“The mainstream media have been very quiet about this one, haven’t they,” said a man to his 11,000 TikTok followers in August 2025. There were three mugshots above him of gormless young men. All three of them had been arrested for arson attacks in Kentish Town that May, and all three attacks were linked to the Prime Minister. On Tuesday, two of them were found guilty.
They were not very clever attacks. First, a Toyota that once belonged to Starmer, before he sold it to a neighbour, went up in flames. Then, an apartment that he used to live in. Then, his constituency home. (He’d been renting it to his sister-in-law, who was not at the property.) But the motivations behind the attack were very clear to the man on TikTok: the suspects, he falsely claimed, were male prostitutes. It was true that two of the suspects had profiles on a photography site, offering work as beginner models. One of them charged £20 per hour. But the theory had descended into absurd, unevidenced claims. He claimed the men had been selling sexual services to Starmer, who, he said, was secretly gay. When he refused to pay them, so the theory goes, they started burning down his property.
This “Rent Boy Theory” became a commonly held belief on sections of the right-wing internet. Pro-Russian ex-MP George Galloway joined in. So did Tommy Robinson. Some drew a link to Waheed Alli, the entrepreneur who controversially furnished the Prime Minister and his wife with designer clothes. It made sense, they claimed, that this media mogul would want to “buy” a politician. But Lord Alli was openly gay, which made rather too much sense. At this end of British politics, all roads lead to pederasty. They claimed there was a link between Starmer, the rent boys and Peter Mandelson – who had a verified link to Jeffrey Epstein. Others made much of the false assertion that Starmer failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile when he was director of public prosecutions. In November, a TikToker posted a video of three young men dancing in front of the Old Bailey to a re-tuned AI remake of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”. “UKRAINIAN RENT BOYS NEW SINGLE,” said the caption. “NUMBER ONE IN THE STARMER CHARTS ON LABOUR FM.”
This week, there has been an upset on the Starmer Charts. Mainstream media channels were only quiet because of reporting restrictions; the BBC revealed on 15 June that the main arsonist was actually a rather clueless Ukrainian operative, taking orders from the Russian government over text message. It is not an unlikely explanation: we’ve committed billions of pounds to the Ukrainian side in a war against Russia. The Kremlin fired warning shots in the English Channel only days ago, and its state media channels regularly broadcast proposals to attack Britain. But the rent boy truthers are not giving in. “Absolute bullshit,” said one in the TikTok comments. “Sounds like a lovers tiff.”
The Prime Minister hasn’t helped himself by being more or less a blank slate. Tory politicians knew how to play up their own idiosyncrasies. Boris Johnson once bragged about translating Greek verse in his spare time; Jacob Rees-Mogg is never afraid to wear a top hat or say something weird about his nanny. The average voter could very easily fill in the blanks about their private lives. By contrast, Starmer is the most nondescript political figure we’ve had in quite a number of years. He is so boring that it almost makes him eccentric. He prefers looking at landscape paintings, because portraits make him feel as if he is being stared at. A No 10 spokesperson once said he was “quite happy with a sandwich lunch”. When asked to name a favourite film, he replied: “My favourite TV is Traitors, so I’m going to go with that.” He doesn’t dream. If he testifies to something individual, it will often sound made up: a pre-power biographer described him as a keen dancer on Leeds’ Northern Soul scene. This is historically viable, but hard to comprehend if you have ever seen him do anything.
It feels slightly strange to imagine the current Prime Minister retiring to the Downing Street apartment and enjoying himself, with his BBC One programmes and his landscape paintings and his sensibly anonymous children. This makes Starmer a conspiracist’s delight. There comes a universal temptation to invent a private life where there isn’t one; an initial poverty of detail means the backstory must say more about you than about the politician involved. If you think lizard people run everything, you will imagine the Prime Minister shedding his skin and basking under a heat lamp. If you think pederasts run everything, you will imagine him having sex with a man.
There were holes in Rent Boy Theory all along. It never made any sense that a high-ranking, highly paid lawyer-turned-politician would hire random men instead of using one of London’s numerous discreet escorting services. And if a real sex worker wanted payment from Starmer, surely the most sensible route would be blackmail, and not a riskier public offence like arson. This didn’t matter. The story came before the facts. A recent investigation in the i Paper found that the first online mention of an “angry unpaid rent boy” was made within 15 minutes of an arrest, and before any profile was found on any modelling website.
You can almost see where the conspiracists are coming from. The newer details about Mandelson and Epstein are so disturbing that one struggles to absorb them in isolation. It is more comforting to claim that the entire sphere of power is concentrated towards evil than to reckon with the evil elements in otherwise-functioning institutions. If any well-intentioned politician could be Peter Mandelson, or an accessory to Peter Mandelson, you must live life on permanent high alert; if we had a whole state of verified Peter Mandelsons, you could easily charge through Westminster, replace them with non-pederasts, and win the political game forever.
Thus we have thousands operating in a mode of perpetual paranoia, tenuously joining the dots from one scandal to another. The right’s resistance to a liberal project of counter-misinformation might be more sympathetic if they made any attempt to stick to the facts. But on TikTok, there is an audience for anyone who can simply speak quickly while gesturing to associations that do not exist. The audience sustains itself, entertains itself, and isn’t going away anytime soon. There was another AI video, posted just after the BBC revealed a Russian link. It looked a bit like a painting by Francisco Goya. There was Keir Starmer, wearing a Union Jack jumper and devil horns. There were two young men crawling next to him.
“I’m a Firestarmer,” he said. “A twisted Firestarmer. And I love Ukrainian rent boys.”
“Where’s the ai?” asked a commenter.
[Further reading: How British politics became a brand war]
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