Has British politics finally become a meme?
Is an Islington suit an Islington suit if it was bought in Camden? Does Keir Starmer have more “posh north London” vibes than Jeremy Corbyn? After all his time in politics was “a tiny brain” the best slur Boris Johnson could come up with for the Leader of the Opposition? Yesterday’s PMQs was an old-school brand of entertainment.
British politics has always had a flavour for the bizarre. Amongst “the bubble”, Ed Balls Day and Ed Miliband’s bacon butty have done significant mileage. But now, with the renegade spirit of instagram accounts such as the Archbishop of Banterbury, British politics has officially entered meme-territory, with social media plundering PMQs for content almost as much as the journalists paid to listen to all 30 minutes.
Among jokes about mothers finding their kid’s vibrator and eating “posh dominos” at the table, Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock and Rishi Sunak are key characters in the meme cast.
Memes exist for their relatability. They range from the puerile to the economically and politically informed. As many 20 to 30-something-year-olds try not to dissolve into despair over their inability to buy a house, they share jokes about putting petrol on buy-now-pay-later schemes.
One of the more boring elements of being one of the few regular viewers of Parliament TV is the number of MPs who stand up and ask a question they know the answer to (“Does the Prime Minister agree my constituency is a local powerhouse?”). They do it to secure a clip of themselves celebrating their electorate to post on their social media feeds. Could this soon dissolve away from clunky videos emblazoned with party logos?
Could we envisage a day where a member of Parliament also enters the gilded hall of fame of being a “great meme account my friend sent me”? There’s certainly been little reticence of politicians to enter “pop culture”. Jess Phillips was the latest MP to host Have I Got News for You (for the small cost of £15,000) but she follows a well-trodden path of politicians trying to be funny including aforementioned Ed Balls, Nick Clegg, Neil Kinnock and Boris Johnson.
For all the talk of “cut through”, will we soon be turning to the Archbishop of Banterbury instead of YouGov?