The format is simple. An MP stares directly at the camera while holding an everyday household item – a jug or a packet of biscuits. At this point you know exactly what you’re in for. They’re about to explain the migrant crisis, or the debt-to-GDP ratio, or quantitative easing. A cheerful jingle plays in the background. What was once the preserve of YouTubers reviewing mobile phones has become part of the daily routine of our country’s politicians. Welcome to the new frontier of British politics. Welcome to Reelpolitik.
The explainer is just one of many formats in politicians’ arsenals. Up and down the country MPs are experimenting with short-form video, whether it’s Robert Jenrick chasing a Tube fare-dodger or Gordon McKee “interviewing” a llama named Leo about improved animal welfare rules for zoos – and those who master the form are fast becoming stars. Keir Starmer has even finally joined the platform, although his first post – a 13-second clip of him turning the Christmas tree lights on at Downing Street – was met with a deluge of negative comments. Of course, they are all playing catch-up with one man: Nigel Farage. The Reform leader has 1.4 million followers on TikTok, miles ahead of any other politician in Britain, and his dominance only feeds the narrative that populists are winning the battle for eyeballs on social media.
Alongside the MP for Clacton-on-Sea, the right also has scores of influencers clocking up millions of views with reels that reinforce conservative talking points on migration, media bias and Britain’s social and moral decline. But Labour is trying to gain ground, with the help of a small and (until now) secretive agency – FourOneOne. The organisation, operating effectively in stealth mode for the past year, was set up by former members of Labour’s 2024 election-winning digital unit with the goal of keeping the team together for the next election.
FourOneOne has a number of programmes. One works with existing creators who already have large followings, giving them access to politicians in exchange for content, while its Impact Collective acts as a kind of academy for micro-influencers, training them in the skills they need to build their followings. It also works directly with around 15 Labour MPs, as well as running training sessions for the wider party.
To find out more, I visited FourOneOne’s offices in central London. The firm’s founder, Nik Rutherford, greeted me with a handshake and asked if I’d like anything to drink. The open-plan offices have a tech start-up vibe, with a poster on the wall mapping all of the constituencies Labour won in the last election. Young campaigners worked quietly at their desks – the average age in the room must have been about 25. Rutherford led me to a small side room that doubles as a studio. Despite being set up just over a year ago, FourOneOne already has around 50 members of staff. Rutherford, like his colleagues, dressed casually. Throughout our interview he leaned forward in his seat, speaking quickly. He’s easily animated, answering questions thoughtfully and at length.
FourOneOne doesn’t pay any of the influencers it works with. “It’s not a financial thing,” he said. Instead, they understand what influencers want: “good content”. “You’re going in and you’re helping them to create engaging content that’s going to be useful for them, and building that relationship and understanding them, rather than going, ‘Right, we’ve got a political message for you, and we want to do it like this,’” Rutherford said. Earlier this year, the agency took a group of 25 influencers to Labour Party conference, paying for their accommodation and expenses, while also giving them access to ministers. “We had like 25 different people with different access to audiences. And to be honest, most of them I didn’t know, but they’ve got massive reach,” he said. “And I guess that’s the thing – the thing that’s on your algorithm is not on my algorithm. It’s interesting coming in with 25 people who are, in effect, celebrities [but] I don’t know who they are, and nor should I. But a lot of people do, and they’re reaching different types of audiences.”
Rutherford sent me a list of some of the creators FourOneOne brought to conference after our interview. They included accounts with enormous followings, such as the popular scientist Big Manny (2 million followers on TikTok and 1.6 million on Instagram), entrepreneur Gabriel Nussbaum (1.3 million on TikTok and 158,000 on Instagram), educational channel Talk to the Nation (950,000 across platforms), and educator Jasmeen Basi (292,000 in Instagram and 13,000 on TikTok), as well as smaller accounts like Looking after Your Pennies (19,000). After my first interview with Rutherford, I spoke with Charlotte Jessop, the woman behind Looking after Your Pennies.
Jessop told me FourOneOne’s brief was “very loose”. “They were like, we just want you to come along and experience it and share it with your audiences,” she said. “You know, we want you to share a true reflection of what it’s like to attend these events. So there was no real criteria from their end in terms of ‘you must do X number of videos’.” She said the firm provided her with opportunities to meet politicians, as well as help with audio, video and editing. It also set up interviews with the Technology Secretary, Peter Kyle, and Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson. “So I was interviewing them, and I was asked in advance to put forward a few questions,” she said. “But honestly, the questions… I mean, this wasn’t like intense journalism, that’s not what I do. I wasn’t grilling them, but they didn’t really have any issues about what I was asking. They weren’t like ‘don’t ask that’ or ‘you have to ask this’. They were very chill about that.”
As well as access to politicians, the firm also organised social events for the influencers at the conference. “They organised all of it, as well as some networking [and] social events,” Jessop said. “Obviously, they were working quite closely with social media. So there was a YouTube drinks soiree sort of thing, where we could meet other creators, as well as mixing with journalists and MPs. They were very welcoming and generous and were getting invited into all sorts of interesting spaces.” Jessop makes finance content, which she said was a “very political space”. “There was a real sense of wanting me to bring what is happening in the Labour Party and in the conference to the public,” she said. “And I think we’re seeing more and more of that in the social media and content creator space, where they’re trying to meet people and bring politics to the platforms people are already using.” Jessop posted her interview with Kyle on her Instagram channel. Kyle described dyslexia as his “superpower”. The number of likes on the post was hidden, but it drew a handful of comments, with one viewer calling the comparison “patronising”.
