The Prime Minister Is Watching Television

By Matthew Parish

Saturday 24 October 2026

There are moments in the history of a nation when the dignity of the state is expressed with exceptional clarity. Churchill addressing the country during the Blitz was one. The Coronation of Elizabeth II was another. The solemn opening of Parliament, with its uniforms, trumpets, swords, ermine and incomprehensible constitutional rituals, has traditionally been another. And then, on Friday evening, 23 October 2026, the British people were afforded a new image of sovereignty: the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom sitting on a sofa inside 10 Downing Street, drinking beer, eating Twiglets and watching Gogglebox.

Andy Burnham thereby became the first serving British Prime Minister to appear on Celebrity Gogglebox. His companion was his longstanding friend Steve Rotheram, Mayor of the Liverpool City Region, and their surroundings were reassuringly domestic. There were beers, bowls of crisps, Skips, pork scratchings and bacon fries. There were also Twiglets, which the Prime Minister apparently considers particularly good. The affairs of one of the world’s oldest constitutional states had, for an evening, been reduced to two middle-aged men discussing snacks in front of the television.

This was not, however, merely an exercise in political frivolity. The programme was a special edition in aid of Stand Up To Cancer, the joint fundraising campaign organised by Cancer Research UK and Channel 4. The campaign has raised more than £127 million in Britain since 2012, funding 73 clinical trials and research projects involving more than 13,000 cancer patients. Burnham became visibly emotional while watching the stories of people whose lives had been devastated by cancer and spoke about the extraordinary advances that medical research has achieved.

That fact rather spoils the easiest joke, because the easiest joke is obvious. The British Empire once governed approximately a quarter of the world’s land surface. Its Prime Ministers corresponded with emperors, deployed battleships and occasionally redrew international borders over lunch. In October 2026 the First Lord of the Treasury was filmed asking the Mayor of Liverpool whether he wanted some Skips. One feels that Gibbon, had he lived long enough, might have found another volume to add to The History of the Decline and Fall. But perhaps that reaction tells us something more interesting about ourselves than it does about Burnham.

For what exactly do we expect a Prime Minister to look like? We expect him to inhabit a curious theatre of authority. He must emerge through the black door of Number 10 with a serious expression. He must stand behind lecterns bearing the royal arms. He must walk briskly through corridors accompanied by anxious people carrying folders. He must occasionally descend from an aeroplane while wearing an overcoat. If there is an international crisis, he must sit at a long table beneath severe lighting while military officers point at maps. These things reassure us because they look like government, although none of them is government. They are the iconography of government.

Political authority has always required theatre because political authority is, in substantial part, an abstraction. The state cannot be seen. One cannot shake hands with the constitution. Sovereignty has no face and bureaucracy has no body. Therefore societies manufacture symbols through which these invisible concepts can be made tangible. Kings wear crowns. Judges wear wigs. Soldiers salute flags. Ministers sit on the government front bench. Prime Ministers inhabit a Georgian townhouse with a famous black door that is considerably more impressive on television than the building itself.

The British have traditionally been exceptionally good at this sort of thing. Indeed much of the British constitution consists of persuading everybody that something is tremendously important by giving it an absurd costume and refusing to explain it. Black Rod has a door slammed in his or her face. The Lord Chancellor once walked backwards. MPs are forbidden from calling one another liars and therefore develop elaborate circumlocutions for explaining that their opponents are lying. The King reads a speech written by ministers while wearing a crown, thereby demonstrating simultaneously that he is sovereign and that he has almost no political power. It all works remarkably well, until somebody wheels a sofa into the picture.

The philosophical problem with Gogglebox in Downing Street is therefore not that it makes the Prime Minister look ridiculous. Prime Ministers have always been ridiculous; the pomp and circumstance merely provide camouflage. The problem is that Gogglebox reveals the machinery by which we prevent ourselves from noticing.

Burnham was sitting beside Rotheram in ordinary clothes. They watched Strictly Come Dancing, Countdown and The Traitors. They made jokes and consumed snacks. Burnham announced that, were he ever to appear on Strictly, he would dance to “Sit Down” by James. While watching The Traitors, he suggested that politicians might possess a certain natural aptitude for the programme because one has to be able to identify the wrong person in the room.

