Posting Through It: Sir Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak’s Social Media Strategy on Twitter in the 2024 General Election

Image Attribution: Two images spliced together. No 10 Downing Street, OGL 3 <http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3>, via Wikimedia Commons and Kirsty O'Connor / No 10 Downing Street, OGL 3 <http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3>, via Wikimedia Commons

A Tale of Two Politicians

It would be fair to say that neither Sir Keir Starmer nor Rishi Sunak is especially charismatic. They are hardly London and Paris - maybe more like Maidstone and Hastings. Not every politician has to be charismatic, or even should be, of course - but it made for a uniquely unenthusiastic General Election period. The last decade in British politics has had its fair share of personalities. Boris Johnson is the most extreme instance of this, with his brashness and bolshy bluster, but Jeremy Corbyn and David Cameron were also highly charismatic men. Ed Miliband and Theresa May weren’t quite as attention-grabbing, but both of them at least competed against someone charismatic. Starmer and Sunak were competing against each other, however.

These days, the “public square”, which influences elections and how we think about them so greatly, can be characterized as a strange, generationally stratified mix of different social media. Twitter (which I refuse to call “X”) is probably the big one; though in some respects Millennial territory, Boomer, Xer, and older Zoomer flags also fly over its hills and dales. Crucially, it’s also where more “official” accounts can be found than perhaps anywhere else. Even after Elon Musk’s takeover and some migrations to Threads and Bluesky, Twitter remains strong. As such, it’s a site of much election campaigning, when that season comes around every few years.

Social media is, as everyone says, not real life. It has filters, airbrushing, and carefully selected photos. That’s all the more true of politicians trying to advertise themselves to voters, using a team of spotty twenty-something interns and well-paid consultants from the US to optimize their online presence. There are no gaffes on social media. (Well, not many.) That makes social media a particularly interesting case study in politicians’ ideal images of themselves - and their ideal attack lines on their opponents.

To see how the two Prime Ministerial hopefuls were trying to portray themselves – or at least how their advisors wanted them to be portrayed - online, I went through all of their tweets featuring a picture or video of them (that is, Starmer posting Starmer and vice versa) since the official announcement of the General Election on the 22nd of May 2024. While Twitter was not their only channel for strategic self-fashioning, it’s fair to say it’s the most representative channel they used. Both Starmer and Sunak posted extensively. Starmer was more enthusiastic about himself, though - he posted a total of 139 tweets with pictures or videos of himself on them, whereas Sunak only posted 68 (or arguably 67, depending on how you define it). Perhaps Sunak knew he was more well-recognized, as the sitting Prime Minister, or perhaps he wanted to downplay his physical person somewhat.

Both men had somewhat similar approaches. They tried to come across as competent, managerialist governors who would get the country out of the rut it’s been in. Starmer perhaps had a challenger’s advantage here, since Sunak had already been Prime Minister for almost three years by the time the election came around. However, their individual nuances show something about how they each wanted to distinguish themselves, for better or for worse – and how they tried to use parts of themselves to craft an image. Images really matter in politics – think of how Ed Miliband’s Prime Ministerial hopes were tanked by an awkward photo of him eating a bacon sandwich. Perhaps in seeing how they manicured themselves on Twitter, we can understand better how far charisma translates over phone screens.

Can It Only Get Better? Sir Keir Starmer’s Tweets

In Starmer’s self-presentation can be seen shades of Sir Tony Blair’s middle class, business-ready “new masculinity”. He is often shown in a dark button-up shirt, which frequently has its top button undone. His sleeves are rolled up, an image he cultivated verbally before the election even started. It seems that the core of Starmer’s strategy was to try and look like a can-do professional, someone willing to get their hands dirty on the ground while remaining fundamentally in command. Unlike Johnson in 2019, he rarely portrayed himself in “uniform” or some kind of costume. While Johnson gleefully donned soldier’s uniforms, hi-vis jackets, and all sorts of other apparel, Starmer seems more restrained. Only in a handful of tweets was he wearing anything different, and most of those cases are safety-necessary life jackets while on a boat.

