the umbrella of focus groups, the Labour Party might finally find a woman who will make the political weather.

Despite the shift in the public’s view, Birmingham still has a claim to be Britain’s second city. Even if pop culture is currently on the side of Manchester, Birmingham maintains a profound impact on British life, not least through politics. It can once again be a bellwether for the country’s future, just as it has been in the past.