GRWM… to be Prime Minister

There’s a joke about how any time someone says they ‘read’ something recently, what they mean is that they watched a TikTok about it.

Recently, I read about a young man who’d been suffering from brain cancer and was making a direct plea to the Prime Minister to introduce a new tsar to lead better practice in this area. The top comment was from none other than Andy Burnham, thanking him for his bravery and inviting him to contact the team to discuss. It’s similarly become a meme in New York that you can summon the mayor, Mamdani, to fix anything just by tagging him.

There is a lot to be said for establishing this kind of connection. Bypassing the journalists, with their preset notions and insistence on issues you convince yourself 'not everyone cares about', can help you connect with a group of voters who are far removed from politics and can provide quick wins from a low base of expectation. You lower the unit of political delivery from the national level to the local Clean Streets team, and in doing so take back apparent control of the levers of power.

I always found there was a similar argument at the heart of ‘levelling up’: a politician cannot stand in front of a constituent and tell them usefully that GDP is 0.8% higher than last year. And don’t let’s get into GDP per capita. But an MP or minister can point to a bypass that saves the commuter 20 minutes a day.

Burnham is the UK’s first social media-native Prime Minister. May, Truss, Sunak, even Johnson were the subjects of the joke but never really in on it. Cameron pushed the boundary when Twitter was still a blue bird and hashtags, but when he returned as Foreign Secretary it was with the remote polish of the six-strong digi team. Sir Keir took to social media with all the poise of a labrador being pulled under the waves by a riptide.

Compare this with today. You cannot doomscroll on X or TikTok or Instagram without finding the First Lord of the Treasury, 😂-ing and 👍🏻-ing his way through problems and suggestions big and small.

Small, ultimately, being the operative word.

Since his elevation – it can hardly be called election – six weeks ago, the focus has been on everyday gripes: grubby shopfronts or the never-ending nature of the Dreams half-price sale. Even nods to larger-scale intervention, like interim relief on energy costs or for hospitality venues, are delivered with a hand waving away an explanation of any broader strategy.

I have spoken with one person who sees it as the competent project manager approach: you cannot deliver everything, or indeed anything significant, in six weeks, but you can fish some scraps out of the suggestions box and try to repair the toaster in the break room.

It’s too soon to judge whether it is the right approach but, to me, it makes sense. Nobody is listening over the summer. The polls have so far responded well to his approach and Downing Street will hope the small wins buy credit to spend on a bigger vision to outline in the autumn, with the return of Parliament and party conference season.

That is a best-case situation. The difficulty is not simply that the focus is on small things but that you get to define the field on which you are playing. High streets are dying, so you fix the signage. The train network is failing, so you intervene over a delayed service. It would be churlish to say that this is not trying to improve things, but equally it is not necessarily getting to the main issue. It validates the concern that many had before this contest: that rather than rising to the occasion, the occasion would be shrunk to a mayoral scale.

There is a broader problem with our politics here. We have created a world in which politicians are expected personally to mow every verge and complain about every delayed train. Burnham is unusually well suited to that world, but there is a danger in confusing responsiveness with control. The levers look closer because the problems being presented are ones on which they can actually be pulled.

And several moments have risked seeing the Prime Minister come unstuck when he has not been able to define the field so neatly. His response to closer ties with Europe, his wavering about small boats on the cliffs of Dover, his non-reprimand of Chris Bryant for refusing to commit to Northern Ireland remaining in the United Kingdom all speak to an inability, more than an unwillingness, to confront serious issues.

That is ultimately the test of the strategy. Fixing the small things can create the impression that government works and, if Downing Street is right, build political credit for something bigger. But at some point that credit has to be spent.

There is a final risk here which I think Mamdani does not face to quite the same extent. For all the irreverence of American politics, there is a degree of institutional status and respect afforded to the office of mayor, and certainly of President. Brits, meanwhile, disdain and resent the political class. By putting so few filters between himself and the public, Burnham gets all the benefit of appearing unusually accessible when the tide is with him. He may also find himself rather more exposed when it turns.

As we await the vision of the autumn, I can’t help but be put in mind of the parallel between Burnham’s approach so far and Bill Bratton’s broken-windows theory: if you take the small things seriously, it creates an atmosphere of lawfulness and order that discourages the greater ills.

Just make sure, when you’re replacing the panes, that you have a plan for the people throwing the stones.