In 1971, a teenage boy from Cheetham Hill applied to work at Manchester town hall, fresh out of school.

Howard Bernstein was hired on an annual wage of around £500 into a role that bore little relation to his aspirations of public service.

“I saw working in the town hall as an interesting prospect,” he recollects.

“My first job was being given a big bowl of cups and being told to go and wash them. Which was a bit of a culture shock, because I’d never washed anything in my life.”

It’s probably safe to say that whoever handed him that bowl of cups could never in their wildest dreams have predicted what the 18-year-old office dogsbody would go on to achieve.

Forty-five years later, as he prepares to step down from the very top of the town hall ladder, here are just a few of the projects bearing Sir Howard Bernstein’s stamp: the regeneration of Hulme (‘one of the most important experiences of my life’); the Commonwealth Games; the success of Manchester Airport; the rebuild after 1996’s IRA bomb; the Metrolink; the Bridgewater Hall; devolution.

All of which – and more – have earned him a reputation as the most powerful civil servant outside of Whitehall and doubtless more powerful than a fair few there to boot. A wheeler, a dealer, a persuader.

He has been described more than once as Greater Manchester’s most powerful politician – only half-jokingly – thanks to his shrewdness and renowned ability to get things done.

And yet he remains an enigma to many: the man who rose from a humble start to become synonymous with Manchester’s millennial renaissance.

Howard Bernstein was born into a Jewish family in Cheetham Hill in 1953, the older of two brothers. His dad Maurice – whose parents had emigrated from Russia in the 1900s – sold raincoats on Cheetham Hill Road, above the laundrette opposite the library.

A Jewish upbringing - at a time when the war was still fresh in the collective memory - would come to shape his outlook, one which in turn would come to shape his home city.

“My father was always very... not political, but very socially aware,” he says.

“I think most Jewish families were in that era, from where they came from, and where their parents came from.

“Being in a community was fundamental. Treating people with respect, working across the community – that always was seen as being very, very important.”

Even as a teenager, Bernstein was interested in public service, particularly in economics.

It became apparent fairly quickly that he was not destined to wash pots.

“I lasted about three months in that job and they moved me to the legal department, where I became a junior there, doing the post and serving a whole range of lawyers. I always remember the assistant chief executive – I had to come in and make his tea in the morning. I got so fed up with him I decided I wasn’t going to make his tea.”

From there he moved into conveyancing: “One of the most boring jobs I have ever done in my life. They gave me work which I managed to do in about half an hour. They all thought it was incredibly complicated, but it wasn’t.”

It would be partly that streak of bravado – and impatience – that would spur him up the echelons of a town hall that in the 1970s looked very different. The women were only there to do the filing. The clerks all had ‘stiff collars’, he remembers, and everyone referred to each other by ‘Mr this or Mr that’.

By the time Graham Stringer came to lead the council in 1984, Bernstein was a junior officer. Stringer remembers being impressed, on taking over, by his energy in fighting Stansted Airport over unfair competition.

“It’s ironic that he ended up masterminding the takeover of Stansted,” he notes.

The pair, says Bernstein, became ‘soul mates’ in the years that followed. Manchester was about to reinvent itself.

“Manchester during the 1980s was a very different place,” says Bernstein. “We’d just lost our way. We didn’t really have an economic policy. We certainly didn’t work with the government. Then Graham came in and I think revolutionised – over time – the thinking.”

Between them they embarked on a different relationship with the private sector, effectively starting from scratch after years of underinvestment. It was in these years that plans were hatched for a whole host of regeneration projects: the Bridgewater Hall, the Metrolink, the Free Trade Hall, all radical approaches to business at the time that would eventually come to fruition in the 1990s.

Bernstein would also become central to forging a new relationship with Whitehall after – by 1987 – years of Labour’s political battles with Thatcher had ultimately led nowhere.

(Image: PA)

Manchester is now well-known for its working with the current government, an enigma many struggle to understand: a partnership between a virtually 100pc Labour council and a right-wing Treasury. But it started far earlier, a decade before the IRA hatched its plot to blow up the Arndale – and when George Osborne was still doing his O-Levels.

“You have got to work with the government, because of the entirely centralised way they deal with power,” says Bernstein.

“You could have the Liverpool approach, which in the 1980s was conflict. Or you could recognise that there were serious shortcomings in national policies and try to overcome them by persuading them and working with them where you can. I think we got there on that.”

Michael Heseltine was key. They would work together first on the regeneration of Hulme in 1991 and later on the post-IRA plans in 1996. Bernstein speaks of him as an ‘innovative thinker’ – and Hulme as one of his own proudest moments.

“I took Heseltine around Hulme last year. He was quite moved by it,” he says. “I think there’s something quite chastening about have turned around a failing neighbourhood, transforming people’s lives. I can remember when we were on our knees pleading of Asda to open a superstore there.

“Now it’s one of their best performers.”

At the same time Manchester was bidding for the 2000 Olympic games. That did not come off, but it did provide the city’s medal-busting velodrome. And visits to Barcelona – host of the 1992 games – taught Bernstein and Stringer not only how to bid for a major sporting event but how to persuade.

Those powers of persuasion would be quickly tested, weeks after new council leader Richard Leese took over from Stringer in 1996. As they were working up plans to reshape the city centre, someone else did it for them.

“I was at a wedding in North Manchester. I heard the bomb,” says Bernstein of June 15, 1996.

