Andy Burnham has returned Danny Dyer’s “who is he?” attack with a question of his own.
The Prime Minister was asked about the actor’s comments while travelling to New York for the United Nations General Assembly.
“I’m not sure I know who he is. Is he the father-in-law of a West Ham player?”
It was a deliberately dry answer, and a fairly effective one.
Dyer is a lifelong West Ham supporter whose daughter Dani is married to the club’s captain, Jarrod Bowen.
Burnham’s response came after Dyer launched an expletive-filled attack on Britain’s recent political leadership while attending a protest against sewage pollution in Kent.
Asked whether he had a message for the Prime Minister, Dyer replied:
“I don’t know who the Prime Minister is, mate. Do you?”
When told that Burnham was in Downing Street, he continued:
“Yeah, but who is he? I don’t understand. Did anyone vote for him? Because I didn’t vote for him.”
He then offered an unprintable assessment of the prime ministers Britain has had in recent years before telling the BBC to broadcast his comments.
Dyer was protesting against sewage pollution
The exchange began at a Surfers Against Sewage demonstration in Leysdown-on-Sea, Kent.
Dyer attended alongside his daughter Dani and singer Becky Hill. The protest called for England’s privatised water companies to be returned to public ownership.
More than 315,000 people have signed a petition supporting the campaign.
Dyer said he became more involved in the issue while helping to revive a caravan park near the Kent coast. Testing carried out in the area, he claimed, detected E. coli levels four times higher than they should have been.
“Our children should be allowed to get in the sea and we should be able to get in the sea,” he said.
Dyer asked why customers were paying water companies that continued to allow sewage to enter the sea and accused the industry of failing to invest sufficiently in its infrastructure.
His comments about Burnham quickly overtook the actual subject of the demonstration, particularly after the original clip was shared online.
The BBC journalist who posted the footage reportedly added: “I don’t think we’ll use this clip of Danny Dyer on the news tonight.” The post was later deleted.
Burnham and Dyer may agree on the bigger issue
The strange part of the exchange is that Burnham and Dyer appear to be broadly aligned on the issue that brought the actor to the protest.
Burnham has repeatedly argued for greater public control of the water industry.
Before entering Downing Street, he told Victoria Derbyshire there was “an overwhelming case for public ownership” of Thames Water.
His government has since promised to challenge water firms seeking to pass unnecessary costs to customers. Burnham has warned that households cannot continue to be treated as “a blank cheque” while pollution incidents rise.
However, ministers have not committed to taking every water company into public ownership. The government has instead discussed a range of interventions, from tougher regulation to public control of failing suppliers.
Dyer’s argument was blunter: the current model has failed and the industry should be renationalised.
That disagreement over the detail was rather lost once the conversation moved from sewage to whether either man knew who the other was.
‘Did anyone vote for him?’
Dyer’s question about who voted for Burnham reflects one of the criticisms the Prime Minister has faced since replacing Keir Starmer.
Burnham became Labour leader after Starmer resigned and entered Downing Street because Labour still commanded a majority in the House of Commons.
He did not lead the party at the 2024 general election, although he did return to Parliament by winning the Makerfield by-election before taking over the government.
Britain does not directly elect its prime minister. Voters elect constituency MPs, and the monarch appoints the person capable of commanding a Commons majority. That allows a governing party to change its leader without holding an immediate general election.
Burnham’s opponents have nevertheless argued that his programme differs significantly from the platform Labour took to voters under Starmer.
Dyer expressed that objection in his own unmistakable style.
Danny Dyer has done this before
This is not Dyer’s first political intervention to become more famous than the programme on which he made it.
During a television discussion about Brexit in 2018, he attacked David Cameron for calling the referendum and then disappearing from public life after the result.
The rant became one of the most widely shared political television clips of the year.
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