The last time I heard someone in politics saying they wanted to “go to where the people are”, it was Conservative former health secretary Matt Hancock claiming that the real reason for his participation in I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! was neither the chance to get properly famous nor the £320,000 cheque — of course not — but the opportunity to speak directly to “the masses”.
This time around, the rationale feels a little less dubious: last week Keir Starmer’s government hosted its first Downing Street reception for between 70 and 90 “content creators”. A Labour source told PoliticsHome: “we’ve long known that we’ve got to go where people are”. To that end, ministers would be “working more closely with creators, influencers and smaller platforms to tell our story alongside traditional media”.
Among those invited was Love Island star turned revenge-porn campaigner Georgia Harrison, who posted a picture of herself on Instagram leaning on a sculpture of a twisted red telephone box that seemed to have been placed outside especially for the occasion (presumably to encourage such content). Also on the guest list was Mat Gay, aka “the quid squid”, a personal finance influencer who already posts some pretty helpful content. His pinned reel on TikTok is entitled “The government’s plan to help you”, in which he asks chancellor Rachel Reeves softball questions about how her policies support people coping with inflation.
“We are doing things differently,” Downing Street’s official Instagram account boasted. “Tonight, we opened the doors of Number 10 to the content creators shaping Britain.” It also reposted many of the influencers’ own stories, accompanied by inspirational music, like “Golden” by Harry Styles.
If you can get past the slight nausea you may now be experiencing, you might note that this is very canny and effective public relations from Labour. These content creators reportedly have a combined following of a quarter of a billion (presumably many people follow several of them). If Number 10 can throw a jolly once a year in return for their disseminating a political message in the most friendly and upbeat manner possible, it seems like a pretty good deal — for Starmer at least.
And the public’s news consumption habits are, after all, changing rapidly. In Britain, the share of people getting their news from social media at least sometimes has risen to 39 per cent, according to the 2025 Reuters Digital News Report. In the US, the proportion getting their news from social media or video networks like YouTube has climbed to 54 per cent, overtaking TV news for the first time, while more than half of the under-35s now use social media and video networks as their primary means of getting the news.
But sometimes headline figures like these can hide some of the nuance in the findings. In the Reuters report, when people were asked where they would go to check something they suspected might be false, the biggest group — 38 per cent, globally — said they would go to a trusted news source and just 14 per cent said they would go to social media. Furthermore, when asked where the biggest threat comes from when it comes to false or misleading information, the top answer was not the “fake news media”, as a certain American president likes to call us, but “online influencers and personalities”.
It appears “the masses”, then, are not always so credulous. And if the public are able to distinguish between the trustworthiness of an online influencer and an established news institution, then the government must make sure that it does not conflate the two either. I was heartened to see that Downing Street did not follow in the footsteps of the White House, which earlier this year started holding regular “new media briefings” for Maga mouthpieces. These were designed to look like regular press conferences and were streamed online as if they were official communications.
So I applaud what Labour is doing in many ways: if you are able to get yourself some free marketing, and to keep up with the young folk while you’re at it, why not? But we do need to be careful to draw a clear line between public relations — it used to be called propaganda — and government accountability via the press.
And if Number 10 really wants to get their message across to people who might not otherwise hear it, they might think about bringing in some less friendly types next time — the kinds of people who influence opinion in a dramatically different political direction. That might lend more credibility to the idea of going “where the people are”.
jemima.kelly@ft.com