“There was shock. It was appalling, really.

“It was like those eerie films from the 60s of what a nuclear bomb might look like, the radios still playing in hairdressing salons, no-one around in the entire city.

“I thought: ‘Wow’. This is going to take some herculean effort to get this back together. I was angry and upset.”

The complexities of the rebuild were the ‘biggest intellectual challenge’ he has ever faced, he says. Securing the money – nearly £100m famously agreed by Michael Heseltine in the time it took for Bernstein and Leese to get a taxi from his Westminster office to Euston station – was the easy bit. The struggle would be in assembling all the different bits of land from different owners.

How did he – does he – persuade people to do things they don’t initially want to do?

“You get them to focus on the bigger picture. I put the city first. I make clear if you don’t want to do it, make way for somebody who does,” he says.

His determination and cajoling, a mixture of hard and soft power, would eventually see the Arndale taken over by the Prudential, who were sympathetic to the plans – removing a key barrier to the rebuild.

The Commonwealth Games would not be plain sailing, either. After 9/11 the event’s security bill shot up overnight, leaving them with a £100m black hole.

“We were in deep sh*t, if I’m being frank,” he says. The council had to go ‘cap in hand’ to the Blair government, but with the help of friendly ministers – including Ian McCartney – and more cajoling they were given the cash and sent on their way. The games remain one of his proudest moments to this day, and that of Sir Richard Leese.

“Without Manchester and the Commonwealth Games there would never have been a London Olympics,” notes Bernstein.

But it was a tough time, he says, ‘probably the most difficult two years of my life’. In the year leading up to it, Bernstein lost both his parents. They would never see him get his knighthood in 2003.

“That is a major regret of my life that mum and dad weren’t here to see that,” he admits.

“But having said that, being made president of Manchester City would have made them even prouder.”

His working relationship with his beloved club and its latterly Middle Eastern owners would pay dividends, too.

In the late 1990s, well before the games took place, he ensured the Blues would provide a sustainable future for what would initially be known as the City of Manchester stadium. But it went further than that - City's commitment to the area would start with the regeneration of Eastlands and go on to include a £1bn investment in housing for north and east Manchester over the next decade.

It was the kind of deal not many council chief executives probably spend their time planning.

Inevitably, not everything has gone right in the last 45 years. Although he is absolutely adamant he has no regrets professionally, ask him about the congestion charge and he tussles with the question.

“Intellectually, it was right. We should never have gone to the referendum. It was a political failure.

“It was exactly the right strategy. Do I regret it? I gave so much to that... Was it a mistake? Yes, because it was a classic example of focusing on the intellectual stuff rather than facing up to the day to day political and practical implications.”

And he still thinks the BBC should have moved to Manchester, not Salford.

“I think it could have been better. I’m not saying it’s not great where it is now, but I think a city centre location would have been the best location.”

Nevertheless, he points out, Manchester’s Plan B – the Sharp Project in Newton Heath – has been phenomenally successful.

Criticism has nevertheless been levelled at Manchester’s performance in areas outside of the city’s high profile regeneration and capital projects. In 2014 its children’s services received a damning Ofsted inspection, a failure that perhaps in other cities would have tarnished the chief executive’s reputation more than it has done Bernstein’s. At the time of writing, inspectors were due back in any day.

Is this, perhaps, a regret?

“No. I think we are on an improvement journey,” he says, adding that Ofsted’s report was a criticism not only of the council but other public child protection services such as health and police.

“I’m very confident in the long term future.”

Perhaps one of the defining characteristics of Bernstein’s career has been the ability to get back up again, to find a way through, particularly to find a Plan B.

Council leader Sir Richard Leese – whose partnership with Bernstein since he was made chief executive in 1998 is unrivalled anywhere in government – admits there has to be more to his success than hard work. Again, it comes down to the art of persuasion.

“It’s that ability to bring people together and come out with a shared plan. He is always described as the deal-maker – and it’s the ability to talk to a whole range of people and come out with a shared objective. Although the outcomes appear dramatic, getting there is generally very prosaic.”

And then, always, it’s on to the next thing.

“People who know me understand I never look backwards,” says Bernstein. “I only ever look forwards. You are only as good as your last failure.”

That constant drive forwards is borne, he admits, of obsessiveness.

“I’m pretty driven. If an email goes unanswered for half an hour they probably think ‘he’s lost his focus’. I am obsessive.

“If somebody annoys me it takes me three hours to get over it. That’s as much the case today as it was 20 years ago. Sometimes I just don’t understand why people don’t agree with me.”

That enduring impatience is underpinned by the fierce, visceral pride in a home city that shares many of his characteristics: canniness, ambition, that streak of bravado. And none of that is likely to diminish once he is no longer in the town hall.

Standing down from the council in no way constitutes a retirement, he insists - and neither his wife Vanessa, nor his two children and three step-children, now expect him to 'sit about the house'. But Manchester is still the only place he would consider working.

“It’s my city. I’ve always been a proud Manc. I’ve always regarded this place as the most cosmopolitan, the most successful city about.

“For a Jewish guy to become chief executive of the city council and never once in his entire career experience any kind of racism or prejudice – I find that quite remarkable. I think that speaks a lot about this city.

“I could never do another job in another place because it would never, ever have the same... I could never, ever create the same commitment.

“If you chopped off people’s hands here they’d have Manchester through it. I think people here are different.”