They cancel each other out

On Friday night the Prime Minister was on Gogglebox. Andy Burnham sat on a sofa next to Steve Rotheram, the Mayor of the Liverpool City Region, for Channel 4’s celebrity edition in aid of Stand Up To Cancer, and was filmed watching television.

That morning Kemi Badenoch went on BBC Breakfast to say he shouldn’t have. “Even as a junior minister or as a secretary of state, I never had time to go on Gogglebox,” she said, and it “takes hours to do”. She also said: “I’ve never seen a prime minister have the time to do this much Goggleboxing, social media and LADbible.”

So the Leader of the Opposition used a television programme to complain that the Prime Minister had been on a television programme. Burnham told the BBC he makes “no apology for trying to lead with a bit of lightness and at times a bit of humour”.

I know Gogglebox by name and from R., who mentions it. It is a programme in which people are filmed on their sofas watching television, and the rest of the country watches them do it. I haven’t watched an episode, and I might be doing it a complete injustice.

I’m prejudiced about television. Outside the public broadcasters, most of what I’ve seen is sparkly, sugary and incredibly stupid, and a good deal of the rest is sarcastic or worse, so I don’t watch any of it. Gogglebox is on Channel 4, which I learned this week belongs to the public and has a remit written into law. So it is not even the commercial channel I would have blamed.

I don’t follow politics much these days. I have a household to run and my sanity to hold on to, and British politics is a cesspit I’d rather not stand next to. This piece is my outlet for it.

Salt and water

Burnham has been Prime Minister since 20 July. The country didn’t elect him to it, and Labour’s members didn’t get a vote either, because he was the only candidate. That is how the system works. Five of the last six Prime Ministers took office without a general election, and the one exception is the man he replaced.

Whatever one side does, the other side criticises by default. It was true of Keir Starmer and it is true of Burnham, and the omnipresent, omni-angry Mrs Badenoch is only the loudest instance. Somewhere behind them stand the smaller parties nobody remembers and the newcomers in Reform, all looking for the bad in someone else.

Both sides say their job is to serve the public. Neither even pretends to want to work with the other. Each tries to look better by pushing the other down, and in a playground we’d call that bullying.

Each side has qualities, and put together they could make a government with the strengths of both. What happens is chemistry. Pour an acid into an alkali and they neutralise each other, and what’s left is salt and water, with none of the properties of either.

I say this as an outsider, so take it with a spoonful of honey. The mood in this country is bitter. It is a mixture of sadness, fear, anger and mistrust, laid over people who are, at the core, jovial and friendly.

Starmer was attacked for being remote. In June 2024, at a Sky News debate in Grimsby, a member of the audience told him he had become a “political robot”. He often looked absorbed in the job to the exclusion of everything else, and he was punished for it. Burnham goes on Gogglebox, and he’s punished for that.

Badenoch knows what the job costs. She said herself that a new job in politics is “like drinking from a fire hose”. She meant it as a reason he shouldn’t be on a sofa, and as far as I can tell it didn’t occur to her that it might be a reason to cut him some slack.

Every Wednesday

My modest idea of the job is this. A Prime Minister coordinates teams of people who know more than he does (some days I wonder what a Prime Minister knows at all), and makes decisions on what they tell him. Nobody in their right mind expects Burnham to sit up at night going through every line of the budget. He has people for that.

He needs energy to run them, and he needs to show his face, because part of the job is standing for the whole country. Going on television is part of that, and it is one of the things he ought to be good at.

Some of that energy goes on Prime Minister’s Questions. It is half an hour every Wednesday the Commons sits, and the morning before it goes on preparation. The opposition walks in with a folder of material its researchers have put together, and the Prime Minister does not know which page they will open.

Tony Blair, in his memoir, needed a list of adjectives for it that began “nerve-racking, discombobulating, nail-biting, bowel-moving”.

Holding a government to account matters, and I don’t mind the heckling as such. I just wonder how much is left of a man by Wednesday afternoon, and what gets done with it.

Burnham has said he wants a less “Punch-and-Judy” tone. His answers run long.

At his first session, on 2 September, the Speaker warned that they might make it overrun, and this month a BBC count put his average answer at 51 seconds, against 38 for Starmer. “It’s because he actually answers the questions,” a Downing Street source said.

David Cameron promised to end Punch and Judy politics in December 2005, the day he became Conservative leader. Researchers later named him the rudest Prime Minister at PMQs.

In Germany the Chancellor answers questions from the Bundestag three times a year, for an hour each time.

