There is a certain type of Monday that should be boring, and thank God for it. The kettle is on, the radio is complaining about the M25, the machines of the country are turning into all the drama of a filing cabinet. That’s how it should go. Not this week.
Because on Monday, while we were all going about the boring business of a normal week, our new Prime Minister was coming in. Andy Burnham didn’t enter Number 10 until he got to it, chin up, grinning widely, working the cameras with the swagger of someone walking into a Mallorcan inn rather than a waterless Westminster terrace with a famous boiler.
Here’s the part that gave me chills. This was not a leak. It wasn’t a crude arrangement put together by a lonely teenager with too much time and a grudge. This was posted, deliberately and proudly, on Downing Street’s official TikTok account, scored, captioned and high-profile cut by the very social media purported to run the country. The Prime Minister’s first act in office is not a statement to the House. It was Toki.
@ukgov Welcome @Andy Burnham ♬ Hot new bombshell enters the house – Bella
Undoubtedly, it was an entrance villa. I am not the target audience here. I am old. I don’t belong to the TikTok generation. I’m not on TikTok. I never once said “my type is on paper”. But you don’t need to dance on television to learn choreography. Resting on the threshold. Being able to look at the camera. The body language of a man who has been told that he has contact lenses and intends to use them to their full potential. This was not the Prime Minister who came to do a job. This was a house bomb, and he knew it.
Once you’ve seen it, you can’t put it down, and the format is terrifyingly generous. If the number 10 is a villa, the entire government grammar rearranges to fit. The Cabinet no longer sits, it sits, twenty-two ministers arranged a swimming pool in factor 50 and coordinated swimwear, red boxes balanced on their knees, glittering. The phone rang on the deck. Someone waved straight, held it to his chest and shouted the four words that now rule the world: I have a document. The nation is given about twenty minutes to prepare, and to unite, which you and I can call a re-salvation, starting bright with fire.
The fireplace is, naturally, the Despatch Box, the place where new encounters are announced and newly singles are whisked off into the night in a wheeled suitcase and awkward talk. The cobra meets in it again, everyone measures the Strait of Hormuz with a sharing platter. Casa Amor becomes a day of change, the Chancellor flies somewhere warm and is introduced to a house full of hungry people, to check if his head is turned for a better offer to the Treasury. The old challenges, which were once a matter of eating something unexplained in the text, have now been rebranded as financial events.
And the demotion is pure Love Island. No one is completely fired, that would be very clean. A minister who doesn’t please the producer is simply sent to fill factor 50, and he is left to quietly hole up without a position and without anyone noticing, until the public forgets that he ever ran for election. Then, just like that, the music booms, a bombshell bounces back behind a pair of glasses, and everyone already assembled feels their stomachs drop. We call that a leadership contest.
The mechanics are the same because the incentives are the same. Love Island runs on arrivals and the ever-present threat of eviction, with the firm belief that anyone who walks in on a Monday will be dragging that suitcase down the stairs before long. Which is to say, if you’ve watched British politics over the last decade, you’ll see it less as entertainment than as history-making. Our new person totally understands the genre. The entrance is everything, the exit comes to everyone, and you just had the courage to stop pretending otherwise and lean into the light.
This is where the business student, who has made the metaphor so far, resides. The entrance has a bill attached, and it is not small.
Mr Burnham is our seventh Prime Minister in ten years. Seven. If a company had employed seven executives in ten years, no bank would lend them money and no honest investor would answer their calls. A few hours into the villa, the new man mused loudly about wanting “any flexibility” in lending rules, and the bond market did what bond markets do to developments. Gilt yields, already among the highest in the G7 and stuck near their peaks for weeks, moved again. The pound softened. He had sent Tok. The market sent a response. No one in the City was interested in his entrance, because the City does not buy charisma. It calls for predictability.
And predictability is the asset that this government continues to set on fire. Eight out of ten small business owners were nervous about the Burnham prime minister before he signed a single deal. Since the Bank Rate is still parked at 3.75 percent and all mortgages, overdrafts and property funds in the country have been issued those same jittery gilts, the operating costs are not a mystery. It caters to the 5.5 million small businesses that make up 99 per cent of British business, like affordable loans and short planning horizons. A short horizon is how firms stop hiring and start hoarding for a rainy day that may disrupt seniors’ peace of mind.
This is something every startup founder learns the hard way. The entrance is not a business. I’ve watched entrepreneurs invest huge amounts of money in innovation, brand film, drone influencers, and next to nothing in the tedious process of delivering what they’re actually selling. They are preparing to arrive. And a million views is a useless metric. It is not revenue, it is not margin, and it will not finance one pound of the national debt. The market, patient and merciless, waits for action. The bond market is the only fan that ever matters, and it doesn’t matter how well the video does.
I wrote here only last month that Burnham would be wise to take the advice of competitors instead of relying on his own advice, and nothing on Monday changed my mind. The advice stands. Britain does not need the bomb. Requires a working boiler.
So I’m not going to prepare to regroup. But the new resident must remember one rule the villa does not break. The islander who plays for the camera instead of doing the graft is always the first to get the script. And in this series, the public vote counts in the bond market.
