In England, over the last few years, when a lectern has appeared outside the black door of 10 Downing Street, the office and official residence of the prime minister in London, it has typically been an indicator of one of four things.
It could be that the prime minister is about to resign, call a general election or address the nation. Or it means the internet is likely to be reacquainted with the so-called hot podium guy, a dashing sound engineer who has been tasked with setting up the lectern and microphones for these momentous events. (Although, grammatically speaking, or at least according to The New York Times’s stylebook, he should be referred to as the hot lectern guy.) In Britain’s political merry-go-round of the last decade, the mysterious heartthrob has been a welcome distraction and an enduring presence.
He appeared again on Monday, when Keir Starmer resigned from his post. The man, Tobias Gough, a 42-year-old sound engineer with MGi London, first caught the public’s attention in 2019. He had been tasked with setting up the lectern when Theresa May, then the prime minister, stepped down. Almost overnight, he became a social media sensation. Some pointed out his muscular arms, while others said, despite not hearing much from him, that they trusted him over May to successfully broker Brexit, Britain’s complicated exit from the European Union.
In the years since, prime ministers have come and gone, while Gough, in his uniform black T-shirt, has outlasted them all. Pictures and videos of him carrying the lectern and testing its microphones have become something of a harbinger of significant political news.
Users online have praised Gough for his reliability; some joke that he seems to be more consistent than the leaders of the country and has one of the most stable jobs in a sluggish economy.
Katie Glass, a columnist at The Times of London, called him “the one reliable man in politics” in a recent article, also describing him as a cross between “a choirboy and a Chippendale.”
“It’s an innate part of the British psyche not to take anything too seriously, so we love finding the comedy in serious things,” she explained in an email. And given that Britain has just lost its sixth prime minister in a decade, “coming together over a self-knowingly ridiculous obsession with ‘Hot Podium Guy’ has provided us all with a silly, sexy distraction from thinking about our country imploding.”
It is telling, she added, that the nation is also similarly obsessed with Larry, the tabby cat of 10 Downing Street, known officially as the chief mouser to the Cabinet Office.
During the BBC’s morning broadcast ahead of the resignation of Starmer on Monday, two of the network’s presenters, Jon Kay and Henry Zeffman, discussed Gough’s recurring appearances.
“This guy here — I’ve seen him come out and do the testing of the microphones umpteen times over the last few years,” Kay told Zeffman, while gesturing over at Gough, busy doing his job. “He probably never thought that when he got that job that he would be doing it quite so regularly.”
“I think he’s known on the internet as hot podium guy,” Zeffman responded.
Gough did not respond to requests for comment, and the Downing Street press office declined to comment. But in 2019, in an interview with The Daily Mail, Gough expressed his bemusement about all of the attention and chalked the internet’s obsession up to “great lighting.”
“The sun must have been at the right angle,” he added.
