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Roughly this time last week, representatives of Manchester Pride touched down in Barcelona. They were there to learn if they had won the right to host EuroPride, a hugely popular weeks-long event that is prized by cities across the continent.
Manchester was expected to win and, frankly, it needed to. For years, mostly unbeknownst to the public, the event’s finances had been dwindling. According to one former staff member, payment plans had to be set up in the aftermath of last year’s Pride to pay back most non-local, non-independent artists who had performed at the event.
After this year’s Pride, things were looking even worse. By the time the delegation arrived in Barcelona, they already had a long list of angry artists and contractors demanding payment for their work. The issue was: there wasn’t any money. Manchester Pride was on the brink.
For Manchester Pride’s chief executive Mark Fletcher, winning EuroPride had become a last roll of the dice. According to people involved in talks over Pride’s future, it was the one thing keeping the wolves from the door, ensuring that Manchester City Council might continue to financially support his ailing organisation.
Fletcher said that EuroPride in Manchester “would be a bold, unapologetic display of LGBTQIA joy, creativity, and resilience”. Everyone had heard stories about the famous Europride in Madrid in 2017, which attracted an astonishing 2.5 million visitors, and Manchester’s bid team were thinking big.
Mark Fletcher (centre) at the EuroPride announcement in Barcelona. Photo: EuroPride.
There were plans for a spectacular opening ceremony in a specially constructed staging area in Albert Square, which would also host performances from “global pop icons”. On the more serious side, the event would include a Human Rights and Health Conference hosted in Manchester Central, bringing together activists and academics from around the world.
The winner was announced in front of a room packed with media and the teams from the two shortlisted bids. “You cannot imagine how big the tension is for them right now,” said the announcer on stage.
But the Manchester Pride team felt confident. They were up against Limerick and Clare, two mostly rural counties on the west coast of Ireland. Who could bet against one of Europe’s favourite party cities, a city with a rich history of gay rights activism?
“I can now announce… that the Europride 2028, will be… for the first time, on the island of Ireland…”
Wild applause rang out in the room, pink flags waved and the bid members from Limerick and Clare hugged and jumped in the air. The judges had chosen them by a healthy margin. They looked taken aback when they took to the stage, several of them visibly crying.
Fletcher and his Manchester team — sitting a couple of rows behind their Irish counterparts — were shocked. They clapped politely as the news sunk in.
“To be honest, I think they hedged all their bets on it,” says another ex-staffer. “Then it all came crashing down.”
A new broom
Four days after the announcement in Barcelona, The Mill broke the news that Manchester Pride had run out of money and was expected to enter administration. Artists who performed at August’s Pride events were publicly complaining that they still hadn’t been paid.
Bill Deeker, who put on the pyrotechnics show for Pride’s vigil this year, which pays homage to all those who have lost their lives to HIV, told us he’s owed £2500 but has now all but written the money off — understanding that others are owed even more than he is.
The BBC soon reported similar problems, including one sole trader called Chris O’Connor, who worked backstage at Pride and is taking the organisers to the small claims court to recover £2050 he says he is owed. The past 48 hours have seen an outpouring of anger and concern about the future of one of the city’s most popular events.
So how did Manchester Pride — one of the biggest Pride events in the country — reach this point? It may be too early to tell the full story: the organisation’s board has not responded to our requests for comment in the past couple of days, nor agreed to give us an interview, and its accounts for 2024 aren’t due to be filed until December, meaning that we only have a partial view of Pride’s collapsing finances.
A Corrie float at the 2016 Pride. Photo: Ardfern via Creative Commons.
At this point, no one who was closely involved is willing to speak on the record. But speaking to former staff members, recent performers and others with close knowledge of the situation provides some clues about what has gone wrong. The sources tell a story of an organisation that pushed the limits in order to grow Manchester Pride in revenue and stature, attracting major commercial partners and harsh criticism in equal measure. Crucially, they say that coming into 2025, Pride’s leadership took two big gambles — a massive Mardi Gras party at Mayfield Depot and the bid for EuroPride. Neither of them came off.
For the past decade, the man steering the ship has been Fletcher, an upbeat, charismatic man who grew up in south Manchester and has spoken about being racially abused at a Manchester Pride event in the past, something that he says drove him to make the event more welcoming and inclusive. He has told interviewers on podcasts that he felt Pride’s events felt “static” before he took over as CEO in 2015, and that the organisation needed to innovate.
Manchester Pride Ltd is a charity that is also registered as a company, which is typical for large charities, but Fletcher wasn’t a typical charity boss. His background was highly commercial: selling ads for newspapers and radio stations, a job that attracts competitive, hard-charging types. He got to know Manchester Pride because they were one of his advertising clients, and he later worked for them as a commercial sponsorship consultant, advising them on how to raise more money from the private sector.
‘We were absolutely hated’
When Fletcher took over as CEO, Pride started to boom. Over the four years leading up to the pandemic, annual income more than doubled from £1.6m to £3.9m, despite only having a handful of employees, and in all of those years the charity more or less broke even.
