There is a particular kind of Monday that is supposed to be boring, and thank God for it. Kettle on, radio grumbling about the M25, the machinery of the country turning over with all the drama of a filing cabinet. That is how it is meant to go. Not this week.
Because on Monday, while the rest of us were getting on with the unglamorous business of a normal week, our new Prime Minister was making an entrance. Andy Burnham did not walk into Number 10 so much as arrive at it, chin up, grin wide, working the cameras with the swagger of a man strolling into a villa in Mallorca rather than a draughty Westminster terrace with a famously temperamental boiler.
And here is the part that stopped me cold. This was not a leak. It was not some cruel edit stitched together by a bored teenager with too much time and a grudge. This was posted, deliberately and proudly, to Downing Street’s own official TikTok account, scored, captioned and cut for maximum engagement by the very communications machine that is meant to be running the country. The Prime Minister’s first act in office was not a statement to the House. It was a Tok.
@ukgov Welcome @Andy Burnham ♬ A hot new bom shel enters the vila – Bella
It was, unmistakably, a villa entrance. I am not the target audience here. I am old. I am not of the TikTok generation. I am not on TikTok. I have never once said “my type on paper”. But you do not need to be fluent in reality television to read the choreography. The pause on the threshold. The knowing look to camera. The body language of a man who has been told there are lenses on him and intends to make the most of it. This was not a Prime Minister turning up to do a job. This was a bombshell entering the villa, and he knew it.
Once you have seen it, you cannot unsee it, and the format is horribly generous. If Number 10 is the villa, the whole grammar of government rearranges to fit. The Cabinet no longer sits, it lounges, twenty-odd ministers arranged around the pool in factor 50 and coordinated swimwear, red boxes balanced on their knees, glistening. A phone buzzes on the decking. Somebody bolts upright, clutches it to their chest and shrieks the four words that now run the country: I’ve got a text. The nation is given roughly twenty minutes to get ready, and a recoupling, which you and I would call a reshuffle, duly begins by firelight.
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