It was shortly after Andy Burnham’s famously rousing speech outside the Manchester Central Library in October 2020 that Stanley Chow decided to draw him. Or rather his wife did.

“It was the pandemic and we were all so down in the dumps at that point,” says the illustrator, speaking from his home in the city this week. But I remember looking around and he had just moved everyone.

“He was already a good mayor, but at that point we all thought: ‘Oh shit, he’s really good.’ And then my wife goes: you should draw Andy.”

So he did, using his preferred medium, Adobe Illustrator. “I put it on Twitter and within 10 mins, Andy had nicked it.”

Chow, a 51-year-old designer who grew up in Altrincham and then Stockport, has met Burnham a few times, and describes him as jolly and personable. His image of Burnham is “funny with just a little anger in there”. As an illustrator, he says his style is “hard to pin down” but that it sits somewhere between caricature and portraiture. His technique is to reduce someone’s face to an assembly of shapes while somehow keeping them “recognisably themselves”.

Chow did his foundation course at Manchester Metropolitan before moving to Swindon. At 21, he returned to Manchester, working in his parent’s chip shop while trying to get work. “I don’t want to blow smoke up my own ass but I’ve always been good, I always knew I would be an artist one way or another,” he says. His illustrations have since appeared in the New Yorker and Time magazine, and he is currently working on an exhibition for Manchester’s Arndale shopping centre.

Burnham initially used the image for his Twitter handle, but it has since appeared on billboards, beer mats, mugs, aprons and record inlays, becoming a visual proxy for both his mayoral campaigns and more recent campaigning in Makerfield. With his spot-on light scowl and navy/black attire, the image has become shorthand for Burnham’s anti-establishment sentiment. “There is no tie, no,” says Chow. After its initial use, Burnham said he was “grateful to Stan for making me look cooler than I am”.

It’s rare for an election these days not to feature some sort of visual merchandising, but making it land is not always a sure thing. “I don’t know why it works but he’s quite a modern guy, and my style is quite similar, so maybe it helps to humanise him?” Chow’s images are modern but playful, he says. “He wants to be seen as a man of the people and maybe the design delivers that?” He’s tweaked it a bit since the initial version, he says.

But it wasn’t just Burnham who copied it from Twitter. Within a few hours of him posting the image, “it had been reused [and memed] to fuck”, most notably by senior Reform UK figures including Nigel Farage and the Makerfield byelection candidate, Robert Kenyon, who recently posted the image on social media, doctored with imagery and words to advance an anti-immigration sentiment.

Chow was neither consulted by, nor gave permission to Reform UK for the image’s usage. “Memes are one thing, but something [nefarious] like that? That’s something else.”

He took legal action and they have since removed the images. “It’s all fair in love and war [on social media] as far as I’m concerned but when it comes to something like Reform, you have to draw a line,” he says. As for Burnham nicking the imagery, “at the time, I didn’t charge him”, says Chow. “I think initially him using it felt like recognition enough for me. But yeah, don’t worry, [Burnham’s team] have licensed the image off me,” he says.

What happens now that Burnham is heading beyond Makerfield? “I’m not sure I want the attention – I mean in some ways this has been my journey too,” he says. “But yes, I’d probably still send him a message.”