BURNHAM'S PRIMARK SOCIALISM

There are moments in the life of a nation when the cut of a man’s cloth tells you more than any speech he might deliver from a lectern. Andy Burnham, newly elevated to the office of Prime Minister and freshly arrived in Kyiv on Ukraine’s Independence Day, has provided us with one such moment. He stepped off the train in what can only be described as the full kit of the modern British progressive: a short-sleeved polo of indeterminate navy, dark chinos that had clearly seen better afternoons, and an air of studied informality that suggested he had just popped out for a packet of crisps and somehow found himself shaking hands with the Ukrainian Foreign Minister.

The photographs are instructive. On one side of the handshake stands a man in traditional embroidered shirt, the sort of garment that announces cultural continuity and a certain seriousness of purpose. On the other stands Britain’s first citizen, looking as if he has come to collect a parcel from the sorting office. One almost expects him to ask whether there is somewhere he can change into something more comfortable. He did, of course, later put on a suit to meet President Zelensky. The suit, we are told, is reserved for the proper occasions. Watching Everton, for instance. This is the heart of the matter. Burnham will dress with proper formality to sit among the faithful at Goodison (or wherever the Toffees are currently lodging their hopes). He will not, it appears, do the same for the symbolic arrival on the soil of a country fighting for its existence. The clothes, as the man once said, maketh the man. In this case they maketh a very particular kind of man: the Primark Socialist.

Primark Socialism is not the old-fashioned variety that involved cloth caps and genuine working-class resentment. It is something more modern, more retail, more carefully calibrated. It is the politics of the affordable polo shirt. It signals solidarity without the inconvenience of looking like one has made an effort. It is authenticity by the metre, cut to fit the average chest and available in bulk. One need not rise early to iron a collar; one simply reaches into the drawer of democratic understatement and emerges looking like everyone else, only with a security detail. There is a certain genius to it. In an age when the public has grown weary of the polished and the remote, the Prime Minister arrives looking as if he has been travelling on the same train as the rest of us. The message is clear: I am one of you. I too know the mild discomfort of synthetic fabric on a warm day. I too understand that a quarter-zip is the outer limit of formalwear for a man who does not wish to appear to be trying too hard. 

Never mind that the journey was not, in fact, the same one the rest of us take, nor that the destination was a capital city under wartime conditions rather than a Saturday afternoon in the stands. The clothes do the talking, and they speak in the reassuring vernacular of the high street. One detects in all this the lingering influence of Burnham’s long apprenticeship in Manchester, where “Manchester clothes” became a political brand of their own. The rejection of the Westminster suit was presented as a kind of moral hygiene: a washing away of the old, stuffy, southern ways. Suits, after all, were what the other lot wore. Suits were for people who had never stood on a cold platform waiting for a delayed Northern service. The polo shirt, by contrast, was democratic. It said: I have not forgotten where I came from, even if where I came from is now a rather more elevated address.

The difficulty arises when the same logic is applied to the world stage. Diplomacy has always had its theatrical side. Leaders dress not merely for comfort but for the occasion, signalling respect for the host, the gravity of the moment, and the continuity of their own office. Zelensky himself has made a political virtue of military-style informality, a choice born of wartime necessity and carefully maintained. Burnham’s version feels less like necessity and more like a lifestyle preference that has been allowed to travel beyond its natural habitat. One does not, as a rule, turn up to a funeral in the clothes one wears to the supermarket, however sincere one’s feelings may be.

There is also the small matter of consistency. A man who will put on a proper suit to watch a football match is making a statement about what he considers worthy of formal attention. Everton, it seems, still commands the full armour of respectability. The Independence Day of a nation under existential threat does not. Or rather, it does once the cameras have recorded the arrival in the preferred uniform of the people. The subsequent change into a suit for the actual meetings has the air of a man who has remembered, slightly late, that he is no longer merely the Mayor of Greater Manchester but the representative of a nuclear power. The delay is telling.

Primark Socialism thrives on this careful management of image. It is cheap in the best and worst senses: accessible, unpretentious, and ultimately disposable. It costs little in the way of genuine formality and returns a high yield in perceived authenticity. One can almost hear the focus groups approving. The public, it is believed, no longer wants leaders who look like leaders. They want leaders who look like the man behind them in the queue at the coffee shop, only with better security and the ability to authorise long-range missile assistance. Whether this is sustainable remains an open question. Clothes may maketh the man, but they can also unmake him if the occasion demands something more than the democratic polo. There is a difference between refusing the pomposity of the past and refusing the basic theatre of seriousness. The former is refreshing. The latter risks looking like a failure of imagination, or worse, a failure of respect.

Burnham has long cultivated the image of the ordinary bloke who somehow found himself in extraordinary circumstances. It has served him well. Yet there are circumstances in which the ordinary bloke is expected to rise to the occasion rather than insist that the occasion come down to his level. A train platform in Kyiv on Independence Day may be one of them. The suit that appears for Everton and vanishes for the initial diplomatic handshake suggests that the hierarchy of priorities remains intact, only inverted in a way that would have puzzled an earlier generation of socialists, for whom dignity in public life was not a bourgeois affectation but part of the point.

