POLITICS: How the Tories are fighting the social media battle – and having fun with it – USSA News

Take a look at the Conservative Party’s social media, go on. Whether you get your news from YouTube (as it turns out, a lot of people do), where the Tories were the first political party in the West to hit 100,000 subscribers; or TikTok, where their account outshone Nigel Farage, Reform UK, and Labour in with more views, more likes and more shares in total over the past 60 days; or, like me and half of Westminster, you spend far too much time scrolling on Twitter, where yesterday you might have chuckled at their Little Britain/ Keir Starmer spoof video – the change is unmistakable.

Wherever you look the Tories digital output is sharper, funnier, more nimble – and people both online and in Westminster are talking about it. As Sir Keir Starmer makes his own tentative debut on TikTok (No10 toyed with using the Hugh Grant dance track in Downing Street from Love Actually for his first video … we await the Tory parody any minute), the Conservative Party’s team has been busy enjoying trialling new formats with Kemi Badenoch, a newly enthused leader. 

It is a small team at CCHQ, with five people all-in-all. A head of digital content, Jacob Groet, cut his teeth with Grant Shapps before ending up in No.10 with Rishi Sunak. He now oversees two camera people, one graphic designer and a content manager. Between them, I’m told, they have already exceeded their annual reach targets (individual viewers) by 100 million at the start of this month.

Fresh funding has helped. “Worth every penny,” one shadow cabinet minister insists. With new kit has come new confidence: earlier this week Badenoch and James Cleverly donned GoPros on their aprons for a video in which they took shifts at an Essex restaurant, serving customers, making coffees and narrating it all on “Kemi Cam” and “James Cam”. “Do I need a saucer,” Badenoch – whose first job was at McDonalds – can be overheard while grappling the coffee machine. “The message I’m trying to put out there is that there is dignity in work … nobody should be turning their nose down at work.”

Badenoch herself was very keen on the format, inspired by old POV (point of view) videos of a top London chef from the popular lunch spot Fallow. The original idea in CCHQ was to unleash the full shadow cabinet, staffing out almost all the roles at the restaurant, but the Badenoch/Cleverly pairing was deemed the more manageable alternative. A shadow cabinet minister said they were relieved by the diary complexities, adding: “It would have been perfect Spitting Image fodder.”

The Tory Leader has gradually relaxed into filming with the team. For a while, Badenoch hadn’t even attempted a pretty basic selfie video; now, including in a recent video with Welsh councillors, she is directing the cast with increasing confidence.

Another experiment came on Buget eve, when the Tory team hauled a projector outside of the Treasury to blast clips of Labour claiming they ‘wouldn’t be putting up taxes on working people’ along its walls, followed by their reversals. The message: “If you raise tax, you should get the axe.” Two days before Rachel Reeves’ budget, deputy chairman Matt Vickers was dispatched to Kings Cross to vox pop the public, armed with videos of Reeves’ broken promises to display.

“We thought as a bit of a reset to strip the issues back a bit, focus on breaking down what the government is doing wrong,” one CCHQ source says. Hence the explainer videos.

The first came out around party conference when CCHQ put out a ‘Who is Keir Starmer?’ video, attacking his lack of beliefs and failed plans for power. “He has been Prime Minister for over a year. And since then, Britain has suffered because he simply doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Another about Reebes was labelled: ‘This is the truth about the worst Chancellor Britain’s ever had’. The voice overs are actually a mix of professional voice artists and friends of the CCHQ digital team who have been roped in to help.

They have realised which content works best on which platform. Instagram apparently loves a video of ‘Keir can’t say’ or ‘Labour can’t say’ alongside a ticker or a countdown. TikTok enjoys humour more than anything. Twitter is a blend of humour and explainer videos, this Christmas they’ve been running an advent calendar of Starmer blunders. While YouTube seems to like watching videos as news with press conferences, set piece speeches and PMQs.

YouTube is now the second most watched service in the UK, behind the BBC and ahead of ITV, and Badenoch’s PMQs viewership has been driven by a TV first audience using the YouTube app on their television to watch her slam Starmer. Her latest full PMQs and Budget performances have pulled in 294,000 views, 299,000 views and 561,000 views respectively.

The next step is getting the rest of the party to match central office’s outputs. There are MPs who clearly enjoy doing videos and are good at it, the obvious shadow cabinet ministers are Robert Jenrick and Claire Coutinho, but others like Matt Vickers, Gareth Davies and even new MPs Katie Lam and Jack Rankin, have been creating their own content. Others are more tentative.

But as Labour MPs and Reform figures have begun hiring content creators, work still needs to go into Tory MPs developing their own social content so it is the same level across the board – and avoiding the ‘millenial pause’ as Tory MP and keen TikTok user Dr Luke Evans has warned of, where the older generation leave an awkward two second pause before talking at the start of their videos.

For now though, the Conservatives are reaping the benefits of experimenting and having some fun with their digital comms.

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