There is a particular kind of Monday that is supposed to be boring, and thank God for it. Kettle on, radio grumbling about the M25, the machinery of the country turning over with all the drama of a filing cabinet. That is how it is meant to go. Not this week.
Because on Monday, while the rest of us were getting on with the unglamorous business of a normal week, our new Prime Minister was making an entrance. Andy Burnham did not walk into Number 10 so much as arrive at it, chin up, grin wide, working the cameras with the swagger of a man strolling into a villa in Mallorca rather than a draughty Westminster terrace with a famously temperamental boiler.
And here is the part that stopped me cold. This was not a leak. It was not some cruel edit stitched together by a bored teenager with too much time and a grudge. This was posted, deliberately and proudly, to Downing Street’s own official TikTok account, scored, captioned and cut for maximum engagement by the very communications machine that is meant to be running the country. The Prime Minister’s first act in office was not a statement to the House. It was a Tok.
It was, unmistakably, a villa entrance. I am not the target audience here. I am old. I am not of the TikTok generation. I am not on TikTok. I have never once said “my type on paper”. But you do not need to be fluent in reality television to read the choreography. The pause on the threshold. The knowing look to camera. The body language of a man who has been told there are lenses on him and intends to make the most of it. This was not a Prime Minister turning up to do a job. This was a bombshell entering the villa, and he knew it.
Once you have seen it, you cannot unsee it, and the format is horribly generous. If Number 10 is the villa, the whole grammar of government rearranges to fit. The Cabinet no longer sits, it lounges, twenty-odd ministers arranged around the pool in factor 50 and coordinated swimwear, red boxes balanced on their knees, glistening. A phone buzzes on the decking. Somebody bolts upright, clutches it to their chest and shrieks the four words that now run the country: I’ve got a text. The nation is given roughly twenty minutes to get ready, and a recoupling, which you and I would call a reshuffle, duly begins by firelight.
The fire pit, naturally, is the Despatch Box, the place where new couplings are announced and the freshly single are walked off into the night with a wheelie suitcase and a haunted expression. Cobra convenes around it too, everyone weighing the Strait of Hormuz over a sharing platter. Casa Amor becomes a reshuffle away-day, the Chancellor flown somewhere warm and introduced to a villa full of hungrier backbenchers, purely to test whether his head is turned by a better offer at the Treasury. The old challenges, once a matter of eating something unspeakable for a text, are now solemnly rebranded as fiscal events.
And the demotions are pure Love Island. Nobody is sacked outright, that would be far too clean. The minister who has displeased the producer is simply sent to top up the factor 50, left to redden quietly on a lounger with no portfolio and no signal, until the public forgets he was ever a contender. Then, every so often, the music swells, a returning bombshell struts back in behind a pair of sunglasses, and everybody already coupled up feels their stomach drop. We call that a leadership contest.
The mechanics match because the incentives match. Love Island runs on dramatic arrivals and the ever present threat of eviction, on the iron certainty that whoever struts in on Monday will be dragging that suitcase down the stairs before long. Which, if you have watched British politics this past decade, you will recognise less as entertainment than as a documentary. Our new man understands the genre completely. The entrance is everything, the exit comes for everyone, and he has simply had the nerve to stop pretending otherwise and lean into the tan.
Here is where the business reader, who has indulged the metaphor this far, sits up. The entrance has a bill attached, and it is not a small one.
Mr Burnham is our seventh Prime Minister in a decade. Seven. If a company had run through seven chief executives in ten years, no bank would lend it a fiver and no serious investor would return its calls. Within hours of the villa entrance, the new man mused aloud about seeking “any flexibility” in the borrowing rules, and the bond market did what bond markets do to improvisation. Gilt yields, already among the highest in the G7 and stuck near their peaks for weeks, twitched up again. The pound softened. He had posted a Tok. The market posted a reply. Nobody in the City was charmed by the walk-in, because the City does not price charisma. It prices predictability.
And predictability is the one asset this government keeps setting fire to. Eight in ten small business owners were nervous about a Burnham premiership before he had signed a single thing. With Bank Rate still parked at 3.75 per cent and every mortgage, overdraft and asset finance deal in the land keyed off those same jittery gilts, the cost of the performance is not abstract. It lands on the 5.5 million small firms that make up 99 per cent of British business, as a dearer loan and a shorter planning horizon. A shorter horizon is how firms stop hiring and start hoarding cash against a rainy day a little grown-up calm might have prevented.
This is the thing every half-decent founder learns the hard way. The entrance is not the business. I have watched entrepreneurs pour a fortune into the launch, the brand film, the influencer with the drone, and next to nothing into the boring machinery of delivering the thing they actually sold. They optimise for the arrival. And a million views is a vanity metric. It is not revenue, it is not margin, and it will not refinance a single pound of the national debt. The market, patient and merciless, waits for the operations. The bond market is the only follower that has ever mattered, and it does not care how well the video performed.
I wrote here only last month that Burnham would be wise to take a rival’s counsel rather than trust his own showmanship, and nothing about Monday has changed my mind. The advice stands. Britain does not need a bombshell. It needs a boiler that works.
So I will not be tuning in for the recoupling. But the new resident should remember the one rule the villa never breaks. The islander who plays to the camera instead of doing the graft is always the first to get the text. And in this series, the public vote is counted in the bond market.
Richard Alvin
Richard Alvin is a serial entrepreneur, a former advisor to the UK Government about small business and an Honorary Teaching Fellow on Business at Lancaster University.
A winner of the London Chamber of Commerce Business Person of the year and Freeman of the City of London for his services to business and charity. Richard is also Group MD of Capital Business Media and SME business research company Trends Research, regarded as one of the UK’s leading experts in the SME sector and an active angel investor and advisor to new start companies.
Richard is also the host of Save Our Business the U.S. based business advice television show.
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