BURNHAM'S TRAGIC MISERY TOUR

There is a certain grim poetry in watching a newly minted Prime Minister discover the joys of the open road. Andy Burnham, having lately ascended to the top job with the air of a man who has finally been allowed to drive the family car after years of being told to sit in the back and not touch anything, has decided that what the nation most urgently requires is a bus tour. Not the metaphorical kind that politicians have long favoured when they wish to appear mobile while remaining firmly stationary in their own preconceptions, but an actual, physical procession of carefully selected constituencies, carefully selected voters, and carefully selected camera angles. One half-expects the vehicle itself to be painted in the soothing pastels of institutional reassurance, with the words “Listening Mode” stencilled on the side in a font designed by focus group.

The whole enterprise has the unmistakable tang of The Thick of It about it, that peerless chronicle of political ineptitude in which every sincere impulse is immediately processed through a mangle of spin, panic and self-congratulation until it emerges as something both smaller and more ridiculous than the original intention. In the series, the special advisers would already be circulating talking points about “getting out of the bubble” while simultaneously ensuring that no actual bubble-popping took place. Real people would be produced like props, their grievances carefully filtered so that nothing too awkward—nothing that might require the government to confront the larger structural fires currently consuming the house—could interrupt the gentle narrative of a caring leader rolling up his sleeves. Burnham’s tour arrives pre-sanitised in much the same fashion. It is not so much a journey of discovery as a travelling exhibition of predetermined empathy.

One can picture the itinerary with painful clarity. There will be the obligatory high-street walkabout, during which the Prime Minister will pause to admire a closed shopfront and declare that something must be done about the high street, as though the high street had only just now decided to die for want of his personal attention. There will be the carefully choreographed encounter with a family struggling with the cost of living, in which the family’s actual complaints will be listened to with practised intensity before being translated, by some alchemical process known only to the communications team, into a pledge about making it easier to cancel gym memberships or ensuring that 'half-price' means half-price. 

These are not contemptible aims in themselves. A man who can no longer afford his Netflix subscription is entitled to a measure of administrative mercy. Yet to present such measures as the principal fruits of a national listening exercise is rather like a fire brigade arriving at a blazing mansion and announcing that they have successfully unblocked the gutters. The stage-management is clinical to the point of parody. Every stop will have been reconnoitred, every local dignitary briefed, every potential heckler either excluded or pre-emptively transformed into a useful soundbite. The bus itself will no doubt contain a mobile media unit capable of converting spontaneous human interaction into polished content before the engine has even cooled. 

One imagines the special advisers in the back seats, heads bent over tablets, already composing the triumphant summary: “The Prime Minister has heard the British people. The British people want simpler subscription cancellations and honest discounting. The Prime Minister is delivering.” It is the political equivalent of those elaborate military tattoos in which every movement is rehearsed until the appearance of martial vigour becomes a kind of elegant dance. The public is invited to applaud the performance while remaining carefully insulated from the possibility that the performance might change anything of consequence.

There is something almost touching in the insistence that this is not about photographs. Of course it is about photographs. The modern political class has long since internalised the lesson that the image of listening is more valuable than the act of listening itself, particularly when the act risks revealing that the public’s priorities do not align with the ones already selected for announcement. Burnham’s tour is therefore less a voyage into the unknown than a carefully plotted circuit of the known unknowns. The known knowns—those everyday irritations that can be addressed with a press release and a modest regulatory tweak—will be elevated into the status of national priorities. The larger questions, the ones that might require more than a change of bus route, will remain politely off-stage, like uninvited relatives at a wedding who are known to drink too much and ask awkward questions about the family fortune.

There remains, of course, the one subject on which the entire travelling circus of concern maintains a silence so complete it acquires the dignity of a religious vow. While the Prime Minister’s bus winds its way through selected high streets, pausing to listen intently to the tragedy of an overpriced latte or a subscription that refuses to die, the larger arithmetic of who actually lives in those streets, and how that arithmetic is being rewritten by continuous arrivals, is treated as an impolite noise from outside the vehicle. 

