A bit of word association: what pops into your head when you think of Sadiq Khan? Is it Ulez? Is it the night tube? Is it those posters on the Underground that say “supported by: Mayor of London?” You’re wrong. To one fan, Sadiq Khan is less a politician than he is an aesthetic experience. One that is beautifully filtered and comes with red buses, pastries, railway stations, autumn leaves, Georgian streets, and the Notting Hill Carnival. It is usefully soundtracked by Taylor Swift’s “London Boy”.
Khan-core is the brainchild of 18-year-old Ellen, a university student from London who has spent the last week assembling similar video moodboards for Labour politicians and posting them on X. Mike Tapp, the MP for Dover and Deal, appeared between images of cliffs and misty pubs; fashion-buyer-turned-politician Rosie Wrighting was suspended in a fantasy spin-off of Legally Blonde. “Fave edit of me ever,” said Uma Kumaran MP, who merited a Beyoncé soundtrack and a photo of a Birkin bag.
These are political fancams. They are everywhere. The term “fancam” first came from the K-pop world; it described an unedited, single-camera live recording, generally rigged to follow a single performer. In the wake of 2020’s Black Lives Matter resurgence, fans spammed the videos in hashtags like #WhiteLivesMatter. The idea was to drown out racist sentiment, making it more difficult for the right to mobilise; the effect was campy and irreverent. It allowed people with minimal political power to at least feel like they had a say.
By the start of the 2024 US presidential election, the semantics had morphed. Democratic voters used the same techniques to post glamorous montages of Kamala Harris. They were put together with flashy cuts and twinkly filters; some of them attempted to play up the candidate’s nonchalant feminist image by using music and graphics from Charli XCX’s newly released Brat album. Harris lost, but the format stuck – and quickly spread all over the world.
An Instagram account called markcarneythirst has over 50,000 followers. Its owner calls herself a “Carney-vore” and refers to the politician as a “Dilf.” She has posted over 60 glamorous montages of the Canadian prime minister. Sometimes he’s steeling himself to the tune of Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise”. Sometimes he’s wearing a cowboy hat and posing with fans between dramatic cuts. The comments are full of heart and fire emojis, but a select group of viewers are getting suspicious.
“It’s cute you think I’m part of his team,” said markcarneythirst to a doubtful commenter, “and not making these on my phone with headphones and no pants on.”
It’s a bad time to have been in the New Labour government. Peter Mandelson is in disgrace; his associates are under suspicion. But no political movement in Britain has gripped Gen Z quite as much. In one New Labour fancam, it’s a grey Sunday at the Cenotaph. Blair glances shiftily at Brown. Brown glances shiftily at Blair. Now they’re young men, smiling together in train carriages, radio studios, and briefing rooms. “Because maybe…” goes the music in the background. “You’re gonna be the one that saves me…”
The clip is on TikTok and has over 28,000 likes. “Blair has blood on his hands,” says one disapproving viewer, “and it has aged him accordingly.”
Another fancam. Blair is on a podcast with Alastair Campbell. “Do you ever dream about Gordon?” asks Campbell. “I know you’ve dreamt about Gordon because you’ve told me about dreaming about Gordon.” We shift back in time. Brown and Blair look pointedly at each other to the strains of Lana Del Rey’s Summertime Sadness.
“They’re soo doomed toxic yaoi core its crazy,” says the caption.
The Japanese term yaoi is used to describe works of homoerotic fiction. Enthusiasts are known as fujoshi, or “rotten women.” The dynamics often filter into real life, with fans theorising hopefully about real relationships between real people; you will find pockets of yaoi culture wherever there are male public figures who aren’t physically repulsive.
One commenter doesn’t see the vision. “One million dead Iraqis and the blood is on their hands,” she says. But there is no stopping the political fujoshi.
On the fanfiction website Archive of Our Own, Tony Blair figures in 103 different stories. One of them features Alastair Campbell as a Parisian gigolo. Another takes cues from Twilight, with Blair as sexy vampire and Brown as sexy werewolf. “I don’t support or condone the actions of anyone mentioned in this work,” says its author in a disclaimer. “I just like New Labour yaoi.”
“I must write more TRIP [The Rest is Politics] gay porn,” says one anonymous author – an Oxford master’s student from Australia – before embarking on a sadomasochistic fantasy about Blair and Campbell. Campbell is the aggressor; Brown’s name comes up in the throes of pleasure. The comments are full of satisfied readers, who have entered streams of nonsense to signify maddening arousal.
“I come back to read this like every day…” one attests. “Truly a blessing to the New Labour freaks of the world.”
“I absolutely love watching [Tony Blair] kneel down and perform oral sex,” says another reader, who has come straight from Campbell’s published diaries and is using a translator to read the story in Chinese.
This appears to be the logical endpoint to the fancam boom. Critics of these politicians are right to raise concerns about astroturfing, or the glamourisation of war crimes. But they have little to fear from populist sexual fantasies. They are necessarily transgressive, which means they are scarcely of political use; they won’t empower any war criminals, because the wrongness of misused power is what arouses fans in the first place.
One thing remains constant: as soon as members of the establishment work out what’s going on, everyone else’s fun will be ruined. Harris’ Charli xcx crossover sounded like a hit before the Democratic candidate tanked at the polls – part of the issue was that institutional bodies, including the soft-conservative Lincoln Project, tried to muscle in on an organic trend. And the internet hivemind mocked Caitlin Moran when she said the arrival of a new Labour cabinet had made her feel “as erotic as a British woman can feel during a wet summer.” So far, Labour is too busy struggling with its recent history to publish any erotic fanfiction about Brown and Blair, or to make video montages proposing a star-crossed love affair. Perhaps this is for the best.
[Further reading: The House of Lords’s cosplay democracy]
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