More than you might think.
Andy Burnham walked into Downing Street on Monday of this week. He’s a working-class kid from Lancashire whose dad was a telephone engineer and mum was a GP’s receptionist – and whose first ever job was collecting the football pools door to door around his neighbourhood. He’s spoken openly about feeling like an outsider at Cambridge – finding his identity not in the lecture halls but in The Smiths and The Stone Roses. He spent years being underestimated, told his time hadn’t come yet, building his reputation not in Westminster but on the ground in Greater Manchester, close to the people he was there to serve.
This week, he became Prime Minister.
In his first speech – delivered without notes, without a lectern, standing in the street – he said something a lot of people found striking: that politics hadn’t been good enough, that he knew people were fed up, and that he wanted to be honest about it. His exact words were: we have not been good enough, and we need to be better.
Worth noting that Starmer used similar language when he came to power – it’s not an entirely new political move. What felt different about Burnham saying it was harder to pin down – a quality in the delivery, or perhaps simply the fact that his whole story up to that point made it feel less like a line and more like something he’d actually thought about.
I want to say something about that speech, though, because something in it has been nagging at me since Monday.
There was a head/heart disconnect I couldn’t stop thinking about. Here is a man who, when he’s just talking – in interviews, in front of cameras, in the conversations that catch him off guard – sounds completely himself. Warm and direct and northern and real, someone you’d trust with something serious. Standing outside Downing Street for the biggest moment of his career, though, something shifted. The man and the message weren’t quite in the same place.
If anyone has a line to Andy Burnham, please tell him to get in touch. One of the things I teach – and have taught to speakers at every level for years – is that the most important thing any of us can do in front of an audience is sound like ourselves, not a polished or carefully managed version of ourselves. The gap between Burnham-in-conversation and Burnham-on-a-stage is costing him something, even when the words are right, and I’d love to help him close it.
This applies in business too, and not just for those of us who speak for a living.
The other thing worth paying attention to is what he’s doing with social media. One of the areas where Starmer consistently struggled was the distance between him and the people he was supposed to be leading, and a lot of that showed up in how he used, or didn’t use, social platforms. Burnham is different – and it feels like he’s taken a leaf out of Jacinda Ardern’s book. Ardern genuinely changed the template for what political social media could look like – the Facebook Lives from her sofa, the unscripted moments, the sense that she was talking to people rather than broadcasting at them. She dismantled the us-and-them wall between politician and public in a way that still feels radical, and the trust she built was extraordinary.
Burnham seems to get that. He’s always been praised for being genuinely present online, for sounding like a person rather than a communications team, and from what I can see he’s carrying that into Downing Street rather than letting the institution swallow it.
We talk about this constantly in the coaching and speaking work we do. An audience can feel the difference between content that comes from you and content that comes from the managed version of you. They can’t always put words to it, but they feel it – and it either builds trust or erodes it, one post at a time.
Burnham built his following by being himself in public, consistently, over a very long time. His values, his roots, his refusal to sand off the edges that made him feel like an outsider – that’s what carried him all the way to the top job.
Something to sit with this week.
Where is the gap between how you sound when you’re just talking and how you sound when you’re trying to be professional? And what would it mean for your business if you closed it?
The rest, as Burnham’s story shows, tends to follow.
#UnleashYourAwesome