Throughout the campaign, Starmer and the Labour Party were presenting themselves as the new face of serious government. They wanted to be seen as professional, well-connected, and ready for business. After all, their last leader, Jeremy Corbyn, had very much been the opposite. Following his rapid rise to power in 2015, largely due to the activist and harder left-wing Momentum faction within Labour, he was immediately lampooned as being like a student politician: unrealistic and more motivated by grandiose statements than real politics. Corbyn’s self-presentation just exacerbated this issue. 

As Jessica C. Smith argued in a recent issue of the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, Corbyn was widely perceived as a slightly effeminate, affable schoolteacher type. His ubiquitous cardigans and reputation as a nice man who makes his own jam defined his characterization, and Johnson adeptly countered it by posing as a hyper-masculine man of action. He rode bulldozers and put on boxing gloves, and centred his campaign on his “oven ready” Brexit plan. He was trying to seem like a doer, not a talker - whereas Corbyn, darling of the young and educated and a longtime backbencher, seemed just the opposite. It worked very well for Johnson. It does not seem Starmer and Sunak tried to play off or counter each other in the same way.

Starmer was consciously differentiating himself from Corbyn and his time in control of Labour. Most prominently, early into the election campaign, he was expelled from the party entirely after being banned from standing as their candidate in Islington North. Starmer wanted to seem like a clean break, and a sensible face for all Britons to look to after a decade and a half of - to use his wording - Conservative chaos. That meant a harkening back to the Blair days, now viewed with increasingly rose-tinted glasses, and a presentation more linked to traditional Conservative values than old-fashioned Labour socialist ones.

Starmer’s all-business, no-nonsense side was frequently shown off on his Twitter. On 27 May, for instance, Starmer tweeted a photo of himself with a group of (allegedly!) former Conservative voters in Barnet. In his business-ready suit and tie, he looks somewhat like a boss or manager, consulting workers on their views and how to improve conditions. Similarly, on the 25th of the same month, he tweeted himself talking to voters in Stafford. Here, he is in a dark suit and shirt, without tie - somewhere between a senior partner working overtime and a friendly salesman. Such outfits are ubiquitous, and as ubiquitous as they are boring. His frequent use of dark shirts whenever he wasn’t wearing a tie was doubtless because dark colours don’t attract the eye. He was trying, perhaps, to look deliberately unflashy - just like someone who cared about getting the job done, not someone who cared about appearances.

There were a few other angles to Starmer’s persona. He sometimes chose to look a bit more like a family man: in one tweet from 10 June, he talks about his experiences bringing up young children and how vital nurseries are. He also posted himself with his wife at a Taylor Swift concert, and, as is traditional for candidates, made sure his notoriously camera-shy wife was in the photo of him going to vote on 4 July. This openness about family work is a staple of 1990s “new man” masculinity: Starmer was trying to make himself into a benevolent, flesh-and-blood individual, rather than a policy platform with a human mask. His tendency to answer more personal interview questions in rather bland, evasive ways did not help him in this regard.

Alongside this familial, familiar image, Starmer made sure to underline that he was all about democracy on the micro scale: talking to people. He constantly tweeted images of himself essentially consulting with normal people - from Morrisons workers to small business owners. Given the fractured nature of the British political landscape in 2024, this was surely sensible. However, it might have contributed to his broad problem of seeming like someone without many defined principles or core ideas.

Clearly, Starmer was in some ways trying to make his campaign about himself as well as about getting the Conservatives out. Of course, he knew he was riding a wave of pent-up dissatisfaction with the Conservative Party after fourteen years of rule. He campaigned heavily on being the change candidate. Yet he also tried to emphasize that it had to be Labour specifically to lead the UK after the fall of the Conservative Party, to ensure that post-Conservative governance wasn’t fragmented by coalition politics. That meant presenting a party platform that was more than just “we’re not the other guys”. It meant presenting a viable alternative leader - someone Britons could look to and think, “yeah, he could be our Prime Minister”. That guy could do it.

