29 July 2026

The Prime Minister against the mainstream media

Can political campaigns just bypass newspapers and broadcasters?

Photo by Oli SCARFF / AFP via Getty Images

The quiet yet intense summer tussle between Andy Burnham and the mainstream media is fascinating. There is genuine anger but also anxiety about the way he has mostly avoided TV interviews and press conferences, instead selling his government directly online. The trouble is, it’s working.

That’s because the media is changing so quickly. You want hard data and deep policy analysis? Go online. Among my sources are, first, the New Statesman website, but also Sky’s economics editor Ed Conway’s essays and David Aaronovitch’s “Notes from the Underground” Substack. Television once offered a different kind of insight: what is this politician really like as a person? That gap is now being filled by Burnham’s social media mini-films, created by his own team.

This does not replace scoop journalism, which can’t be ignored. But beyond that, there is a bigger worry: what if it is now possible to win an election largely without the support or attention of newspapers and broadcasters? Just to bypass the whole system entirely? If so, what is the point of so many political hacks? If you detect a personal edge to my coverage, this is why.

Paris in the screen time

To Paris – a birthday present from my family so I can see the “Matisse, 1941-1954” exhibition at the Grand Palais. While there, there was also time to see the Manets and Courbets at the Musée d’Orsay and to visit Notre-Dame for the first time since its devastating fire. All wonderful. But in each place, I noticed a habit that has been growing steadily for a decade or more.

Forget AI spectacles: we already use smartphones to put a physical barrier between ourselves and what we claim to cherish. We travel hundreds or thousands of miles to see something, barely glance at it, raise an iPhone with a camera, click and move on. You’d think people would want to stop to look at the thing itself, but no. The Matisse show included the original art he used to make his famous Jazz book. You could see the tiny scissor marks and subtle adjustments of colour. There are millions of immaculate copies of the book, as well as postcards, posters, et cetera. So why take another bloody picture?

Similarly, in the cathedral, rammed with more tourist pilgrims than the most soul-hungry priests could have hoped for, people arrived, took pictures of the windows and the service, crossed themselves, apologised to the upset nun who was trying to make them put their phones away, and then left. What’s that all about? We are being persuaded to hide behind our devices from the real beauty and mystery all around.

Drilling for oil while Europe burns

Meanwhile, our Parisian weekend was haunted by the news of the terrible wildfires in France and Spain. Hundreds of thousands evacuated. How long before the Mediterranean loses its summer tourism trade, perhaps to Ireland, Sweden and Scotland? The British newspapers I clicked on at the time blended enthusiasm for more North Sea oil and gas drilling with terrifying stories of the wild fires villages evacuated. I wonder whether the two things could be connected?

A classic tale for a modern world

And so – except for Burnham and his new cabinet, and for Count Binface and his bold opponent in Clacton – the summer political pause begins. It’s a time for reflection. I have been a relative defence hawk because of the sheer pressure of the Russian threat, but I have been subjected to two pieces of powerful anti-war thinking over the past week.

The first was Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the anti-war, anti-violence theme of which seems to have slipped some people by. Essentially, Nolan frames the returning-home story as moral payback for the massacre visited on Troy. This is the Odyssey as a response to, and punishment for, the Iliad. The problem is the rhetorical structure demanded for a US blockbuster requires the final scene to be one long slaughter-fest. Exciting to watch, but it rather undercuts the film’s message.

The second thought-provoker was the book 85 Seconds to Midnight by the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, who writes on page 24. Earlier this year the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set their nuclear war “doomsday clock” at the point of Rovelli’s title. They explain: “The world is already perilously close to the precipice, a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster.” Rovelli’s central argument is that we are all driven by irrational fear of the other and respond by arming in a way that brings the end of human civilisation closer. To adapt Nolan’s argument, we ourselves are the invading sea people we have been warned about. Putin’s behaviour in Ukraine makes it hard to see our fear of him as irrational, but the book’s argument will rattle around my head all summer.

[Further reading: Labour’s lead may not last]