Scroll the Mirror's politics feed from this weekend and you'll meet one man over and over: Andy Burnham, eight times in roughly 24 hours. He 'says more cost of living help is on its way.' He 'hints' carers could be spared the visa crackdown, with a 'fairness' pledge. There's the 'Burnham bounce' sending Labour past Reform. There's a think piece crediting him with inventing 'normalism.' His by-election 'gamble paid out in full.' The Sunday front page carries his 'pledge' that struggling families are his 'top priority.' * Now stay in the same feed, same weekend, and find the other head of government: Donald Trump 'spirals furiously as reflecting pool saga ends in humiliating climbdown.' Trump's 'erratic week as his polls plummet and he screws Ukraine over.' No hints, no pledges, no bounce. Full contact verbs only. * To be clear: neither dictionary is exactly wrong. Trump's week was genuinely shambolic — his own polling hit new lows, and 'humiliating climbdown' is a fair description of losing a fight you started. The problem isn't either set of verbs. It's that they never visit each other's subject. Burnham gets the weather-report conjugation — says, hints, pledges, vows — where words leave a politician's mouth and land on the front page unbruised. Trump gets the wrestling commentary. * Here's the tell inside the Mirror's own pages: its columnist warns that Burnham 'must hold onto' the public's attention 'when the honeymoon ends.' Honest sentence! But look around — the honeymoon being described is happening in the Mirror. A pledge is not a delivery. 'Help is on its way' is a press release wearing a byline. And 'struggling families in his sights' is, if we're being picky about verbs, what you'd write about a hunter. * The Mirror has been the Labour movement's paper for a century — that's not a scandal, it's the masthead, and at least it's worn honestly. But the families in those headlines don't need a PM who 'pledges' at them one more time; they need the gas bill to go down. When it does, write it in the past tense — helped, lowered, delivered. Those are the only verbs in this story that would actually be news.