Andy Burnham’s first few weeks as Prime Minister has been defined by not what he has done, but by how he has communicated.

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Every major broadsheet and broadcaster has fawned over the arrival of the “First TikTok PM”. LinkedIn grifters have gone from talking about B2B sales to highlighting the thirteen new social media jobs offered by Number 10, and Burnham has seemingly collaborated with every online influencer — from a man on a ladder, to a lady on a bus.

Beyond the media praise, is the assessment that Burnham is better online actually true?

From 2017 to 2024, I advised countless UK politicians as a digital adviser. I filmed Rory Stewart sleeping on someone’s sofa whilst running for Mayor of London, I captured James Cleverly eating jollof rice as Foreign Secretary, and I was in that fateful room when Rishi Sunak decided to wear Adidas Sambas with a suit.

For some of the most viral moments in UK politics, I was behind the camera.

More often than not, whether I was successful at my job was defined not by the number of likes or views I generated — the objective measurement of virality — but by whether the Twitter commentariat crowned the leader I was working with as “a good communicator”.

So when the Westminster bubble cast anointed Burnham as worthy of such an accolade, I was inherently sceptical.

Did this perception of Burnham as a strong online communicator align with the data?

There’s a few ways to measure this, and the company I founded shortly after leaving Number 10, Knox Digital, tracks the online performance of every individual MP to........

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