Feel The Burnham

**Ian Hislop** (0:00)
Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

**Andrew Hunter Murray** (0:03)
Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94 My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here in the iStudio with Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen and Ian Hislop. We're here to discuss the big events of the week's news, not least since the last issue of the magazine came out, and we should begin with the very biggest, of course, a new day has dawned, has it not? Or a new social media strategy.

**Adam McQueen** (0:24)
Yeah, Andy Burnham is our first kind of, I say Instagram native prime minister, which is quite an achievement. But he has, he's done two things in his first week. One, he's done an absolute blizzard of policy announcements, and two, he's done a kind of blizzard of media thing. So the most notable, I'll go from an inside baseball perspective, is that he has had every morning at 6 a.m. in lobby correspondence inboxes, a not embargoed policy announcement. Now, there are probably several words in that sentence that you are craving for me to explain to you. Let me say, so the lobby, first of all... Policy for a start.

**Helen Lewis** (1:00)
Who is this Burnham you're talking about?

**Adam McQueen** (1:02)
It's not low, work up. So if you have a lobby pass, that means you are a journalist who works on the grounds of Westminster, the estate, a parliamentary estate. In return for your greater access, you can wander around and kind of buttonhole people in corridors. You have to do a number of things like you have to, for example, declare your interests, like where you might have outside speaking gigs. So it's understood that these are people with privileged special access to politicians and in return, they have to kind of cleave to higher standards.
They are very used to the idea that before anything gets announced, they are told about it. So they can, in the nicest way, go, well, where are you going to get money for that from then, mate? Or, but you've already announced this twice, or whatever it might be.

**Andrew Hunter Murray** (1:40)
Or I presume just prepare a story for the next day's paper.

**Adam McQueen** (1:43)
Right, exactly. So but now, and so this has caused enormous amounts of grumbling in the lobby WhatsApp chat. So Burnham has done very few traditional interviews and also they've done this blizzard of media stories that have not been, you know, they haven't played favourites and given a bit to the Daily Mail beforehand or whatever it might be. And they've made lobby correspondence jobs harder. Now, you may say, still your tears.
Welcome to journalism, where mostly people don't give you things on a plate. I mean, most of the journalism that we do is things that other politicians particularly would rather you didn't publish, rather the things that you do want to publish. But that has been very interesting. And it's kind of a signal of intent, which is what you always do as a politician your first 100 days, when it might be. And he's saying, actually, I think the way I'm going to talk to people is via social media. You are the gatekeepers, you're the old regime, and I actually don't need you anymore.

**Ian Hislop** (2:33)
And what do the new gatekeepers say? Thank you very much for this and then just put it up.

**Adam McQueen** (2:37)
Well, yes. Okay. So that's the other thing, is there is another hidden reason why. I mean, for all that politicians will complain about, oh, the lobby obsessed with punch and duty personality, they're all about grandstanding themselves. There is a thing that one of the things that are very annoyed with the lobby is that they say things like, and how are you going to pay for it then, Andy Burnham?
And Andy Burnham is already retreated into slightly what I think of as small bean mode, which for those of our internet persuasion means that he's kind of a little wounded puppy dog. And some people are asking questions about No. 10 North, and he said, well, this is you being London-centric critics.
And I've, you know, the SNP are masters of doing this. Well, this is you talking down Scotland, you say, when you say things like, well, drug deaths are terrible in Scotland, or your educational achievement benchmarks have been comprehensively failed, and they say, why do you hate Scotland? I'm going to put that down as an early marker of something that I feel could become annoying very quickly, if it becomes, why do you hate the North every time you say anything mean about Andy Burnham? But you're right, the other problem with influencers is that they don't see their role largely as asking hard questions. So have you consumed any of the Odyssey press tour? You've been on Instagram, me and you'll have seen lots of it.