LABOUR prime ministers have a strange relationship with the media.
Tony Blair played the game and was rewarded generously, until he wasn’t. Many who haunt the Westminster lobby still speak with dewy eyes about how he had “the X-Factor”, to employ the cringe-inducing New Labour-era phrase.
Gordon Brown hated them, they hated him, simple as.
Keir Starmer seemed to loathe just about every single aspect of being prime minister but nothing seemed to hold quite as much pain for him as speaking to the media, even when they were giving him the soft soap treatment.
Going further back, Harold Wilson seemed to believe – and this is something of a theme with the man – that the press were engaged in a massive deep state conspiracy to remove him from office. He was probably right.
Clement Attlee might be Andy Burnham’s inspiration. Legend has it that Attlee was so uninterested in the media that he had to be sold on the idea of having a tape machine to monitor the news in No 10 by being told it would give him up-to-date cricket scores.
“Francis,” Attlee is believed to have said to his press secretary. “My cricket machine's gone wrong. It's putting out stuff about the government.”
Attlee’s approach of basically ignoring the media allowed him to pursue bold policies – hated by the Tory press – like nationalising industry and creating the National Health Service.
It was less successful in giving him an insight into other things like whether it was right to call a General Election almost immediately after you’d just won one .
The current Prime Minister thinks that times have changed.
Burnham generated much fury over at GB News when he refused to grant them a question at one of his rare press conferences recently.
He has also been irking the fearless guardians of truth in the Fourth Estate by announcing all of his policies at the ungodly hour of six o’clock in the morning.
Elsewhere, special advisers have been banned from speaking with the media. You can look at this as a positive and a negative.
Special advisers, or Spads, are able to wield a decent amount of basically unaccountable power by briefing journalists on various policies – usually credited as a “senior government source” – as well as flying kites for their ministers' pet projects or attacking their political rivals.
I think most people would think that minimising that kind of carry on is for the best.
But it will unquestionably make it harder for journalists to work out exactly what is going on behind the scenes in government. Virtually all political journalists, myself included, have also found it useful to be able to talk through knotty policies with special advisers who know their topic areas inside out.
Fundamentally, governments of all stripes have decided they’ve had to play ball with the media – whether that means bending the knee to the Murdochs or scrapping Leveson part two like David Cameron did – because the media are powerful.
That used to be evidently true. Now it is less obvious.
Time was that if you wanted to speak directly to the common man – at least in the Westminster imagination – you had to show a bit of ankle to The Sun.
Now if you want to speak to him, you can do so directly through TikToks .
The press still exercises a large amount of power: the motive force of the news agenda is still whatever appears on the front pages of the mostly right-wing newspapers.
But Burnham’s position matches that of an ever-growing numbers of people: he doesn’t like the media and doesn’t want to engage with it.
The Prime Minister seems an unlikely gambler, but he’s no stranger to a little flutter. A recent example, for argument's sake: making an all-or-nothing run for parliament to oust your predecessor. In that instance, fortune favoured the bold boy.
Sticking two fingers up at the legacy media is one almighty punt, even more perilous than taking a tilt at No 10. Will his luck finally run out?
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