TalkTV’s Alex Phillips was discussing prisons and public safety when she spotted Andy Burnham’s illustrated profile picture and launched into an extended attack on it instead.
The image, which Phillips called a “cartoon” and an “emoji,” was created by acclaimed Manchester illustrator Stanley Chow. Burnham’s used it for years, and it featured heavily throughout his Makerfield byelection campaign. None of that mattered to Phillips, who suggested it made Britain’s new PM look ridiculous and claimed Trump would mock him for it.
A serious discussion takes a sharp turn
Phillips opened with a genuinely furious segment on prison overcrowding, early release, and successive governments failing to build enough capacity for dangerous offenders. The on-screen caption referenced Burnham reconsidering early release for the men convicted of killing PC Andrew Harper, and Phillips argued ministers should focus on building capacity rather than debating which offenders can be safely let out. Legitimate topic.
Then she pulled up Burnham’s X account. “I’m sorry, that is your prime minister.” She complained he’d used it as his “campaign picture,” called it a cartoon, and said it was evidence the government treats politics as a popularity contest. “If this was Donald Trump, Donald Trump would be licking his lips.” Her imagined Trump response: “What is this emoji running the country?” She finished by comparing Burnham’s operation to a “kindergarten of the North” involving “fuzzy felt and Comic Sans.”
One of Manchester’s best-known illustrators actually made it
Contrary to Phillips implying it was campaign staff messing around with crayons, this is Stanley Chow’s work. He created it after Burnham’s confrontation with Boris Johnson’s government over Greater Manchester’s pandemic restrictions in October 2020, shared it online, and Burnham quickly adopted it as his profile picture. Burnham’s team later licensed it properly, and it’s since appeared on posters, billboards, mugs, beer mats and the “Vote Andy For Us” branding used during Makerfield.
Chow’s own description of his style: somewhere between portraiture and caricature, reducing a face to simple geometric shapes while keeping the subject instantly recognisable. His client list includes The New Yorker, Time, The White Stripes and Manchester poet Tony Walsh, artwork for The White Stripes’ Icky Thump even earned a Grammy nomination for its packaging. This portrait has become one of Chow’s most recognisable political images, and it was already well known across Greater Manchester long before Burnham won Makerfield by over 9,000 votes and became PM.
Reform even used altered versions of it in attack adverts during that campaign, prompting Chow to instruct lawyers over unauthorised use. Reform pulled the posts while insisting it was fair use. So this isn’t a rushed social media graphic. It’s established work from an internationally published illustrator, and Burnham’s connection to it goes back nearly six years.
The Trump comparison didn’t help
Phillips is entitled to dislike the portrait. Using Trump as the arbiter of tasteful political imagery is harder to follow. Trump has spent the past week posting flattering AI images of himself as historical, military and religious figures, alongside Lincoln and Washington, dressed as a Revolutionary War commander, kissing a gold crucifix. Trump’s also already spoken to Burnham directly since he took office, and Burnham’s said he’d challenge the president whenever British interests required it. Presenting an imagined Trump nickname as decisive evidence Burnham should ditch his avatar is a genuinely strange standard to invoke.
Viewers were baffled
The clip spread fast, mostly because of how it reacted rather than what it depicted.
@King0243_PJC: “Alex Phillips is having a full nervous breakdown on air… over a profile picture. Absolute state of her.”
@OWS1892 called it an “unhinged and embarrassing rant.”
@reecepst: “Every clip I see of this woman is her screeching. She needs to calm the fuck down.”
@forever2021may: “Are they drunk?”
@BabyCorsola compared her to “a little rabid Nadine Dorries,” while @TonyPot15280928 asked the obvious question: “Who gives a fuck about his profile pic?”
@GreggC_CC: Phillips was having “a complete breakdown over Andy Burnham’s Twitter avatar.”
Campaign branding’s always fair game for criticism, especially when a politician builds a personal identity around carefully designed imagery. Phillips never actually offered that criticism, though. Her objection seemed to be that an illustrated portrait existed at all.
By the end of the segment, a real conversation about prisons had been replaced entirely by an imagined Donald Trump reaction to a Manchester illustrator’s work. Chow’s portrait is still on Burnham’s account. Unlikely this changed his mind.
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