‘You will be related to, ya posh twat!’ (Richard Pohle/AFP/Getty)
Comrade, this long march is one hell of a slog. I speak of Andy Burnham’s social-media campaign, a relentless process of ingratiation with the credulous commenters of TikTok. A week into Arr Andy’s run, I’m pooped. Reminds me of hitching home from Knebworth in ‘96.
At the time of writing, Andy Burnham has more than 350,000 followers on TikTok. Our new prime minister follows only three accounts: UK Labour, Labour North West and a middle-aged Nigerian woman named Bemi Orojuogun. Who she? Zoomers know her as “Bus Aunty” — a content creator who blew up in 2024 for posting silent, selfie-mode videos showcasing her love for London buses. It’s the sort of thing an older relative would put on Facebook for a handful of likes; over on TikTok the gimmick earned her 440,000 followers (more than the PM) who all fawn over her pure-hearted, just-naff-enough Boomerism. Off the back of her success Orojuogun has collaborated with brands and bodies cashing in on her Zoomer fandom — among them Burberry, TfL and UniDays.
Last week she linked up with Burnham himself. Over an inevitable audio clip of The Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”, Bus Aunty beams into the camera while Burnham edges, Nosferatu-like, towards her, clasping her shoulders in an ungainly embrace as a green double-decker cruises past, its sign reading “£2 bus fares” in homage to the new government’s flagship policy. One could not imagine a more bang-on totem for Burnham’s Britain: twee, memeable civicslop with a side-order of Morrissey. The video has more than half-a-million likes: Burnhammaxxing is working. And it’s horrifying.
Elsewhere on TikTok, Burnham presents to camera, summarising the “five things I’ve done in my first week as prime minister”. This video is aimed at distracted Zoomers with body-temperature IQs: like Cocomelon dancing fruits, the PM hypnotises us with bouncy subtitles and rousing zoom-ins as he runs through the days of the week. “Monday I launched a new national drive to end rough sleeping. On Tuesday I announced a tax cut on energy bills. On Wednesday, that’s ‘wed’, ‘nes’, ‘day’…” Except not the last one, obviously. But it may as well have been judging by the intellectual heft of the commenters who propose big-brain policies like: “Lower retirement age to free up jobs” and “make Freddos 10p again gaffer”.
In another David Brent-worthy video, Burnham shows a chinless RADA-reject around No. 10 North, a dreary grey boardroom seeded with memorabilia. There’s a gold Smiths disc (“I need to return that to Johnny Marr, actually! Haw haw”). A whiteboard doodle of the PM playing football against Liverpool (get oop mush!) and, in a sphincter-tightening “gaffe”, the camera lingers on a big screen showing YouTube search results for “how to make the perfect cup of English tea”. “Woah! Hang on,” says our unelected premier, slamming the laptop shut. “You don’t need to see that.” It’s dismal, but the troglodytes of TikTok snaffle up the scraps anyway. “Nice to see a prime minister with some personality it’s a breath of fresh air,” says one commenter. Another reads: “Seems a bit down to earth tbh Keir Starmer just came across as a silver spoon out of touch ponch [sic] that took everything super serious.” And perhaps this commenter, “Harley”, has a point: how daft to be forever banging on about gilts or government spending. Booooring! Let’s see that record collection. I love jellied eels, me — oh wait, wrong region. I mean, erm, shove some chips in a barm cake. What tax rises?
Welcome to the next three years: a neverending bad trip of Burnham sitting with his chancellor, John Healey, “blind-ranking pub snacks”. Crunching down on scampi fries, our PM says “it takes me back to the back room of the Cherry Tree”, wherever that is. But it doesn’t matter where it is, you prole: what matters is that it sounds right, it sounds like the sort of place where Mark E. Smith once shoved a pork pie up his nostril, or the cast of Coronation Street did pre-drinks before butt-chugging Vimto in the Hacienda loos. That’s Manchesterism for you: weapons-grade relatability, gobblicious reference-grabbing. You will be related to, ya posh twat! Yes, I’m the one deciding the future of this country — wanna hear my favourite Stone Roses B-side do ya? Mad fer it!
The problem is that TikTok has its own trapdoors — and you can just as easily look a fool online as on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. The satirical TikToker known as Zoë Bread, known for rattling low-level council officials with absurd trolling campaigns, may be just the right prick to burst the Burnham bubble. The 31-year-old found fame hiding her face behind a slice of bread while terrorising Manchester City Council over misplaced parking signage with her signature faux-naif flat affect. Lately she has turned her attention to a series of enormous warehouses despised by residents in the Astley Business Park in Wigan, entering a David and Goliath battle with the local authorities and the logistics firm Whistl, which runs the site.
