Bosh! Why we all love Thomas Skinner

Thomas Skinner is, as he wouldn’t say, ‘having a moment’.

It’s not hard to see why the former market trader and pillow salesman, who made his name on BBC One’s The Apprentice in 2019, has become so popular, gaining a huge online and pop-cultural following.

In a world suffocating under layers of meta-this and ironic-that, Skinner cuts through. He is like the re-appearance of an old stage act, a chocolate bar or a draught lager you’d forgotten you used to love.

On TV, he can be seen on shows like Channel 5’s Jeremy Vine or ITV’s Good Morning Britain, where he often provides picturesque bewilderment at the toxic foam spewing from right-on panellists when talking about the identity issue of the day. He rarely says anything likely to transfer to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, but like the Tao of Pooh, he just gloriously is.

It’s on X that he’s rising most notably above the din. His posts are upbeat and refreshingly free of anger, scorn, cynicism and arch critique. They ring true, like the bells of Old Bailey.

Skinner is nothing like the other online male ‘role models’ and influencers for hire – the Andrew Tate types who alarm Gareth Southgate and Stephen Graham so much. Rather, he is like your fondest memories of your grandad or your favourite football coach.

As a rule, his posts are of two kinds. There are those published on workdays, where he usually begins each morning with an image of himself enjoying a hearty breakfast that is sometimes full English and sometimes ‘fry it and see’. Later on, we may see him on the road with a few of his fellow grafters.

Then, there are the posts for weekends and bank holidays. In these he’s usually pictured with his happy brood sitting on the sofa, or in the stands at West Ham or perhaps enjoying a sunny beer garden. He radiates a patriotism as invigorating as anything John of Gaunt summoned up.

Whatever the location, Skinner has a very simple message. There is no need to paraphrase it:

‘Lift heavy. Laugh a lot. Love and be there for your family. Look after your friends. Graft like a lunatic.’

And, of course, his signature sign-off: ‘Bosh!’

In a nation that feels at best as if it is in rapid decline, or, at worst, skidding towards irreversible catastrophe, Skinner’s broad, cheerful demeanour is as welcome as an ice-cold pint of lager on a warm summer’s day.

His Wikipedia entry is titled ‘Thomas Skinner (businessman)’, which is a striking parenthesis. It is technically accurate, though I feel ‘Thomas Skinner (archetype)’ would serve him better.

‘Businessman’ does not appear to be there in the service of disambiguation, there being no other notable Thomas Skinners as far as I can see. But ‘businessman’ is presumably how Thomas wishes to be seen, having first come to the world’s attention in The Apprentice six years ago. But the word that immediately comes to mind when the scrolling eye settles on Skinner is not ‘businessman’ so much as ‘yeoman’ – and quite possibly bowman. Indeed, more than one admiring social-media user has imagined Skinner as what was lying in wait for the French at Agincourt, or indeed the Vikings in the north – ‘Not today, Bjørn’.

He recalls an earlier, healthier, more confident Englishman. He is an avatar of that stubborn Arthurian myth, of the sleepers under the hill that will awake in England’s direst need, cometh the hour.

This is quite a burden to bear for the pillow-peddling, banger-loving boy from Romford, Essex. But he seems quite untroubled by the weight of expectation. Despite being recast in the popular imagination as a kind of guileless Zelig of the indomitable British Bulldog spirit for the past two millennia, Skinner is gloriously, defiantly himself.

One could certainly overstate Skinner’s naïveté when it comes to ‘curating’ his personal brand, of course. No one accumulates over 350,000 followers on X without having some grasp, however instinctive, of the dynamics in play – or of the need for consistency as well mere sunniness. Skinner is no fool.

But in an era when dozens of accounts are promoting the lessons you can, and urgently must, learn from Marcus Aurelius, Sun Tsu or Albert Camus, Skinner’s catchphrase, ‘Bosh!’, is the equivalent of a sonic boom. It says, ‘I’m here, I’m loud, and I’ve got 500 pillows to shift by lunchtime’.

This is itself a tightrope. He could very easily tip over into parody, a Del Boy pastiche. His ‘apples and pears’ and ‘mate, you’re having a bubble’ cockney patter could easily be mocked. Yet somehow it feels pukka.

I could be wrong. There may be some grand strategy, some endgame, some secret flowchart on a whiteboard somewhere in a surprisingly minimalist boardroom behind a secret door in the meat fridge. But it doesn’t look to me like Thomas is chasing clout or crafting a TED Talk persona. I think he is really just trying to share an all but universal system for improving your chances of having a good day, every day.

We could all do a very great deal worse. Bosh!

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.