Cackling happily into their pints, the two most powerful men in the country scoff their way through a selection of pub snacks.

Pork scratchings or scampi fries? Or maybe old-school peanuts? It’s hardly the toughest choice currently facing Andy Burnham and the chancellor, John Healey, so some may find this week’s made-to-go-viral Instagram reel of them gleefully ranking crisps a bit silly. (I’m writing this, laptop balanced on my knee, beside a hospital bed; right now I couldn’t care less whether the chancellor likes bacon fries.) But I do care, intensely, about a government that is promising once-in-a-generation reform of care for elderly people winning the public’s confidence for long enough to actually carry out that promise, and weirdly in 2026 that means chomping crisps on camera to establish your bona fides with people who’d scroll straight past conventional political content.

Pulling off this kind of freewheeling, seemingly casual content actually takes surprising skill, as the compulsively online Green leader, Zack Polanski – until now the reigning king of leftwing British TikTok – has just inadvertently demonstrated. On Wednesday, the police cleared Polanski of any wrongdoing over reposting a picture of a man in a T-shirt emblazoned with a guillotine and the words, “We’re only making plans for Nigel”. (Polanski says it was among a bunch of images he uploaded without looking properly first, and he deleted it as soon as he realised.) An innocent........

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