ANDY BURNHAM: THE FIRST TIKTOK PM

ANDY BURNHAM: THE FIRST TIKTOK PM

“I do have a thing for a pickled onion Monster Munch…”

Words you might hear uttered in any pub on any given evening.

But they are also the words that ushered in the arrival of Andy Burnham, the first Prime Minister for the TikTok generation. 

Four days into his premiership, Burnham had just announced business rates relief on pubs. 

Prime Ministers love a pub. It makes them – they and their advisors hope – look like a man or woman of the people. 

Think David Cameron sharing a beer with President Xi of China at a pub near Chequers or Covid-masked Boris Johnson pulling a post-lockdown pint in Wolverhampton. 

Rishi Sunak’s most memorable hospitality-adjacent PR stunt came when he (masklessly) served food at Wagamama in central London to launch the post-Covid Eat Out To Help Out scheme. 

YouTube records Sunak stiffly walking up to the restaurant entrance with the look of the boss’s son about to do a day’s reluctant work experience. 

He’s then seen serving the wrong food to two customers who look like they would rather be anywhere other than in the middle of this painful charade. Suited Wagamama execs look on awkwardly in the background. 

(Note that if you want to avoid looking cringe in front of the camera, check out Harpswood’s media training offer here.)

Compare and contrast Sunak’s efforts with the new PM’s pub business rates relief launch. 

Video begins. Burnham and his new Chancellor John Healey sit close together at a table in a tightly cropped frame, but not so tight that you can’t tell it’s a pub. 

Burnham wears a jacket but no tie, Healey a tie but no jacket. 

Burnham opens the dialogue. “If Twiglets come out of that bag, I’ve blown it.” 

Subtitles bounce across the screen. The title graphic all in lower case reads: “blind ranking pub snacks… with the chancellor”.

What follows is a breezily entertaining couple of minutes featuring the two most powerful people in the UK ranking pork scratchings and bacon fries. 

And as you watch, you realise this isn’t a Prime Minister forcing himself into an awkward PR stunt against his better judgment.

This is a Prime Minister embracing the dominant social media culture. (Kudos to Healey too for throwing himself into it and looking entirely natural.)

Burnham and his team understand the content the form requires. A scroll through his TikTok account reveals post after post of slick, curated content.

Three-second clips spliced together of Burnham welcoming new cabinet ministers into No10 with handshakes and hugs as The Heavy’s How You Like Me Now plays. 

Burnham leaning into the camera, double tapping the screen as though turning the camera on, screen blurring in transition and then sharpening as he leans out to announce: “I’m cutting taxes.”

Regular updates of “The five things I’ve done this week” as the PM looks straight down the barrel of the camera and lists off his achievements from the previous working days. 

Want to talk about your new devolution plan? Cue a video of Burnham discussing the different names given to a bread roll in different regions of the country. The video starts with said roll being thrown at Burnham from off screen as a sound effect plays of it whizzing through the air. 

“Is it a cob or a bap or a batch?”, opines the PM. “What makes sense in one place clearly doesn’t always make sense necessarily in another,” he smoothly segues into, holding onto the roll. The 48-second piece ends, inevitably, with the PM taking a bite out of the barm (Burnham’s preferred name) to another cartoonish sound effect. 

A tour of Burnham’s No10 North office from the point of view of one Burnham’s aides reveals a gold disc of The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead album, a cartoon of Burnham in an Everton kit scoring against Liverpool and a poster of the Brit Awards in Manchester. The aide then “spots” that Burnham’s laptop, connected to a screen, is open on a web page showing how to make the perfect cup of tea. “Flustered” Burnham ushers him out. 

Yes, we have Burnham meeting and greeting President Zelensky of Ukraine as previous PMs have done on their socials. 

But we’ve also got him going for a sped-up run with Mo Farah to talk about the power of sport, sharing the camera with social media star Bus Aunty to announce the £2 bus fare cap and answering questions about his first job while standing on Max Klymenko’s Career Ladder. 

Burnham’s predecessor Sir Keir Starmer wasn’t a luddite when it came to social media – he also filmed TikToks with Bus Aunty and Klymenko. But he certainly wasn’t a natural.

Burnham’s team understands the culture and the cadence better. Abby Tomlinson, who at 17 launched the viral ‘Milifandom’ campaign to boost then-Labour leader Ed Miliband’s standing in 2015, is the digital guru behind Burnham’s socials (having previously worked for Starmer).

Crucially, what does the TikTok generation make of it? 

This writer’s two teenagers have both commented positively – and unprompted – about the PM’s TikTok account.

“He’s like the New York mayor’s [Zohran Mamdani] account,” says one. “It’s not cringe,” is the other’s brief analysis.

High praise indeed from two potential voters at the next election.

If Burnham can engage with a younger demographic who historically fail to turn out in numbers at elections, the impact of his Monster Munch bants could be seismic.