I also spoke to Jasmeen Basi, who described the process as an “exchange”. “There’s no financial gain,” she said. “I get access, and I’m able to ask these questions, and in return I’m delivering your message – or what you’re saying – to my audience.” She said it was the access that drew her in. “The reason that I went was because I was given the chance to interview Bridget [Phillipson] at that conference. And so for me, personally, in my professional career… that’s incredible. That’s who I wanted to interview, just completely relevant to what I’m doing. So that’s the incentive.” At the same time, she’s received backlash online for being a “Labour mouthpiece”, an allegation she denies. “They don’t tell me that I have to support their ideas,” she said.
Rutherford said FourOneOne doesn’t have a minimum follower count for the micro-influencers the firm works with in its training academy. “There are people with hardly any [followers] that we just think are worth building up. And actually, we’re not doing that and saying ‘hey, here’s a bunch of political content that you’ve got to produce’ at all. We’re just building them up to do whatever influencing they want to do, because we think having a wider network of influencers is the best possible thing that we could be doing with our influencer programme.”
The accounts’ interests are multifarious. “You might be interested in beauty or cookery or whatever it is that you want to talk about online, but the important thing for us is the relationship, so that if, and when, we want to talk about something or provide information or provide people we can do that,” Rutherford said. “But it’s about trying to train people to be good influencers online who are kind of left-leaning.” However, he said a lot of the people weren’t very political. “And we think that’s fine for now, because we feel like the political benefit is actually having a big enough network.”
Influencers do a three-month programme with the firm’s academy, where they are taught how to build a following. “It’s all things that you might expect to learn, like how to produce compelling content, how to maximise clicks, and all of those sorts of things,” he said. “And we have people who have done that very, very well. We work alongside other influencers who’ve made a success of it, [getting them] to come and talk to those people. We’re basically just building a network.”
While some may take umbrage at the involvement of social media influencers in UK politics, FourOneOne’s most controversial programme is its “Amplifiers” project. Earlier this year, Declassified published a report claiming the firm was offering journalists cash to publish progressive content on their social media channels. It said the company offered journalist Amun Bains £50 a week to post at least five “progressive” videos on his social media accounts, with the potential for bonuses. The report has cast suspicion on FourOneOne and its work, depicting it as a shadowy organisation. It asked “who is paying FourOneOne, and why?”
In a further phone call after our interview, Rutherford denied that the firm was paying journalists or established influencers to post content – instead, it is targeting smaller accounts. “There’ve been a few programmes across the world where you have people who post content, and then you give them some low-stakes money for it, if they post certain content to a certain standard,” he said. “Right now, we’re just building it – it’s not done anything to any scale yet.” He said it was at an “embryonic stage” and he wasn’t sure if FourOneOne would even continue with it.
“We’re doing it right now outside of election time because we don’t want to fall foul of any election regulations or anything like that,” he said. “So we’re just seeing it as possible at this point, and then we’re working it out.” The goal of the project is to build at scale a network of accounts, one that can counter the bot armies used by foreign powers and the right. He added that the firm was not working with Labour on the programme.
“We’re not thinking about trying to do bot farms or anything dodgy like that,” he said. “But we are thinking about how can we incentivise people to make left-wing content.” He said the programme wasn’t for any clients. “At the moment, we’re just trying to work out whether it’s a goer or not, and we’re trying to be at the cutting edge of everything digital.” He said the programme operated via a “referral” system. “We’re just working with people we know, mostly, sometimes we work with people we don’t know, and we’re just seeing what we can do.” He stressed it wasn’t something the firm was trying to hide. “We are having conversations with the Electoral Commission, and we’re trying to find ways around making sure that we are as compliant as we can possibly be,” he said.
The Declassified report also highlighted the involvement of Assaf Kaplan, a former Israeli military officer, with FourOneOne. Kaplan, who also previously worked for Labour, is a director at the company. “Obviously, he is a target – because of his background in the Israeli military – he’s a target for the online, kind of far-left mostly conspiracy theorists, who think he’s still working for Israel and trying to spy on everybody, which he certainly isn’t,” Rutherford said. “But that’s just part of the gig for him at the moment, really.” He declined to say who FourOneOne’s investors were, though he said the media agency Estratos, founded by progressive Hungarian politicians, is a minority stakeholder.
Rutherford was keen to emphasise FourOneOne’s transparency. “I think what is important for me is that there’s a lot of this sort of online stuff that’s wanting to write about us as if we were shadowy. And the main draw for talking to you, in my view, was to just be as open and transparent about what we are.”
FourOneOne’s selling point is that it’s the team behind Labour’s 2024 general election victory. At the time, that was a useful claim to fame. Labour’s digital team was widely praised for beating the Tories in the meme wars, in what was billed as “the first TikTok election”. Since then, however, Labour has plunged in the polls. The question, then, is whether any of this is working?
“Labour’s current digital strategy is strong,” Rutherford said, adding that the party has “some of the best digital campaigners on the planet”. “Obviously we don’t exist in a vacuum, and it’s a really challenging political space that the government finds itself in,” he said. “I don’t think that this is a communications problem. They’ve inherited extremely tough conditions from the last government. The politics is now hard, people expect change and expect it quickly and so it’s about the government using the next few years to show delivery. That is the key to unlocking political success. Once we’ve got there we have the machine in place, both at FourOneOne and Labour, to turn that into electoral success.”
A Labour Party spokesperson said: “We do not comment on confidential arrangements with any contractor.”
[Further reading: Pity the Labour staffers]
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