Staff sensed that Fletcher’s competitive instincts were driving him on, and noted how often he would compare Manchester Pride to its larger counterparts in London and Brighton. “I think it became really competitive,” one former staff member told The Mill. She recalls Fletcher’s response when Kylie Minogue was booked for Brighton Pride in 2019. “It was: ‘We don’t want Kylie. We’re going to get someone bigger’”.
That year Manchester Pride welcomed the global pop superstar Ariana Grande to sing at the new MCR Pride Live concert series, which accompanied the usual festivities on Canal Street. In 2019, overall artist fees and expenses rose to nearly £600,000, more than twice the previous year.
A Pride performer at this year’s event. Photo: @manchesterpride on X.
The big name acts helped to bolster Pride’s reputation as a fun, glitzy festival rather than a heavily political event focusing on protest, making it easier to sell to big companies worried about “brand safety”. Fletcher, the salesman turned CEO, spoke a language that marketing departments could understand, culminating in a major coup in early 2020: Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Holidays had signed up to be the headline sponsor for the next three years.
“I am honoured to be partnering with an organisation that is so committed to placing diversity and equality at the heart of everything it does,” Fletcher was quoted saying. “I am confident that we will work together over the next three years to drive real change both here in Manchester and throughout the world.”
But the next three years would bring nothing but trouble. In 2020, the August event had to be cancelled because of Covid-19, causing Pride’s income to fall almost £3.5m from the previous year. The charity’s headcount had now risen to 11, which contributed to a loss of almost half a million pounds.
Somehow, 2021 was even more disastrous. A bombshell BBC story revealed that Pride would no longer be supporting two charities that had been central to its mission for many years: the LGBT Foundation who supported a scheme to distribute free condoms and lubricant to promote safer sex, and George House Trust, who support people living with HIV.
Fletcher said the cuts were “tough decisions” he had to make coming out of the pandemic, but the story caused fury. Suddenly, the decision to spend huge sums on major pop stars looked like an organisation that had veered far from its fundraising roots, when typical events included a jumble sale outside a Gay Village pub. In the year Grande headlined, Pride donated just 3% of its vast new revenue to charity, around a fifth of what it spent on artists.
Mark Fletcher giving an interview in 2020. Screenshot: Youtube.
More than a thousand people marched through Manchester city centre in protest, and many contrasted the decision to cut funds with the fact Fletcher himself was earning a salary of around £100,000, having recently secured a £20,000 pay rise.
One former staff member recalls having to run the company’s social media channels in the aftermath of the story. “It was constant vitriol — as though we were absolutely hated.” Another recalls people turning up outside Pride’s offices taking pictures.
Debates about Pride events becoming too corporate are familiar in cities around the world, but the notion that Manchester’s version has set itself up for the wrong audience in recent years has lingered. “I just think it’s a bit sad when it’s very obvious it’s a money grab and doesn’t feel like it’s what Pride is about,” a twenty-something attendee of the festival called Neen told The Mill last year. “To me, Manchester Pride seems to be about straight girls going out on a sesh, getting drunk and coked up with their gay mates.”
Blame game
Fletcher became a lightning rod for the criticism of Pride, his £100,000 salary — at the high end for a charity of its size, but by no means unheard of —transforming into a meme that cropped up endlessly in angry tweets and Instagram posts.
Several people The Mill spoke to for this piece say Fletcher has become a scapegoat, with one person who worked with him suggesting that much of the criticism is motivated by racism. To his defenders, he is a highly competent operator who has achieved great things in difficult circumstances, putting on an extremely popular event that caters to attendees with divergent tastes and expectations. They note that Pride events around the world have suffered shortfalls in revenues in the past few years, as the political mood has shifted right and companies have cut back on diversity initiatives.
And what about the charity’s board of trustees, who are supposed to offer oversight of the charity? “He [Fletcher] has his faults, but personally I think the board has real questions to answer for how its got to this stage,” says one city official who has worked with Pride extensively.
Sir Ian McKellen attends Pride in 2010. Photo: Pete Birkinshaw via Creative Commons.
The accounts covering 2023 show a loss of £467,000 almost as much as the charity lost in the pandemic year of 2020, leaving negative funds of £356,000, the worst cash position in Fletcher’s decade in charge. We haven’t managed to speak to Fletcher or member of the board who were in place during this period, so we don’t know what was going wrong in 2023. But we do know that the board was concerned.
A note to the accounts says that a review will be undertaken in 2024 “to safeguard the sustainability of Manchester Pride’s financial model.” The board seems to have been reassured by financial results and forecasts that suggested the charity had turned the tide and returned to the black in 2024 and would make a surplus in 2025 too.
How robust were those numbers? And how carefully did the board check them? We don’t know. But the accounts note that after making “appropriate enquiries” the trustees were now confident the charity would have the funds to continue as a going concern.
In recent months, public filings at Companies House show the board has been in a state of upheaval. Three new directors were appointed on 6 August, two of whom resigned after about a month.
The VIP floor
Whatever responsibility the board should bear, there are plenty of people who point the finger at Fletcher, including former colleagues of his. After our story revealing Pride’s predicament on Thursday, a former staff member sent us a message on Instagram within hours. “I can say with confidence that the board isn’t solely to blame,” they wrote. “The real issue lies with the CEO.”