No doubt sniffing the PR opportunity of engaging with Bread, a hyper-online “little guy” freedom fighter, Burnham appeared on the radio in January saying that he did not have a “formal role” in the dispute as mere mayor, but that there had to be “work to find a fair remedy”. Now that he’s in No. 10, Bread is holding his feet to the fire. Over a rapid-fire montage of the Prime Minister’s social-media campaigning in her latest video, she said: “I’m sure if we tag him enough we can make sure he sees this video in case he’s forgotten.” The commenters, all die-hard Breadheads, are keeping their eyes peeled. “This could be his first real test. We are all watching. Go Zoe,” reads one. Another makes explicit the craven irony of Burnhammaxxing: “I’ve seen Andy Burnham respond to so many TikToks. Weird he’s not picked up this one yet.”
That’s the thing about social media: at some point it becomes its own constituency with bespoke demands. If you’re a compulsive people-pleaser as Burnham seems to be — aides are said to complain about him always being late, forever waylaid by a thousand impromptu conversations with the general public — might this deter you from making unpopular calls, cashing in your political capital? And if you don’t make TikTokers’ dreams come true, what then?
Prime ministerial popularity contests are, for this reason, always suspect. And for normal voters, they are infuriating. Anyone who wants to be treated as an adult by our politicians must find the Burnham charm offensive frustrating. For this slopstream we can thank aides including 28-year-old Abby Tomlinson, the “brains behind the strategy”. Tomlinson apparently cut her teeth on whipping up the #milifandom, Ed Miliband’s erstwhile fan club (though who remembers anything about “Red Ed” bar the bacon sandwich and “hell yes I’m tuffenuff”?). Tonally, Tomlinson’s Burnham creation is what “Yookay” mastermind Drukpa Kunley has coined “Buzzballism”, a vibe with “the aesthetic sensibilities of a 19-year-old woman”. Named for the spherical corner-shop beverage clutched by your archetypal milquetoast-progressive sociology student, Buzzballism is everything Burnham’s campaign plumps for: diverse, trite and defensive with the ironical springboard of gay slang (“it’s giving intersectionality”). Kunley aligns it with “multicultural Britain twee” — Paddington, Benjamin Zephaniah and PinkPantheress. A cheeky sassy lovely-jubbly Blitz-spirit bangers-and-mash Bus Aunty paradise.
If Burnham wants to cosy up to this political caste, it is because its values are exceptionally nebulous and vibes-based. This is highly convenient for a premier in the opening salvos of an unwinnable battle to remain a popular British PM, because at least there’s hope that personality might distract, for a little while at least. Buzzballistas are highly susceptible to Britcore polyfilla — discussion of biscuits, bands and UKTV Gold, and the like — and this above anything is Burnham’s brand. These young women also tend to be the great influencers of Zoomer politics: their takes on social issues, often integrated within favourite formats like TikTok makeup tutorials, make their way to the apathetic normies who care more about general principles (kindness, equality, justice) than their downstream realities (prohibitions, taxation, laws). Buzzballism keeps things light: this is a comfy corner of the discourse in which our new PM seems determined to shelter while he can.
What’s not to like? Well, this. The problem with social media Burnhammaxxing is that it insults the intelligence of the British public, who, we hope, require more action and scrutiny than a few campy TikToks. The new PM’s team may think tickling Gen Z is win-win, but replicating every trend — childhood throwbacks, Love Island references, “morning run” POVs — may bite Burnham on the backside when it turns out that high-ranking politicians are definitionally unrelatable, remote and exceptional, and are drained of popularity as soon as the first inevitable banana peel appears. It’s no comfort for leaders to be “just like us” when they end up leading us off the edge of a cliff.
Nor will Burnham’s your-cool-uncle posturing save his rep among his young PIPster fans, who look likely to be whacked with big changes to their welfare qualification to fund the PM’s ambitious social-care plans. He used a weekend breakfast interview to signal that he would “get really serious as a country at getting welfare down” — probably including the 87,000 16 and 17-year-olds on PIP, many of them for mental health and neurodiversity — and kick away the crutch for the million-odd NEETs who are more likely than most to spend all day shut in their bedrooms, slobbering over his TikTok persona. If this is the demographic he hopes to court, can he really smite them in his first month in office? That’s the problem with all this relatability: soft-as-grease parents who want to be a toddler’s “friend” soon discover their little tyrant’s lack of respect when it’s time to tell them “no”.
Burnham is but a week in; we should give new prime ministers time to prove their mettle and allow them to be, sometimes, unpopular. Better that than a revolving door of hostages (or sausages, as Starmer might call them) to public opinion. But while giving him a fair shot, we should absolutely be suspicious of Burnhammaxxing. Politicians are not there to form cosy parasocial relationships with voters; at best they end up toothless totems of former optimism like Bernie Sanders, and at worst disgraced clowns like Boris Johnson. No, they are there to get on with the job: a twat in a T-shirt is a twat all the same.
