Andy Burnham is having a good time. I can’t remember the last time a prime minister (or indeed any high-profile British politician) actually looked as though they were enjoying what they were doing. I saw a clip the other day in which Burnham remembered arguing with his dad about the point of an English degree, quoted poetry and discussed the importance of mastering words. It was almost enough to make you feel sorry for Keir Starmer. In his entire time as leader of the Labour party and then the head of the government, Starmer delivered not a single unprocessed moment. No natural sentiment escaped the carapace. And here is his successor, practically oozing it.
It matters. It’s good and healthy to have a leader who looks as though they want to be where they are. Whose approach isn’t that of a scold or a receiver who has taken control of the premises, or someone whose sole aim is to tenaciously clamber up to the top job and hold on for dear life.
I hadn’t fully realised, until Starmer cleared off, how much his premiership gave off the sense that the public were doing a bad job. That it was somehow their fault Starmer wasn’t as popular as he thought he should have been. As though it were the public’s job to deliver stable government and stop being so restive and fickle; stop having feelings and opinions on your prime minister that show up in the polling. Poor Starmer, some said, smashed fatally against the rocks by the waves of the roiling, insentient electorate of an ungovernable country.
Burnham’s approach restores the basic principle, lost for so long, that you have to woo people and establish a connection. Over the past two weeks, it looks as though it has been easier to get a reply from his X account than for business executives to establish contact with his team. The videos he is posting on social media are, by any measure, a remarkable departure from the old way of doing things. They collectively have a voice, an almost salesman-like pitch. They say “just hear me out”. If anything, Burnham’s posts on everything from the importance of learning practical skills to ranking pub snacks show how late British politics is to the game. My first sense of it all wasn’t of how revolutionary it was, but why on earth it took so long.
The answer, of course, is that no one had the taste for it. The personalities of our last few prime ministers were not, to put it mildly, those of digital natives. Their styles were “cop”, “sidekick bully” and “Liz Truss”, rather than public-facing politicians keen to communicate via the platforms they actually use. Burnham’s performances may sometimes be perilously close to shtick, but he has an undeniable flair and energy for the sort of modern direct-to-camera address that could give him an edge in a media environment where the parameters have for too long been set by an overwhelmingly rightwing traditional media.
Burnham knows all of this. A little too much, perhaps. The bar is in hell and so is the discourse. It takes very little to break through the grim record of the past few years and outdo stale TV and radio formats. It would be easy enough to post some good, sharp stuff on your own social media and call it a day. And if it continues that way – that is, an approach to communication which does not tackle the positions that made the atmosphere so fetid in the first place – then it will all soon become background noise, and then an irritant.
Because digital political success is not just about being good on camera. Burnham’s style has been compared with that of the obvious originator of the model, Zohran Mamdani. But Mamdani shows that having a flair for direct communication is only the first stage, the part where you get people on board. (His videos speaking in different languages during the election campaign were gold.) You then have to keep at it and show you are new in both style and practice. That you are a strong advocate for people. And, most importantly, that you are a cheerful, unflappable threat to their enemies. “When I ran for mayor, I said I was gonna tax the rich,” Mamdani says in a recent video. Then he comes up close, knocks the camera. “Well, today we’re taxing the rich.” His pied-à-terre tax, he told New Yorkers, will be levied on properties like the one he’s standing under, a penthouse belonging to the hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin.
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Burnham has already done some tangible good by starting out with policies focused on people’s pockets – on bills and bus fares and VAT relief – and with an evocative drive to devolve power from London. He promises “a new political model and a new economic model”. Them’s fighting words. Or should be. But his narrative lacks a clear articulation of what actually separates the needy from the predatory. Yes, at this point it is revolutionary just to name the problems, let alone do anything about them. But it will not be enough.
Burnham seems satisfied with figuring out what he can get away with without that epic fight; with broadly gesturing to how bad Thatcherism and neoliberalism are, but not actually slaying them. He won’t target the under-taxed wealthy because he doesn’t want to “create new divisions and pitch people one against another”. He is willing to keep in place the punitive immigration regime of the previous administration (while valorising the foreign workers who care for his father). And while it’s early days on foreign policy, things look to be business as usual, suggesting Burnham has little appetite for resetting international relations in a period of historic flux. Even though he apologised for Labour’s stance on Gaza, he continues the previous government’s permission for the US to use some UK bases for air strikes on Iran, and is entertaining, at least according to Trump, friendly discussions on “North Sea Oil, Trade, the Military Alliance, Demining of the Hormuz Strait”. There looks to be no necessary reckoning afoot with the US’s calamitous actions in the Middle East.
First you change the political culture, then you can change the political model. That culture is style and presentation and some policy, yes, but to really capture lightning in a bottle, you must show that intellectual and moral barriers are being redrawn. If there is any lesson to be gleaned from our age of short-lived prime ministers, it is that all ostensible advantages – landslides, huge polling leads, mandates to deliver Brexit – dissolve under the harsh light of insincerity born from timidity. Authenticity comes from congruence. Burnham might be able to get away with a lot of the effect and some of the substance for a while, but he will only be the revolutionary prime minister he promises he is – people will only believe that he is – if he breaks something other than the fourth wall.
