By DAILY MAIL COMMENT
Published: | Updated:
Imagine for a moment that you have just taken over running a country with the world’s fifth-largest economy.
As a diligent leader, would your first few months be spent knuckling down to hard work and tough decisions?
Or would they be frittered away appearing on a gormless TV show and drawing up policies to deal with people who play loud music on the bus?
Prime Minister Andy Burnham, to his great detriment, has opted for the trivial over the arduous.
And his decision to take part in a ‘celebrity’ edition of Channel 4’s Gogglebox is symptomatic of his complete lack of seriousness as a leader.
The country’s Armed Forces are on their knees, desperate for a multi-billion pound injection. The suffocating cost of the welfare state means there is vanishingly little money for other things. Our borders are in disarray.
Meanwhile, business owners, hard workers and diligent savers are all conscious the Burnham Government’s first Budget is mere days away, and are fearful they will be punished even more by a tax-and-spend Labour Government.
None of them will be charmed by the sight of the PM chuckling on the sofa at the week’s TV highlights. Indeed, many will be rightly infuriated by it.
The Prime Minister made his Gogglebox appearance alongside Liverpool mayor Steve Rotheram
In the last few days Burnham’s ministers have announced a campaign against nuisance behaviour on public transport (before admitting there will be no-one to enforce it) and then told the public to stockpile tinned food in the event of an unforeseen crisis.
Where is the real action that Britain needs on a thousand red-hot priorities?
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is right to chide the PM for giving the impression he is ‘not actually doing the really difficult stuff that will protect the country’.
Burnham attempted to justify his participation in the TV show by saying, like a David Brent wannabe: ‘I make no apology for trying to lead with a bit of lightness and at times a bit of humour, that’s the way I go at things.’
This is a PM who cultivates a phoney everyman persona while ignoring the real issues and the hard questions.
He prefers to spend time on petty, performative TikTok videos and granting interviews to outlets where he will be lauded rather than put on the spot.
TV production teams will fawn, and his meaningless comments will be turned into social media clips.
This Burnham premiership is not even the era of the soundbite. It is a period when the aim is saying nothing significant at all.
Depressingly, as far as Downing Street aides are concerned this amounts to ‘mission accomplished’.
But the PM needs to be careful. This is not playtime, it is government.
Voters are likely to one day begin asking themselves why this man is prattling away on their screens, as they become increasingly disenchanted by his blokeish chumminess and perturbed by his lack of gravitas.
The TV programme he took part in may be a charity special, and for a worthy cause.
However, this kind of silly turn is for a prime minister about to step down, not for one who arrived just months ago thanks to an internal Labour party coup.
Burnham still has everything – yes, everything – to prove, and this country deserves far better than a TikTok, Gogglebox Prime Minister.