i, I'm Andy Burnham and I don't believe any child should eat gravel for breakfast. That's why we've launched the National No Gravel Breakfast initiative. Hi, I'm Andy Burnham and I think everyone should have access to sitting on a chair no matter if they live in the north or the chair-rich south. Hi, I'm Andy Burnham and I don't think pensioners should be required to stab themselves in the hand with cocktail sticks. Unless that's what they want. In which case I will personally do this for them.

Hi, I'm Andy Burnham and I believe in a mother's love, the laughter of baby horses and beautifully crisp and gooey churros straight from the pan. Unless you don't want those. In which case I believe you have that choice and I will fight for it. Or not fight for it. Whichever.

In the absence of a manifesto or an actual election campaign, it feels like the best place to experience raw, unfiltered Burnham-ism, to really get a handle on his vision as mid-season firefighting prime minister, is the videos on his LinkedIn page. Which are pretty good and, yeah, he seems nice, and like he generally agrees with me, so that's fine.

This is not a criticism of Burnham. It seems a pretty clear-sighted strategy on his part, mainly because politics is ridiculous now. Keir Starmer is widely seen as perhaps the worst prime minister of all time, the man who lost control of immigration and did something terrible to the economy. Reality: immigration went down under Starmer. The economy is sluggish but not terrible. Starmer was above all a terrible communicator, choosing to make every public statement in that fussy, nasal upwards-register, like a notably dull and pissy professional angler explaining at great length why your waterproof trousers are inadequate.

Burnham does seem to have a more state-of-the-art understanding of presentation. Most notably of the fact he must perform two simultaneous roles. First, the public one, which is basically a cover job, a way of stopping people reflexively hating him, as they must now hate all politicians in the end. Meanwhile any actual politics, the usual hard choices and compromises, will have to be Trojan-horsed beneath that. This may seem undesirable, but it's a choice we have forced on these people, and a method that might actually allow him to at least get something done before he is inevitably chewed up by the rage and stupidity of the digital hive mind.

It is in this context that his comments this week about drinking in the stands at football must be interpreted. By now Burnham's off-the-cuff response to a question has been sliced and diced and generally dismissed. It is worth adding some further context, pointing out exactly why this is not just a pointless idea but a bad one. But the most interesting part of his most significant engagement so far with football, the great public megaphone, is what it says about Burnham himself.

First up, this is just a dead issue. Burnham was just re-stating a long-held personal opinion, not making policy, or expressing any real intention to do anything. He's in a period of ambient electioneering. In his mind this is an easy issue, a free hit, like saying yes we must have more chocolate at Christmas. It won't actually happen. Alcohol has been banned within sight of the pitch since the late 1980s, and with good reason. I love drinking. I'm a fan, a cheerleader, a devotee. I love the softness, the booze-haze, the first three drinks, that delicious transition from sober towards something else that is always the best part, the bit you keep chasing across all the lost drinks that must inevitably follow. But really, come on.

Of all the many problems facing the nation, insufficient access to alcohol really doesn't seem like a hot-button issue. Currently the average urban centre has 60 booze outlets per square mile. Maybe if you're spending your days skipping warily between a shotgunned bottle of Oyster Bay in the Nisa local and the five-minute walk up the road to the Meatbag and Carrot, it would genuinely help if you could stagger into Loftus Road for a pint of warm Foster's on the way. But nobody really needs to be more drunk at football. And if you really must drink, it's not that hard to smuggle in the gin flask.

Young people also don't really drink. And many people who already feel excluded; new fans, women in particular, feel doubly uncomfortable around a pissed-up football crowd. As a final hard pass, within three minutes of re-legalising this, someone somewhere is chucking a pint in the air. No thanks.

The most interesting part of all this is that Burnham chose booze and football as an obviously tribal issue, choosing to introduce the idea of "discrimination", as though people who want to drink at football are a lobby group, an oppressed section of society, or even any kind of identifiable demographic. Hang on, you can drink at the opera! Well, yes, but you also can't sing songs at the opera, do the Poznan or call people wankers. Different environments have different rules. And plenty of people at the opera will have hot-footed it there from consuming the Premier League. What was the point again?

If we really are going to make this an-us-and-them issue I can kill it right here on Burnham's own terms. This is a bad idea because it would help to close down pubs, and shovel money instead into the pockets of clubs owned by hedge funds. You might say buying a couple of pints in sight of a football pitch isn't going to change pub culture. But that's not how it works. That minor prohibition has helped create a culture of external football drinking, and this is one of the few physical match-day elements to exist outside football's corporate force field.

Pubs are great and vital places. I love all of them. Urban pubs with flat felt roofs. Pubs with mock-Tudor cream cheese wall-coverings, unlike any other building known to man. Pubs that sell obscure brands of pub-only crisps. Crucially, pubs still provide a third space, a place where people can meet, where men actually speak. And they thrive around football grounds.

An amazing and deeply cheering fact: there are 174 active pubs within a one-mile radius of St James' Park. Molineux has 50 pubs, Portman Road 29. Arsenal 33. When Andy Burnham sits down at Everton with Mark Carney and feels annoyed he can't buy a £9 Peroni, he is also just a 15-minute walk from 23 public bars that survive purely on selling liquid to thirsty people.

All pubs operate on fine margins. Matchdays are their rush hour, guaranteed mega-rounds, a captive footfall. Why would you divert even the tiniest bit of that money to the wildly commodified institutional leisure facility up the road? Also, just to kill this once and for all, you can imagine how awful the fully realised Premier League experience will be? In related football news, it also emerged this week that Manchester United are literally selling off the pitch, just fully giving up on irony and leaning into it. We've hollowed this place out, chucked the bentwood chairs on the fire, sold your memories back to you. Yeah we can do a pub. Another round of deliciously fruity Yorke and Cole Witbier sir? Why would you put more money into this, and not into a place with a furry carpet that still performs some kind of authentic social function?

So much for all that. It won't happen. The police don't want it. Burnham was just re-sharing a personal opinion. But it does tell you something valuable about his reflexive way of thinking. The idea that this is a vital cultural issue is pure 1980s, from a time when to be interested in football was to be dismissed as a thug, an unwanted emissary of the undeserving working class.

This is not the case now. Instead, football is the cultural imperialist, out there inflicting itself on everything else, always, always selling. And this is also a first very obvious example of playing to a base that exists most vividly only in his own cultural milieu.

There has been a successful projection of the new prime minister as fresh and novel, a figure from the outside. Which is not bad going for a Blair-era spad who will be 57 in January, the same age as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Woodstock.

But football is always telling you things. The response to that slight false note, a wider head-scratch over what is essentially a non-issue, is useful information. Time for a drink and a rethink.