Nesrine Malik: Andy Burnham masters direct-to-camera politics

Andy Burnham took a selfie at a family centre in Sheffield on 31 July, a small moment that neatly captures the new prime minister’s early instinct: politics as direct address. In a Guardian column, Nesrine Malik describes a leader who posts short videos, riffs on practical skills and pub snacks, and seems unusually reachable through his social-media presence.

Malik’s point is not that British politics has suddenly become shallow, but that it is finally behaving like the media environment it sits inside. For years, prime ministers relied on press conferences, set-piece interviews and the old choreography of Westminster, even as voters learned to treat politics like the rest of their feeds: short clips, personality cues, and constant updates. Burnham, as presented here, appears comfortable in that format, and the contrast is sharpened by Malik’s description of Keir Starmer’s era as one in which “unprocessed” sentiment rarely surfaced in public. Where Starmer’s restraint could read as distance, Burnham’s style is built around recognition — the sense that the person on screen is speaking to you rather than at you.

That shift changes who holds leverage. Malik notes that it has reportedly been easier in recent days to get a reply from Burnham’s X account than for business executives to reach his team — a detail that hints at a new hierarchy of access, where visibility can outrank institutional channels. The same logic also tightens the loop between leader and audience: a prime minister who speaks directly can bypass hostile headlines, but also inherits the obligation to keep performing. Malik argues that British politics has been slow to adopt this direct-to-camera mode, in part because the country’s media parameters are still set by traditional outlets with their own ideological gravity. Burnham’s online fluency may help him move around that landscape, but it does not rewrite the underlying constraints: budgets, bureaucracies, and the hard trade-offs that do not fit into a clip.

The column’s warning is embedded in its examples. Burnham’s flair can slide into “shtick” if it never cashes out into policy that bites, and Malik points to Zohran Mamdani in New York as a contrast: connection paired with bold decisions rather than content alone. The risk is not simply that voters tire of a leader’s posts; it is that a government starts optimising for what travels well, while the slower work of changing institutions is left to the same machinery that outlasted the last prime minister.

Burnham’s videos can make him feel close at hand. The test will be whether the government he leads becomes any closer to being movable.