Why do we say “pardon my French” when we swear? Some say the expression comes from the time when our ruling class spoke French. A lofty Norman, snooty Plantagenet or indeed a shrugging Angevin would lapse into French mid-conversation, then kittenishly apologise for being oh so helplessly de sang bleu. Common islanders would retort with a homegrown profanity – something about hounds’ arses – then mockingly return, “pardon my French”.
Of course you never really know how true such explanations are. But that one tells you something. The lesson is that power must be fluent in the modes of its day. That is why Yvette Cooper cannot simply stop the boats or smash the gangs: she must also break the internet.
The Home Secretary made some changes to her media rounds on Tuesday (5 August). She was promoting her “one in, one out” small-boat deportation treaty with France. As well as speaking to the usual outlets, Cooper took questions from what officials are calling the “digital lobby”. She answered the TikTok accounts Politics UK, Simple Politics and the Daily Mail’s TikTok.
Critics have pointed out that it was not quite the performance of a deep-fried digital native. Cooper addressed the camera from her podium in front of two “Home Office” screens. It was a little old school, a little stiff.
But she was wise to get stuck in. The phones are out and all the eyeballs are there. Last month the Times found that students are set to spend 25 years of their lives on their phones. Mobile phone usage has almost tripled over the last decade.
Vertical video – TikTok, YouTube shorts, Instagram reels and whatever Facebook’s one is called – is one key medium of this age. Last year the average UK citizen spent 42 hours a month on the app. The other key form is the podcast. Its political necessity is better developed and better recognised. America’s most recent election was hailed as the first “podcast election”. Trump did the circuit, Kamala didn’t. Trump won.
Politicians unable to perform will be left behind, unheard from, unthought of. As Andrew Marr warned in these pages, “we should not be calm about this memetic war zone… the political class has to spend more time engaging on Instagram, TikTok and X.” Dominic Cummings says legacy media has roughly zero relevance now.
Are you keenly awaiting the next gig by German-Swiss composer Nikolaus Matthes? Why not? By critical consensus, the man is just as good as Bach and Beethoven. You know why. All great successes ride the crests of their moment’s waves. Even Bob Dylan, who seems so instantly eternal, so heroically irrelevant, became immortal by going electric.
It has always been necessary to stand on the cutting edge. Fascism famously spread on the radio. The American revolutionaries like Thomas Paine harnessed cheap print to stir popular sentiment with pamphlets. JFK, Thatcher, Reagan and Blair profited from TV.
Indeed it is not long since the Labour Party were setting the pace on communications. Alastair Campbell engineered the media handler archetype that endures today. New Labour also instituted new communications units to push their message beyond the political press. Before that, in opposition, New Labour developed the intimidatingly named Excalibur computer, which produced rapid rebuttals to Tory aspersions. The current Labour government recently unsheathed a new weapon of its own. Former Sun editor David Dinsmore was communications chief.
But so far, Nigel Farage is the British politician dominating the new forms. He has more TikTok followers than every other MP added together.
The rest of the political class is nervous to make such a plunge. Some worry that short video only permits crass oversimplifications. But podcasts, which are enmeshed with vertical video, allow more elaboration than even “golden-era” political TV formats. Another fear is that traditional politicians going to the young’s party can only be cringe. But Zohran Mamdani, the New York mayoral candidate, seems a promising light in the American left’s hopes. And even David Cameron got pretty handy at slick video updates during his stint as foreign secretary.
If they don’t fill the space, someone else will. Jeff Bezos put a note in the Washington Post, after buying the paper, entitled “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media”. He wrote, “those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion.” You might not like Bezos. Politicians might not like the new mediascape. But you are about as likely to stop using Amazon as voters are to get off TikTok. It is true that the government has signalled a hope of lowering British screen time. But that would be a full-time brief for a designated minister. In the meantime, the rest of them should get with the moment.
History will not promote anachronisms. We’re not going to start listening to classical music again. Barring a really shocking escalation in our fishy acrimony, we’re not returning to a Francophone ruling class. And certainly, we’re not putting down our phones. If Cooper was not a natural on TikTok, she was still right to start trying.
But she may never succeed. The new formats do seem better suited to a populist brand of politics. So far none of its left-wing winners, Mamdani or Zack Polanski, have won without lifting from that style. One thinks of the historian Perry Anderson’s assertion that the left can now only win by evolving a “left populism”. TikTok has not yet changed all our politicians, but it has already changed all of our politics. History will be written by the scrollers.
[See also: The Online Safety Act humiliates us all]
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