A friend and I once realised that there’s quite a neat pipeline from music journalism to Westminster. Somehow, he and I and several other people we knew had started out by covering various indie bands in the 2000s, and ended up in SW1 after that. My joke, at the time, was that I’d grown tired of writing about posh, obnoxious young white blokes and so I’d decided to start writing about posh, obnoxious, slightly older white blokes instead.
In any case, my interest in music ebbed and flowed at times but remains an important part of my life to this day. This is why I was, in this one narrow way, pleased to see Andy Burnham make his way towards No 10.
As avid readers of The New World will know, I’m just not convinced the former Manchester mayor is the man the country needs right now. I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and sincerely wish him well, but I worry his flaws are simply too similar to Keir Starmer’s.
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There is, however, one way in which the new PM has already bettered his predecessor. While Starmer was, allegedly, we’re told, quite the indie music fan, he just never managed to talk eloquently or even comfortably about that part of his life. Burnham, on the other hand, clearly loves nothing more than bragging about his cool dad credentials. In an interview with music website The Quietus in 2022, he went over his 13 favourite albums, and complained about how narrow the selection had to be.
From albums by New Order and the Strokes to the Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy and the Lash – a brave title for a politician to pick if I ever saw one – the then-mayor enthusiastically discussed each band and record, and clearly relished the opportunity to do so. Since then, he has used more or less any opportunity to chat about the Haçienda, and this or that album he discovered thanks to his kids, and it has been a genuine pleasure to witness.
Few modern politicians have true hinterlands and even fewer can talk about them with ease; Burnham, in this one respect, really is a generational talent. My only disappointment is that his very public zeal for music doesn’t seem to extend to the other area in which he’s a rarity. The new PM studied English at university – a degree held by only 4% of MPs elected in 2019.
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Sometimes, fleetingly, he has alluded to his love of reading and literature. We know that he loved poet Tony Harrison as a young man and we know that he has read all of Shakespeare. We know that… well, that’s pretty much it. What sort of novels does Burnham like? Is he more of a contemporary or classics kind of guy? Does he like his fiction to be originally written in English or does he like translations of foreign tomes better? Again: we have no idea.
It isn’t clear if he’s refusing to discuss it or is simply seldom asked about it. In any case, Britain has now gained its nth PM who has barely ever talked about what they read. It really is a great shame, as reading rates are plummeting both in the country and across the world, and AI threatens to turn our world into a post-literate one.
There is so much to be gained from stuffing your nose inside a good book as often as you can, and electorates may not always take their cultural cues from politicians, but it feels like it ought to be worth a try. 2026 is meant to be our National Year of Reading, but we’ve heard so little about it.
I’m aware Burnham will have rather a lot to be getting on with in weeks and months to come, but can’t he at least tell us about the pile of books on his bedside table, for the good of the nation?
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