There are jokes that professional satirists labour over for days, and there are jokes that Providence simply places gently upon the table. Burnham himself had arrived in Downing Street only three months earlier, after returning to Parliament, replacing Sir Keir Starmer as Labour leader and becoming Prime Minister on 20 July. The spectacle of a recently installed Prime Minister watching The Traitors and discussing the political skill of identifying suspicious characters therefore possesses a degree of dramatic perfection that ought not to be disturbed by excessive commentary.

Yet the darker philosophical point lies elsewhere. Democracy has been steadily dismantling the distance between ruler and ruled for centuries. Medieval kings were sacred beings. Early modern monarchs ruled by divine right. Victorian statesmen were photographed like marble statues. Twentieth-century politicians learned radio and television. Twenty-first-century politicians must master TikTok, Instagram and the peculiar art of eating ordinary food convincingly in front of cameras. The trajectory is unmistakable: authority has descended from the throne, crossed the parliamentary chamber, entered the television studio and finally sat down on the sofa.

Perhaps this is healthy. The notion that those who govern us are a superior species has caused enough trouble throughout human history. Prime Ministers eat crisps. Presidents lose their spectacles. Generals get indigestion. Judges forget passwords. Behind every magnificent institutional façade are human beings wondering where they left their telephone chargers. Democracy depends in part upon remembering this.

Burnham’s Gogglebox appearance can therefore be understood as a little exercise in democratic demystification. Here is the Prime Minister, it says. He is not a demigod. He watches television, laughs at stupid things and has opinions about snacks. He becomes upset when confronted with the suffering of people affected by cancer. He resembles, in these respects, millions of people over whom he temporarily exercises considerable political authority. There is something attractive about that, although there is also something terrifying about it.

We would perhaps prefer to imagine that, somewhere behind the black door of Downing Street, there exists a secret caste of exceptionally serious people who understand what is happening. They have access to special information. They receive intelligence briefings. They possess red telephones. Somewhere there is a room full of screens upon which the problems of civilisation are being carefully monitored by adults who know exactly what to do. This is one of the comforting myths upon which modern states depend.

Anyone who has spent sufficient time around large institutions eventually discovers the less comforting truth. Governments, corporations, armies, universities and international organisations are composed of ordinary human beings improvising under conditions of imperfect information. They have meetings. They misunderstand emails. They lose documents. They become irritated with colleagues. They form factions. They make decisions because lunch is approaching. Sometimes the person nominally in charge knows less about a problem than the junior official sitting three chairs away. Civilisation nevertheless continues, which may be humanity’s most impressive achievement.

Seen in this light, Gogglebox in Number 10 is almost existential horror. The camera has accidentally wandered behind the scenery. We discover that the Wizard of Oz is not operating an enormous machine; he is sitting on a cream sofa asking whether anybody wants a bacon fry.

The timing made the symbolism sharper. Burnham’s appearance attracted criticism because Britain was simultaneously confronting serious questions of national security and preparing for an important Budget. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch questioned whether the Prime Minister ought to have had time for celebrity television. Burnham replied that he made no apology for trying to govern with occasional lightness and humour, and emphasised that the appearance was intended to encourage support for cancer research. That defence deserves more consideration than the normal machinery of political point-scoring permits.

If a Prime Minister can spend an evening on television and thereby encourage people to contribute to medical research that saves lives, what precisely is the objection? Is it that watching television is beneath the dignity of his office? If so, what is dignity and whom does it serve?

There is a distinction between dignity and pomposity that British public life does not always successfully maintain. Dignity is seriousness of purpose. Pomposity is seriousness of appearance. The two are easily confused because pomp has traditionally been one of the methods by which institutions communicate their importance. Yet the moral value of an act cannot sensibly depend upon whether it looks sufficiently prime ministerial.

Imagine two Prime Ministers. One spends an evening in Whitehall attending a reception beneath chandeliers, exchanging grave observations with ambassadors while liveried staff circulate with champagne. The other spends an evening eating Twiglets on Gogglebox and thereby persuades thousands of people to donate money towards cancer research. Which of these activities possesses greater dignity? The answer is not necessarily the one with the chandeliers.

