Andy Burnham likes decent music. That doesn’t guarantee he’ll be a decent PM

As page-one indie as his choices are, it’s obvious he hasn’t been handed these tracks by a focus group – his time spent at Manchester’s various clubs in his youth are clear evidence of him walking the (Board)walk as well as talking the talk. That said, Andy’s PR people must be extremely grateful that his younger self went down the indie route and frequented the Hacienda on a Thursday night – if he’d been a bit more cutting-edge and attended the weekend rave nights, they’d have had to spend a bit more time strenuously denying he was ever a fan of disco biscuits. 

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OK, so far so good – Andy’s credentials hold up, so let’s look at the music taste of some recent prime ministers. He’s had a tough time over the last couple of weeks, so no doubt Keir Starmer will be greatly relieved to know he scores pretty high on the Paul Hanley decent music/decent bloke chart, mainly for picking Falling And Laughing as one of his selections on Desert Island Discs. A love of Orange Juice is clear evidence that your heart is in the right place in my book; it’s just a shame some of the witty thoughtfulness of Edwyn Collins’ lyrics didn’t make their way into Keir’s speeches now and again.      

Whenever I think about them, which is probably more than I should, I’ve always imagined Conservative leaders as fans of music for people who don’t really like music – Lighthouse Family perhaps, or Stereophonics. Liz Truss certainly didn’t disappoint in that regard when she revealed that Dancing In The Moonlight by Toploader was her first single purchase. She also named Taylor Swift’s Blank Space as her favourite song, which she probably now regrets, as it allowed Channel 4 to use it as the utterly fitting soundtrack to their report documenting her fall from grace. 

Rishi Sunak is also a self-identified Swifty, which, to quote Teenage Fanclub, a group that’s never appeared on any party leader’s playlist, seems pretty bandwagonesque to me. His professed love of country music hints at a deeper, more quirky side to his musical tastes, however. Sunak may not have thought this through – immersing himself in the thoroughly blue-collar world of C&W gigs may bring him a bit too close to working class people, something he’s usually keen to avoid.    

I definitely had Boris Johnson down as a fan of whatever music was the most expedient way of getting to a feeble Latin pun  – Status Quo spring to mind – but the genuinely warm manner in which he talked about Joe Strummer on Desert Island Discs, and his choice of The Clash’s cover of Toots and the Maytals’ Pressure Drop (hardly the choice of a dabbler) is one in the eye for my theory. It turns out Boris and Joe knew each other from when they were contemporaneous contributors to the Daily Telegraph. They were also both public school boys, of course, which probably explains how Joe got the gig in the first place.

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Like Andy Burnham, David Cameron is something of a Smiths aficionado, who has quoted the lyrics to There Is a Light That Never Goes Out and Cemetery Gates in parliament, though he got them both wrong. (I wonder if Hansard corrects such errors? It’s a marvellous image, the parliamentary stenographers frantically consulting the Genius website for clues to Morrissey’s subtle wordplay. A word of warning, guys – it’s frequently as reliable as Cameron was when remembering which football team he allegedly supported.)

Johnny Marr was famously unimpressed with Mr Cameron’s fandom of course, as was Paul Weller, who took huge umbrage at the former PM’s expressed love of Eton Rifles, commenting: “It wasn’t intended as a fucking jolly drinking song for the cadet corps.”

To be fair to David Cameron – possibly the first time that phrase has appeared in The New World – I’m pretty sure he understood that. He later said: “I don’t see why the left should be the only ones allowed to listen to protest songs.” For the same reason that the left are the only ones writing protest songs, I’d say, but you do you, David. 

In short, while a contempt for art and music is always an excellent barometer for a damaged soul – looking at you here, Kemi – an appreciation of indie and a good attitude to its transformative power sadly indicates nothing at all politically. As Benjamin Disraeli famously opined, “nature has given us two ears but only one mouth”.  Perhaps we should just be grateful that politicians occasionally shut their gobs long enough to listen to anything at all. 

Paul Hanley’s books include Have a Bleedin Guess: The Story of Hex Enduction Hour. With his brother Steve, he is a member of House Of All and co-host of the Oh! Brother podcast