This person — who we later interviewed on the phone — cited Fletcher’s “reckless spending decisions” that pushed the charity towards calamity. They say there were concerns about Pride’s spending on things like lavish brunches and artists that Fletcher’s team felt stretched the budget unnecessarily.
They recall the frantic final days of preparation before the festival weekend in what they believe to be 2023, at which point they say the charity’s finances were already precarious. According to them, with days to spare before the festival, Fletcher had an issue: he didn’t like the floor in the VIP area. The floor was admittedly basic: the concrete surface of the car park where the area had been set up. At the expense of several thousands of pounds, a new floor, with artificial grass, had to be installed at the last minute.
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“We were completely on our arse and hadn’t recovered from Covid,” the former staff member says. “And he’d be swanning around saying: ‘fix this, make it happen’”.
Neither Fletcher nor Pride responded to our requests for comment yesterday about the VIP floor incident, or the other key claims in this piece.
Another former Pride staff member is more sympathetic to Fletcher’s approach, pointing out that he has “created one of the biggest Pride events in all of Europe”. Nonetheless, they admit there was a dissonance between Fletcher’s lofty ambitions for the event, always wanting bigger and better artists in order to compete with the other major UK Prides, and the fact that the team felt some staff members were poorly paid.
Two bad bets
When asked to identify the final straw for Manchester Pride’s finances, most of the people we’ve spoken to for this story point to Mardi Gras, a brand-new addition this year. Described as “high-energy, high-glam, high-queer extravaganza” over two days at the Mayfield Depot (a massive warehouse behind Piccadilly, usually reserved for large-scale clubbing events) and the adjacent Freight Island, well outside the traditional festival area, the event featured big name pop stars like Leigh-Anne, Olly Alexander and Nelly Furtado.
Some were perplexed when they heard about Mardi Gras. After the outcry in 2021, Pride commissioned a major consultation to reset its relationship with Manchester’s LGBT communities, taking feedback from thousands of Mancunians. The consultation picked up a perception that the big MCR Pride Live concerts had attracted “a cisgender heterosexual audience”, and the music festival was scrapped in 2022 and Pride weekend returned to being focused on the Gay Village.
Tulia performs at the Mardi Gras event. Photo: @manchesterpride on X.
Did Pride need to pull off a major ticketed event in order to recover its financial position? Or was this just a return to Fletcher’s true vision: big, glamorous and marketable?
Whatever the reason, it didn’t work. Tickets were expensive and attendees reported sparse crowds for many of the acts. “They were charging like 78 quid for a ticket and obviously no one bought it so it was dead throughout the weekend,” recalls Willow Stone, who performed at Pride and is still owed £300. “I think they just tried to bite off more than they can chew.”
A former staff member claims that one of her friends was booked to DJ at the Depot and texted midway through her performance to say that only four people had turned up to her set. A number of videos were shared on TikTok mocking the low attendance.
The other thing that most of our sources can agree on is that EuroPride was the final way out. By the time the announcement was made in Barcelona last weekend, artists and suppliers were growing increasingly irate about not having their bills paid. According to people involved in key discussions, Fletcher believed that EuroPride was his trump card: the thing that could tip the council into shoring up his balance sheet.
Manchester Pride presented itself as an organisation in rude health, providing a breakdown of its finances that showed surpluses in the three years up to 2023. But these numbers didn’t tell the full story: they were the financials for the charity’s trading subsidiary Manchester Pride Events Ltd, rather than the main organisation.
It’s unclear how costs and revenues are distributed across the charity and its subsidiary, but the numbers appear to veer around wildly from year to year, with administrative expenses suddenly dropping by more than £300,000 in 2023, just in time to create a surplus of almost £300,000. That’s a year, remember, when the charity’s accounts (which are done on a consolidated basis, meaning that they include the events subsidiary) show a loss of close to £400,000.
Had Manchester won its EuroPride bid, it expected to receive £1.5m in council and GMCA grants over the next few years to put on the event. But that money will now never come. After the disappointment in Barcelona, The Mill understands that Fletcher offered his resignation as CEO, and despite several opportunities to comment, the charity’s board has not confirmed whether he is still in post.
“We recognise that there has been a period of silence from us, whilst we have taken legal and financial advice,” the board said in a statement on Thursday. “We understand the frustration this has caused and the impact this has. Our intention is to ensure that we speak with honesty, clarity, and care as we move forward. Manchester Pride is currently in the process of determining the best way forward with our legal and financial advisers.”
The musicians, artists and suppliers who are unpaid are waiting anxiously to find out whether there is any money left in the pot for them. The statement says they can expect “additional communications” by this coming Wednesday.
Thoughts are already turning to how next year’s Pride can be organised. Council leader Bev Craig is said to be adamant that the city can host an event with or without the organisation that has spent the past decade ratcheting up a once-modest celebration into something bigger, flashier, grander — and which now faces the prospect of collapsing into administration.
Unless, of course, Mark Fletcher has one final rabbit to pull out of his hat.
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