Even PMs get catfished sometimes

New British Prime Minister Andy Burnham has joined a rather exclusive club: leaders who have exchanged messages with someone pretending to be a very important person.

According to multiple reports, Burnham for some time traded a few messages with an account impersonating Susie Wiles, Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff. At some point he became suspicious, then it was explained that the messages were of “no significance,” and the British embassy reportedly raised the matter with the White House. No lasting damage appears to have been done – beyond a mild case of diplomatic embarrassment.

Burnham is far from the first high-profile figure to fall for this particular trap. Boris Johnson once spent 18 minutes on the phone with Russian pranksters posing as the Armenian prime minister. Other politicians have been lured into accepting fake awards, reading out compromising scripts, or engaging with fabricated social-media accounts. Impersonators, deepfakes and clever phishing attempts have become an occupational hazard of modern leadership.

As a newly installed prime minister establishing working relations with the Trump administration, Burnham apparently treated a direct message exchange with the White House chief of staff as a normal, high-level channel for informal coordination… Well, this assumption is highly questionable.

If we’re busy inventing parental controls to keep teenagers off social media, perhaps it’s time we designed a version for politicians – complete with a “Are you sure this is really the White House chief of staff?” pop-up.

Caption: British Prime Minister, Andy Burnham during his first cabinet meeting as prime minister in 10 Downing Street, London, Britain, 21 July 2026. EPA/Chris Ratcliffe / POOL

• Andy Burnham
• pranksters
• social media

Updated: August 17, 2026 - 15:50