The scene opens on the interior of an aeroplane.
A suited man in a luxurious seat looks pensively out the window, his face partially obscured, his chin delicately resting on his hand.
Dreamy synths reverberate as the camera pans to show a fighter jet, hovering above the clouds just past the plane’s wing.
It turns and flies away, its dark shadow set against the warm yellow sunset.
“I’d explain, but it’s classified,” the TikTok video’s caption reads, the username above revealing the identity of the mystery man: Keir Starmer.
In the comment section, one user puts a voice to the question on a thousand lips.
“Why is our prime minister aura farming?”
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When the UK prime minister launched his TikTok account earlier this week, I assumed we’d get the same slate of cringeworthy content that so many elected officials have given us before.
Stiff line delivery, policy talking points awkwardly shoehorned into already outdated memes, and the general feeling a PR person is holding them at gunpoint just out of shot.
Alas, no. In a shocking twist, Starmer’s TikToks are borderline competent.
The majority of the videos seem to be attempts at ultra short-form cinéma vérité: a camera operator following the prime minister around, catching snippets of him saying good morning to security guards, questioning where chief mouser, Larry the cat, is and greeting the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
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The “peek behind the curtain” style is clearly designed to make the prime minister feel more relatable to young UK voters, and while there’s definitely potential here, all his videos share the same fatal flaw.
Starmer cares about looking cool.
“Aura farming” is an internet term for someone posting content trying to seem effortlessly suave, handsome or charismatic.
And look, for my own sanity, I have to assume Starmer’s team was being tongue-in-cheek when they captioned that plane video: “I’d explain, but it’s classified” – that they were poking fun at people trying to seem cool on the internet.
But the more I look through his TikToks, with every shot so carefully curated to make Starmer seem competent and in control, the more I began to feel the accusation of “aura farming” fitted.
And on a platform such as TikTok, which trades off vulnerability and intimacy, being caught trying to seem aloof is a crime worse than murder. (Or at least worse than the “millennial pause”, and that’s pretty bad.)
There are some rare examples of politicians feeling authentically at home on the app: in the US, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has found great success speaking frankly to her iPhone camera from her living room couch. Even a lower-profile politician such as the Australian MP Julian Hill has cultivated a dedicated following by sharing his frustrations with the opposition from his cluttered parliamentary office.
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The politicians that truly succeed on TikTok are the ones where you can suspend your disbelief just enough to believe they’re actually hitting “post” themselves. Where a little part of you is holding out hope that they might actually reply to your comment.
But Starmer never gets within a metre of the camera lens, let alone a comment section keyboard. A style, no doubt, influenced by the fact that TikTok is technically banned on government phones, due to data security concerns, and his team is, no doubt, terrified to imply he might actually have the app downloaded.
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Numbers wise, the videos are going well, two of them already crack 1m views, but that lack of intimacy comes at a cost. The comments under any politician’s post are going to be filled with far more vitriol than praise – that’s just how the internet works. What’s notable about Starmer’s is just how generic the comments are.
It’s all “get this clown out”, “vote reform” and the occasional “best prime minister ever”, but barely any mention of the actual content at hand.
Because ultimately, the videos don’t have any content – besides a fleeting sense of novelty, there’s no reason I would ever send them to friends, let alone bring them up at the pub. These videos only exist to prove what a cool guy Starmer is. And he isn’t.
So no, the UK prime minister’s first foray into the world of TikTok hasn’t been an utter embarrassment. But it might have been better if it was.
Like most politicians, Starmer is an innately dorky man and if he is really serious about winning the hearts (and votes) of young people, his TikTok needs to embrace and celebrate that, not unconvincingly hide it away.
I have some ideas for what he could do, and I would explain, but hey, it’s classified.