One begins to suspect that the carefully cultivated ignorance is not accidental. A government that appears content to oversee the steady importation of future voters while polishing the minor inconveniences of the present ones has discovered a form of long-term electoral insurance that requires neither manifesto nor debate—only a determined refusal to notice the demographic engine humming beneath the stage-managed concern.

WILLIAM ORBIT (1956 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

William Orbit has left the building, or rather the studio, at the age of 69, departing this world with the same unhurried elegance he once applied to a drum machine. Born William Mark Wainwright in 1956, the son of teachers who had clawed their way into the middle class only to watch their boy reverse the process by leaving school at sixteen to squat and consume Mars bars with acid, he spent the rest of his life proving that the right sort of noise could elevate almost anything.

He began, as so many English experimentalists do, in a disused school with a synthesiser and a pair of like-minded dreamers, forming Torch Song. The results were interesting in the way that early experiments with electricity were interesting: occasional sparks, intermittent power cuts, and the faint smell of something overheating. Then came the Strange Cargo series, ambient records that drifted past like expensive fog, and Bassomatic, which briefly persuaded the charts that house music could be both fascinating and rhythmic.

The real trick arrived when Madonna, seeking reinvention after a period of professional turbulence, hired him to produce Ray of Light. Suddenly the Queen of Pop sounded as if she had been left overnight in a particularly stylish planetarium. The album collected Grammys the way other people collect parking tickets. Orbit had performed the producer’s highest service: he made a superstar sound as though she had discovered depth, while ensuring the beats remained sufficiently propulsive that nobody actually fell asleep during the discovery.

He repeated variations of the miracle for Blur’s 13, All Saints’ “Pure Shores,” and assorted other clients who arrived seeking transcendence and left with something that would play nicely in both clubs and elevators. His own classical-electronic album Pieces in a Modern Style climbed the charts, proving that Barber’s Adagio could survive a night on the tiles and still look presentable at breakfast.

Orbit was the rare producer who made the technology sound human and the humans sound slightly more expensive. He never shouted. He merely adjusted the atmosphere until everyone else sounded better for having breathed it. In an industry devoted to the loud and the temporary, he specialised in the luminous and the lingering. The silence he leaves behind is, characteristically, rather well produced.

JIMMY CRICKET (1945 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Jimmy Cricket, not to be confused with Pinocchio's insect sidekick, has cracked his final gag at the venerable age of 80, surrounded by family, laughter, and presumably a spare pair of wellington boots. Born James Mulgrew in 1945 in the County Tyrone town of Cookstown, Cricket – real name suggesting either entomological destiny or a clerical error in the Book of Life – left school at 16, dallied briefly with the precarious mathematics of a betting shop, then discovered his true vocation as a Redcoat at Butlin’s. There, among the knobbly knees and forced singalongs, he honed the persona that would sustain him through five decades of light entertainment: cut-off trousers, bow tie, floppy hat, and those trademark wellies marked “L” and “R” heroically worn on the wrong feet. 

It was comedy of the gentlest, most Catholic variety – wholesome enough to make even a Bishop blush with approval, which, in 2015, one did when Pope Francis conferred upon him a Knighthood of the Order of St Gregory the Great for services to charity and not frightening the horses. Television beckoned in the 1980s after a talent show victory. And There’s More! gave the nation its nightly dose of affectionate daftness, launched Rory Bremner on an unsuspecting public, and allowed Cricket to tour the nation’s stages like a benevolent virus of good cheer. 

He appeared in Royal Variety Performances, pantomimes, radio series (Jimmy’s Cricket Team, naturally), and enough summer seasons to make Blackpool’s illuminations seem fleeting by comparison. His humour never punched down; it patted the audience on the head and offered them a cup of tea. In an age when comedians increasingly resembled angry sociologists with better agents, Cricket remained defiantly pre-ironic, a living rebuke to the notion that laughter requires a PhD in deconstruction. 

He raised four children, one of whom became a priest (proof, perhaps, that divine comedy runs in the family), supported hospices, and maintained the quiet decency of a man who understood that entertainment and edification need not be enemies. Death, that final curtain call, has now claimed him after a short illness. The world of British comedy, already short on unselfconscious warmth, is a size smaller without him. Alas, from Jimmy - now there's no more.