At what point, during Team Burnham’s preparations for government, did the overture to ‘Bus Aunty’ go out? Was she contacted before or after the editor of the Observer, one wonders? Was she approached before they had chosen a policing minister? Was she more important to win over than Al Carns?
If you don’t know who ‘Bus Aunty’ is, that’s a shame, because Andy Burnham doesn’t care. He isn’t trying to talk to you. You, evidently, are a reader. You read pieces in The Spectator. Perhaps you listen to Times Radio, or even peruse our morning newsletter. Well, Andy Burnham’s done with all that. A ‘yes’ from Bus Aunty (real name: Bemi Orojuogun; cause of fame: standing in front of buses on TikTok) means more to the new governing style than a supportive column from Polly Toynbee ever will.
A lot of excitement has resulted from the fact of Andy Burnham having a degree in English literature. In the New Statesman, Tanjil Rashid wrote that Burnham had a ‘more literary style of politics’ than Keir Starmer. Burnham may have a private interest in Tony Harrison, and a genuinely individual choice of favourite Larkin poem (‘Love Songs in Age’). But journalists, perhaps wishing to validate or show off their humanities degrees, place too much weight on a university course decision that Burnham made at 18. Because Andy Burnham’s governing style is not remotely that of a literate prime minister. In fact, he’s our most post-literate prime minister yet.
Team Burnham are having more success with their outreach to influencers than any government of the media age. Is it too much to say that the sway of these influencers matches that of a Hurst, or a Beaverbrook? Certainly, never again will the 8.10 performance on the Today programme matter more than a Reel done right.
Can you blame him? In a sense, his team are accurately feeling the shift in our culture. Columnists now regularly cite Walter Ong, who argued for the supremacy of literary culture over the oral one that preceded it. Ong said that a culture of writing produced logical argument and more thorough reasoning, in contrast to the more aggressive and fleeting culture of orality.
But with Burnham, we should be so lucky to even have an oral culture. What we have instead is something even more shallow: a purely visual culture. Politics, Team Burnham understands, is to be consumed passively, like second-hand smoke. Videos of Andy Burnham’s DJ sets will provoke kind comments in pub gardens. You’re not meant to be impressed by Louise Haigh’s performance on Laura Kuenssberg: you’re just meant to see a TikTok of Burnham and Bus Aunty as you brush your teeth, before you move on to another video of a hydraulic press crushing a watermelon. Dominic Cummings once said that to understand how swing voters watch the news, watch with the volume turned off. Now, even tuning into the televised news seems like an anachronism: TikTok is much easier.
And look, when I watched John Healey and Andy Burnham rank their favourite pub snacks, I was charmed! They seemed as if they genuinely like pork scratchings, whereas Keir Starmer literally wouldn’t eat them if his aides begged him to. It’s a low bar.
Of course, I risk a diagnosis of Burnham Derangement Syndrome. Politics largely ceased to be literate a while ago. New Labour’s introduction of ‘stakeholder relations’ into our governing class was horrific, but by the time we had Theresa May’s ‘red, white and blue Brexit’, few could say that the Conservatives were doing Disraeli proud in comparison.
Yet the trend is downward and we should resist it, despite the frumpiness of doing so. Defending the written word, as writers like James Marriott have done, carries with it the risk of seeming po-faced, reactionary or, the ultimate sin, snobbish. Some, like the writer Thomas Peermohamed Lambert, have sneered at the increasingly common ‘“No-One Can Read Any More” essay’, while the journalist Alastair Benn has said that books can be used to ‘avoid the messiness of real human encounters’. Hardcore aesthetes, Andrei Tarkovsky fans perhaps, might think that a visual culture is more profound.
The post-literate style of politics makes it easier to evade coherence
But the post-literate style of politics has two principal deficiencies. The first is that it is easier to evade coherence. It is easier for policy detail to be brushed over. If Burnham were to unveil train nationalisation alongside Francis Bourgeois, or announce that football fans can drink in the stands alongside Angryginge, that would get more clicks, but less examination. It would be a kind of sugar rush politics, and the incoherence would be revealed with time.
The second problem is that journalists have less power to scrutinise politicians this way, since officials can just put the content they’re happy with, rather than subject their ministers to the unpredictability of an interview. Journalists being ignored may not make the public weep, but we should care about it regardless. No matter how grating, how interrupting the interview style of your least favourite journalist may be, they are still giving the government a tougher time than they and their special advisers would like. When Tory advisers stopped their ministers from going on the Today programme and Good Morning Britain in 2020, in a way it was a good call to do without the hassle, to not risk the rants of Piers Morgan. But ministers have returned to the airwaves out of a sense (hopefully, at least) that it is the right thing, to subject themselves to an accountability that is not technically necessary.
If Burnham is a true believer in the power of words, he could tilt his governing style to a more literary culture. If he believes in the power of words, then he will want his policies to be worked out and scrutinised through them. His ministers could be encouraged to write, to properly engage with journalists, and to avoid the easy high of a well-liked Reel. Of course, this is risky advice, and would be laughed at by all those inside of his operation. But isn’t it meant to be different this time?
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