In the end, Primark Socialism is less an ideology than a wardrobe strategy. It is the politics of looking approachable while holding power, of signalling solidarity through the absence of effort. It may yet prove popular. The British have always had a soft spot for the unassuming. But one wonders how long the soft spot will last when the soft collar becomes the permanent uniform of the office. 

There are times when a nation needs its leaders to look as if they have dressed for the history they are making, rather than for the journey they took to get there. On the evidence of that Kyiv platform, the current Prime Minister is still working out which is which.

PETER CULLEN (1941 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Peter Cullen has died at the age of 85, which is a respectable span for a man whose most famous utterance was essentially a truck telling everyone to roll out. He passed peacefully in Los Angeles, surrounded by family, thereby denying the universe the more theatrical exit one might have expected from the voice of a robot who regularly exploded for the greater good.

Born in Montreal in 1941, Cullen trained for the stage in the old-fashioned way, which is to say he learned how to speak clearly and stand still while other people threw scenery at him. Fate, however, had other plans. Instead of Shakespeare, he was handed a script about transforming vehicles with moral philosophies, and somehow made a talking semi-trailer sound like a combination of Moses and a slightly disappointed uncle. For four decades he remained Optimus Prime, the one Autobot who never once sounded as if he had been cast by committee or overdubbed by a marketing department.

The achievement was not merely technical. Cullen invested the character with a gravity that survived Michael Bay’s fondness for fireballs the size of small countries. While everything around him detonated with the subtlety of a fireworks factory on payday, Optimus continued to intone noble sentiments as if reading the closing credits of Western civilisation. Fans heard leadership; more sceptical listeners heard a man doing heroic overtime in a recording booth while the director ordered another helicopter crash.

He also voiced Eeyore, proving that the same larynx could shift from interstellar command to mild, rain-soaked melancholy without dropping a stitch. One might say he specialised in characters who were permanently slightly put out by the universe, yet refused to abandon it. In this, Cullen was almost certainly drawing on the quieter side of his own temperament rather than pure invention.

The family asked that he be remembered by the injunction to “be strong enough to be gentle,” a line that would have fitted both the robot and the donkey rather well. In an age of voices that shout to be noticed, Cullen’s quiet authority now sounds almost antique. He leaves behind the rare distinction of having made millions of children believe that a truck could possess a conscience, and of having done so without once raising his voice. That, in the end, may be the more impressive transformation.

TIM CURRY (1946 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Tim Curry, who has Time-Warped his last at the age of 80, spent a lifetime proving that the line between high camp and high art is thinner than a fishnet stocking. The British actor, forever embalmed in the public mind as Dr Frank-N-Furter, the sweet transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania, shuffled off this mortal coil on 25 August at his home in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles, having long since mastered the art of making the ridiculous look like destiny.

Born Timothy James Curry in Grappenhall, Cheshire, he arrived in the world with a voice that could curdle milk or seduce it, depending on the lighting. His father, a naval chaplain, departed early via stroke when Tim was twelve, an event the son later outdid by surviving his own, in 2012, with characteristic stubbornness and a wheelchair. From that point he continued working mostly by voice, which was just as well: the instrument had always been the real star, a baritone capable of velvet menace or velvet seduction, often in the same breath.

It was The Rocky Horror Picture Show that fixed him in amber. On stage and then on screen in 1975, Curry strutted about in heels and makeup as if the universe had been waiting for someone to demonstrate that gender is merely a costume change. Audiences of a certain age still shout the dialogue at midnight screenings, which must have been both flattering and faintly exhausting. He followed this with a gallery of villains and eccentrics: the devil in Legend, the butler in Clue, Pennywise the clown in the 1990 version of It, each performance suggesting that evil is best delivered with a raised eyebrow and perfect diction.

Nor did he neglect lighter fare. In Home Alone 2 he played Mr Hector, the Plaza’s haughty concierge, eyeing a credit-card-wielding child with the disdain of a maître d’ spotting a ketchup stain—comic precision in every arched brow. Four years later, as Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island, he swaggered among the felt and foam with RSC gravitas, singing and scheming as if the Muppets were fellow professionals of the highest order. Both roles showed his unerring instinct for the ridiculous: bureaucratic irritation made hilarious, piratical villainy oddly paternal.

Hollywood never quite knew what to do with him beyond the grotesque, and he never seemed to mind. He collected Tony nominations, voice roles by the dozen, and a memoir, Vagabond, published only last year, in which he revealed just enough to keep the curious hungry. Of his private life he remained resolutely opaque. “I have loved and been loved,” he wrote. “The rest is none of your business.” One suspects the line was delivered with a small, satisfied smile.

In an age that mistakes sincerity for depth, Curry specialised in surfaces that glittered with intelligence. He made excess look like restraint and restraint look like a missed opportunity. The world is a shade less interesting without him, and considerably less well dressed.