I am cautiously optimistic about our new leader. For one thing, the fact that Mr Burnham went to Cambridge not Oxford, did not study PPE, is not a lawyer and did not grow up in Surrey makes him something of a diversity hire among our more recent UK prime ministers.
This gives us hope. It is a near-universal law of problem-solving that you cannot think your way out of problems using the same mindset that created them in the first place.
Occasional catastrophes cause much less annoyance than frequent peeves
One tip. Government needs a marketing function. Rather than explaining itself to the public, it has endlessly sought to cadge publicity by ingratiating itself with the news media. As all journalists since Watergate are largely motivated by discrediting those in power, this is hopeless. Burnham should learn from the Trump playbook and start insulting journalists. Then bypass the press altogether using social media or even paid advertising. (The government spends less on advertising than Specsavers and B&Q combined.)
Imagine if you wanted to launch the new V10, 8.3 litre Dodge Viper and the only spokesman you could usewas Greta Thunberg. This is pretty much the position in which modern politicians find themselves: trying to communicate via the mouthpiece of someone who dislikes you. Remember, modern journalists are no longer contented, well-watered members of the Establishment but bitter, over-educated people who made a really bad career choice in the early 2000s.
Consequently, chasing press coverage is ultimately futile. If you were somehow forced to use Thunberg to launch the new Dodge Viper, the only workable strategy would be to use reverse psychology and to emphasise how much Greta hated the car. Since a lot of people hate Greta Thunberg, this would work very well. The reason that the Trump strategy works very well is because a lot of people hate journalists.
A second marketing tip. Sweat the small stuff. I once had a friendly contretemps with the political editor of the Financial Times over John Major’s cones hotline. He argued that this project was beneath the dignity of a prime minister. I argued that it was precisely this kind of thing (stupid roadworks) that riles people most about government. It is well understood by carmakers that constant minor niggles and squeaks are much more damaging to customer satisfaction than, say, a complete transmission failure after 15,000 miles. Occasional catastrophes cause much less annoyance than frequent peeves. And government has, for some bizarre reason, become a major source of constant minor acts of effrontery against the public. Seen alone, these are small, but they compound. Government today often feels less like a policeman and more like a traffic warden, someone trying to catch you out. I was a month late paying some taxes. Five years ago, I would have sorted it out with a phone call. Now they summarily fined me £2,000 and the onus is on me to sort it out. There are too many peremptory behaviours of this kind.
Hence, any prime minister could be re-elected simply by making life less irritating. Small details matter. I wouldn’t go as far as Count Binface, whose Makerfield manifesto included a pledge to move the hand dryer in the gents’ toilets in the Crown and Treaty pub in Uxbridge to a more sensible position, but he was on the right lines. Two sensible people have created a website, Quibble.org.uk, as a repository for such ideas. For instance, it’s time to sort out Britain’s execrable mobile coverage, which is in large part caused by outdated planning laws. It’s time to get rid of speed camera signs where there are no speed cameras. And to ditch the legislation behind those stupid cookie pop-ups.
One personal favour for the over-sixties: on scroll-down menus where you give your date of birth, can we legislate so that the birth-year defaults to, say, 1975 rather than 2010? Scrolling back to 1965 feels like a memento mori. You might as well put a Holbein skull on the page.
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