The strangest part of the British arrangement is the dual role. This country has a head of state who stands outside the parties: the King, who by convention stays out of politics.

The man who has to run the country, and is expected to speak for all of it, is also the leader of one side of the room, and he spends every Wednesday being treated as that. I don’t see how that helps anyone settle a difference.

The papers

The press does the rest, the private papers above all: the Sun, and the Daily Mail, which is cruel in a way I find infuriating. The BBC I hold to a standard, and I’ve written about it when it falls short.

Germany has Bild, and Bild seems to lift the odd story from the Mail, but I don’t think you can compare the two. The Mail is vindictive, and lately the target is Harry and Meghan.

I don’t care much for either of them. I do not hate them and I do not like them. I am no friend of royalty, I don’t care for titles, and I would not curtsy to any of these people. I don’t think they deserve a fraction of the coverage they get.

They are two people with two children, trying to make a living. They seem to have a lot of money still, they are not known for much, and I think they’re looking for a niche. It is not for lack of trying that they’re written up as failures. The way they’re presented every day looks to me like harassment.

The Mail went after Meghan early. In November 2016, a year before the engagement, MailOnline’s headline was “Harry’s girl is (almost) straight outta Compton”. In 2019 the Mail on Sunday printed parts of a letter she had written to her father, and in December 2021 the Court of Appeal ruled that it was private.

Harry took the paper’s publisher to court with six others, including Elton John and Doreen Lawrence, over how its stories had been obtained. On 7 July Mr Justice Nicklin dismissed all 97 allegations, and in August the claimants were ordered to pay an initial £9.5 million in costs. Associated Newspapers called the ruling a “devastating critique of an attempt to destroy a newspaper”.

I accept the judgment. The court was asked whether the Mail had broken the law to get its stories, and found it hadn’t. I am asking whether what it does legally is decent, and having won, the Mail is free to carry on.

This week it has more material. Her father, who has been living in the Philippines, is under investigation there after his son reportedly told police he had found images of child abuse on his phone and computers. No charges have been reported.

He called the allegations “sick lies”, in an interview with the Daily Mail. Meghan said she was “deeply distressed”, and that she had kept her distance from him to protect her own children.

I would like the media to serve people: to educate them, and to help make a country of one soul that has room for everyone in it. Here most of the main outlets are awful at it.

Three days of water

On Thursday the government asked us to keep three days of water and food in the cupboard. The Security Minister, Dan Jarvis, told Parliament that the new Be Ready advice asks households to be self-sufficient for three days in an emergency.

The checklist has bottled water, food that won’t go off, a torch, a radio, cash and copies of your documents. It is the first stage of a three-year campaign.

I am a man trying to get through the week and look after his family, and here was one more catastrophe to get ready for.

The advice itself is modest. Germany’s civil protection office tells households to keep ten days of supplies, and Jarvis said three days puts Britain in line with its European neighbours.

The campaign was planned under Starmer, and Burnham held it back because, Bloomberg reported, he worried it would look too pessimistic at the start of his premiership. Wes Streeting, the Defence Secretary, said he wanted people “alert but not alarmed”.

Badenoch found a way to attack this too. “I worry that between the Prime Minister being on Gogglebox and then talking about stockpiling canned goods,” she said, “they’re not actually doing the really difficult stuff that will protect the country.”

What wears me down is the drumbeat. The papers sell fear every morning, I wrote in the first chapter that fear is the product, and now the government has a campaign of its own with a three-year plan.

Keep calm

It made me think of the Blitz spirit, and of keep calm and carry on, and I wondered whether the government wants it back. A population melted into one obedient, malleable mass, held together by fear, acting as one when ordered to, and told that this is the most admirable kind of society there is. It is the opposite of the one soul I’d like from the papers: a grey pixel in a grey surface, united for one purpose only. To serve whom?

The poster itself stayed in storage. The Ministry of Information printed about 2.45 million copies of Keep Calm and Carry On in the summer of 1939 and held them back for after the heavy air raids. In April 1940 they were pulped for the paper salvage drive.

Few people saw one until 2000, when the owners of Barter Books in Alnwick found a copy in a box of second-hand books bought at auction.

In 1991 the historian Angus Calder called his book about the period The Myth of the Blitz. The Mass-Observation reports he worked from recorded the courage, and next to it looting, crime and defeatism.

The Ministry’s other posters did go up in 1939. One read “Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory”. When Mass-Observation asked people what they made of it, some read the “your” and the “us” as two different groups of people.