There is something faintly Christian about this inversion, although Burnham presumably did not intend a theological demonstration. The important act is deliberately stripped of grandeur. The powerful man makes himself ordinary. Instead of demanding reverence, he sits amongst the rest of us. The symbolism of authority is temporarily abandoned in pursuit of compassion for strangers, and then somebody passes the pork scratchings.

This combination of the sublime and the ridiculous is, in fact, profoundly British. Britain has never really trusted grandeur unless it can be punctured with a joke. The same country that invented the State Opening of Parliament also invented Monty Python. The nation that produced the Household Cavalry produced Dad’s Army. We preserve a monarchy of extraordinary ceremonial magnificence while endlessly discussing whether members of the Royal Family squeeze their toothpaste correctly. Perhaps Gogglebox in Downing Street is therefore not the destruction of British political tradition but its logical culmination.

The episode also tells us something about contemporary political power. The modern politician does not merely govern; he must be visible. Visibility has become a political resource almost comparable with money or institutional authority. A Prime Minister who communicated exclusively through parliamentary statements and official communiqués would now seem bizarrely remote. Politics has entered the attention economy, and politicians must therefore compete with footballers, actors, influencers, comedians, cats and people falling into swimming pools.

This creates obvious dangers. Government may become performance. Difficult problems may be replaced by attractive images. Political judgment may become subordinate to audience metrics. The distinction between statesman and celebrity becomes increasingly difficult to maintain when both spend much of their working lives attempting to generate favourable video clips. But again the cancer charity complicates the criticism. Attention itself is morally neutral. What matters is what one does with it.

Celebrity is simply accumulated human attention. If Burnham possesses some quantity of it by virtue of being Prime Minister, directing a fraction of that attention towards cancer research is difficult to condemn. The very machinery that can trivialise politics can also be employed to remind millions of viewers about mortality, suffering, medical science and generosity. That is why the most important moment of the programme was not the crisps but the moment when the joking stopped.

Confronted with the experiences of people affected by cancer, Burnham became tearful. The Prime Minister disappeared for a moment and a human being remained. He spoke of the devastation caused by the disease and of the hope provided by extraordinary advances in research. That transition from comedy to grief explains why the episode worked as something more than publicity.

Human existence itself makes precisely the same transition without warning. We spend our lives discussing trivialities because we cannot spend every waking hour contemplating death. We eat snacks, watch television, complain about trains and laugh with friends. Then the telephone rings and somebody has cancer. The trivial and the profound are not opposites; they coexist, often separated by only a few seconds.

Perhaps that is the philosophical lesson of Andy Burnham’s evening on the Downing Street sofa. Political philosophy has traditionally concerned itself with enormous abstractions: sovereignty, justice, liberty, legitimacy, authority and the state. Yet every one of these abstractions ultimately exists for creatures who spend most of their lives doing very ordinary things. They love their children. They worry about money. They watch television. They become ill and eventually they die. A state that forgets this becomes monstrous, while a statesman who occasionally remembers it may therefore be forgiven a Twiglet.

There remains, nevertheless, something wonderfully unsettling about the whole affair. Somewhere in Britain on Friday evening, millions of citizens sat upon sofas watching television footage of the Prime Minister sitting upon a sofa watching television. The Prime Minister was watching people on television. We were watching the Prime Minister watching those people. Commentators then appeared on television to discuss what we had watched the Prime Minister watching. Plato’s cave has acquired Freeview, and one suspects that Baudrillard would have needed to lie down.

Perhaps this is where contemporary democracy has finally arrived: not dictatorship, not utopia and not even particularly dramatic decadence, but an infinite regress of citizens and rulers watching one another through screens while eating flavoured maize products. There are worse political systems, and history supplies an ample catalogue of them.

The Romans eventually had Caligula. The French had the Terror. Russia has Vladimir Putin. Britain, for the moment, has Andy Burnham offering Steve Rotheram a choice between Skips and Twiglets while raising money for cancer research. History may yet judge us kindly, although it may be puzzled by the snacks.