How did a completely invented story about Andy Burnham dishing out public funds to an electric vehicle company run by his wife become the most viral political post in the UK? The story is a depressing tale of just how politics works in the social media age.
It begins with a kernel of truth: in 2021, Marie-France van Heel was working for a marketing company whose clients included an EV company which won a contract from Transport for Greater Manchester. Yet unlike claims in the stories now being widely circulated by the online right, Mayor Burnham was not involved, and neither he nor his wife owned shares in the company.
In fact, in September of that year, Burnham excused himself from part of a Greater Manchester Combined Authority meeting discussing the region’s EV charging infrastructure strategy precisely to avoid any perceived conflict of interest with his wife’s work. But that did little to stop a conspiracy theory from starting.
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In January 2022, a Facebook group set up to oppose Burnham’s plans for a Clean Air Zone reported a “rumour” that van Heel “has shares in the company” which will supply “the monitoring cameras” for the CAZ – all completely untrue. But that, of course, didn’t stop it from gaining traction locally, and the story eventually became that Burnham was benefiting directly from a contract he had awarded his wife.
In February 2022, Burnham addressed the rumours directly, issuing a statement in which he pointed out that van Heel “has no direct financial relationship with Iduna [the company running the EV scheme]. She does not own any shares in them and does not receive any bonus nor incentive payments from them”. He added that “some of the claims that have been made about my wife are frankly disgraceful”, pointing to a poster put up locally by anti-clean air campaigners claiming that “Andy Burnham is a nonce and his wife is shagging the French”.
That put a stop to it for a while – until the Makerfield by-election, when they resurfaced and were amplified heavily by Jon Gaunt, a former Sun columnist and proto-GB News type figure, who went on to work for Russian propaganda outlet Sputnik. He promoted the lie to his 60,000 Facebook followers, and it went on to be shared widely among influencers on the right.
It has now been picked up by former comedian John Cleese, who took a rare break from whingeing about the BBC no longer repeating Monty Python to share the story with his five million X followers, demanding “Investigation, please”.
So a complete load of bollocks invented by a tiny local Facebook group five years ago is now the most shared political post in the UK today, with mainstream figures on the right – who are otherwise engaged in defending Nigel Farage’s right to accept £5 million from a Thai-based crypto billionaire – pushing a lie that the incoming PM and his wife are corrupt. Hasn’t social media been a wonderful boon?
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