“Now, this is a barm – and no one can tell me otherwise!”
It sounds like something Mr Tumble might say, doesn’t it? All that’s missing is the exaggerated wave, the red nose and the starry waistcoat, but otherwise, it’s all there: the jovial intonation, the chuckle, the giant, comedic bite from the bread bun at the end. Yet, this is the actual Prime Minister. I know.
“Apparently, there are some people who might call it a cob or a bap or a batch…” Suddenly, there’s a Geordie accent. “A stottie!”
Andy Burnham looks down, astounded, at the bread roll in his hand, in a video posted to his own social media. I half expected him to bring out another two from behind his ear and start juggling with them.
www.instagram.com/p/Dbd6vs4CcgM/The reason for this latest bit of schtick? Well, a fairly clunky leap to devolution, by way of the bakery aisle.
“What makes sense in one place clearly doesn’t always necessarily make sense in another,” continues the Prime Minister in a segue so jarring it physically hurts to watch. “So, why for decades has Westminster been making decisions that should be in your hands?” Ba-dum tish.
Now, we get it. We get it because Andy Burnham is trying very, very hard to be “normal”. That’s what Brand Burnham is all about: focusing on the little things that matter, like introducing £2 bus fares and slashing VAT on our leccy bills.
It’s about sitting in the centre of Cardiff with a sign inviting the Great British Public to ask you questions; it’s saying you like The Smiths (and, horror, even singing along to “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” during your own DJ set, and waving your arms around in the air in some classic “dad dancing”); it’s doing cute videos for socials and admitting you wear socks with sandals, that you don’t think phones should be used at gigs, that you don’t believe in Yorkshire pud with a Christmas dinner. It’s about saying you put the milk in first when making a cup of tea – and knowing exactly what kind of horrified reaction you’re going to get, which is exactly why you did it.
Clearly it’s working. That bap/cob/barm video had 4.4 million views on X at the time of writing and, more to the point, all this being normal stuff has helped Labour open up a five-point poll lead on Reform UK.
But there’s a snag to all of this performative normalcy, as I see it. Because while Burnham may be savvy with social media and cool enough to talk about sad-boy Manchester indie bands, the boomers and Gen Xers this post feels laser-targeted at are generally savvy enough to see through the “everyman” performance. We’ve seen it all before.
We saw it in Boris Johnson, who got stuck on a zip-wire during the 2012 London Olympics. See also Nigel Farage, the careful “everyman” who loves being papped chatting to construction workers and enjoying a simple cig and a pint in a local pub, despite secretly being quite posh. Then there was Ed Davey, who famously bungee-jumped in Eastbourne during the 2024 general election to tell Lib Dem voters to “take the plunge”. Davey also rode a jet ski off the Sussex coast to highlight the issue of sewage pollution and chucked himself down rollercoasters at Thorpe Park; he raced down a giant slip-and-slide in Somerset and did an obstacle course in Tunbridge Wells. Did we laugh? Yes. Did we take him seriously? We did not.
Yes, Keir Starmer was wooden. But this feels like an overcorrection. We don’t want a prime minister to ask us whether a Jaffa Cake is actually a cake or a biscuit or whether Hobnobs are better than Digestives, or who is willing to court outrage by saying he puts the milk in before the tea bag in first (and whoops, Burnham’s done just that, telling PoliticsUK last month that he believes it “softens the bag a bit” and “makes it stronger” – he also admitted he knew his stance would “offend a lot of people”).
There’s a point at which these clips begin to look a bit cringe at best, and at worst pretty calculated. Burnham risks alienating his voter base by looking like he’s trying too hard. Or, worse, like someone who isn’t taking the job seriously enough.
Still, maybe I’m wrong. My 14-year-old daughter just said Andy Burnham was “cool”.
“I like him,” she added. “Did you see him talking about his playlist?”
I haven’t told her what he calls a bread roll, though. Where we’re from it’s a “bap” – anything else and you’ve really lost the dressing room.
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