Andy Burnham is like Donald Trump. I hope he becomes more so. No, no, obviously not like that. Not the botched war, nor the tariffs, nor the weird bromance with Putin, nor the strange tangerine colour. I mean, governing for the new times by being on perpetual to-everyone broadcast – being unignorable. Trump does it with provocative but also often funny-shocking social media posts. Burnham does it with simple, direct, conversational filmettes on social media – sometimes about neoliberalism or the joys of the north, but also about his music playlist, his greying hair, his running, his clothes. Like Trump, he comes across as authentically himself, a natural communicator. I hope he doesn’t stop; in the bumpy times ahead, this may yet prove his superpower.
Moving the goalposts
Andy Burnham may also be the great liberator of all of us caught in the web of a sinister London cult known as “the Arsenal”. From Keir Starmer to Melvyn Bragg, Prince Harry to Benedict Cumberbatch, “Gooners” have long dominated my world. I know sod all about football, but I do know that all sorts of semi-political networking goes on around the club. Well perhaps no longer: it’s Everton now. Goodison Park dodges the Emirates’ defence to become the most politically significant club.
Northern soul
Will we see a wider cultural rebalancing towards the north to match Burnham’s political project unveiled? I hope so. Like me, Burnham read English at Cambridge, taught by a friend of mine, John Mullan. The bard of Goodison Park is Roger McGough and among Burnham’s favourite bands is the sublime Elbow. Maybe we’ll get a bit more JB Priestley to balance Orwell; more talk of Auden, a little less of Eliot? A boy can dream…
Whoever it is, the studying-English thing matters. This week a friend sent me Margaret Atwood’s recent speech at Granada University, in which she quotes Auden (probably, or EM Forster), asking that essential question: “How do I know what I think, until I see what I say?” Her address is a robust defence of the humanities. They teach people, she says, how to think, “how to create, and how to understand other people, especially people unlike themselves”. Novels are the most powerful empathy machines humanity has yet developed.
Cultural capital
Our editor, Tom McTague, leads me on to another “Eng lit” problem: the allure of what is difficult. I’m deep in the cloudy entrails of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake – a book to be listened to and read simultaneously. Members of Joyce’s family and some of his closest friends told him it was just too difficult. Ezra Pound, for goodness’ sake, told Joyce that nothing short of divine vision “or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherisation”. Perhaps at some level Joyce agreed: before he died, he was talking about writing something short and simple.
As I lope round London parks in the heat, I ask myself whether my increasing addiction to this monstrous obscurity is real, or because I have spent so long on it that it’s become an investment I don’t want to “waste”.
Then there’s pretentiousness. Do I want to read the Wake, or do I want to be the kind of person who reads it? I have found the same problem with Wagner, to whose charms Tom is succumbing. Some of the music is sublime, and for sure there is a message about power and corruption that stays fresh. But all those wailing, horned Germans; the antisemitism; the enthusiasm for pink silk underwear…
I enjoy it once in a while. But, as with Arsenal, we should beware of cults. I want Tom to enjoy Wagner’s music, but I don’t want him to become a Wagnerian: the composer’s loyal fans are ferociously right wing, dressed all in black, with faces like white hatchets and pitiless stares – terrifying. And the men are even worse. I’m with Billy Wilder, who allegedly said, after attending a Wagner opera that had started at 8pm: “At midnightI looked down at my watch. It said 8.15.”
An investigative great
The Guardian’s great investigative journalist David Hencke has died. We were friends and rivals in the mid-1980s, when we jointly devised cunning schemes to get political scoops, levering stories from the committee system. Grandiose MPs thought David harmless since he looked as if he had dressed hurriedly in the dark, and wore a beard apparently attached in handfuls with glue – but he was lethal, a better reporter than I ever was. Luckily for me (and like me) he was also compulsively indiscreet and after asking a few questions, during which he would bob up and down with delight and excitement, I could often work out what his latest story was before he published it and scoop the scoop. Sorry, David. You will be very much missed.
[Further reading: Andy Burnham’s win-win-win-win-win-win economy]