However, I’m not so sure this was Starmer’s best strategy, given his lack of charisma and corresponding unpopularity. Evaluating the exact effects of his campaign strategy would be well beyond the scope of this piece, but it is worth laying out a few basic statistics. For one, Starmer is not and has never been very popular. His YouGov opinion tracker makes this pretty clear. His peak popularity rate was 33%, in April 2022. Since then, he has fluctuated between 20% and 30%. Only for about a week has he enjoyed a net positive approval rating (which is a harsher metric than popularity). That week was actually after the General Election, during which he varied between -10% and -20% net approval (a harsher metric than popularity rate, since it can go into negative numbers).

I think Starmer’s problems with self-presentation on social media are best summed up by his difficulties coming across as a genuine fan of football. Starmer is an honest-to-God football fan and always has been as far as anyone can tell. He’s a devoted Arsenal supporter with season tickets. That’s why it’s all the more surprising that he comes across as though he’s faking it. In a photo posted by his trusted second-in-command, Angela Rayner, on 16 June, he can be seen standing awkwardly in a plain white shirt. He doesn’t look like he wants to be there, which is funny given he almost certainly did want to. Starmer is simply a little awkward in front of cameras, and more suited to Parliamentary exchanges than social media. Making him so prominent in Labour’s campaign to replace the Conservatives may have done more harm than good.

Rishi Sunak’s Prime Ministerial Internship

Perhaps afraid to be the face of Conservative failure, Sunak did not post himself quite as much as Starmer did. There is thus a little less to say about him. Mostly, he maintained Conservative message discipline, focussing on attack lines around tax and pensions. This means that, unlike Starmer, Sunak posted some pictures of his enemy - but always in an unflattering context, such as one ad which had Starmer crossing his fingers behind his back, implying he was lying about his campaign promises. However, there are still some themes running through Sunak’s presentation of himself on Twitter.

Sunak’s self-presentation can be summed up as finance bro chic. He mixed very modern looking suits with thin lapels and slightly stringy blue ties with quarter-zips and occasionally just shirts, without a tie or jacket. Given his reputation as a member of 'the elite' and history as an actual finance bro, it’s most likely that he simply viewed his image in this regard as a bit of a lost cause. He was never going to be perceived as an average bloke. Although there are some brief flashes of an attempt to come across as normal, such as him celebrating England’s victory on 16 June in a jumper and jeans, Sunak probably knew that everyone knows he’s rich. Neither was he ever going to be the type of rich person Johnson was, who could get away with a certain laddish boisterousness that seems to negate accusations of elitism.

It is probably important that Sunak constantly posted pictures of himself in strong, leaderly contexts. More than Starmer, he liked to post photos of himself with British flags, cheering supporters, and sometimes an audience. In one post from 1 June, he seems the model of a glamorous, bold leader, with his chin up and cheering supporters standing behind him. The open-collared shirt and slightly rolled up sleeves add to the image, making him look like the sort of man you could trust your pension with. (Notably, Starmer was going for something similar.) Given the Conservatives’ voter-base, it is not surprising that he wanted to look that way.

Sunak was more than willing to use his incumbency as Prime Minister to give himself particularly flattering photo-ops. For instance, on 29 June, Armed Forces Day, he stood head and shoulders over a sea of fatigues-wearing soldiers at an airport; he followed that on 1 July with a photo of himself talking to workers in a factory, a massive Union Jack hanging behind him. The fact that he did not choose to dress himself like them, or even like a generic boss or politician, but opted for a quarter-zip underlines the degree to which he was trying to come across as a financial technocrat more than a personality politician or a charismatic leader.

The Conservatives’ broad patriotic streak, accentuated in the 2024 General Election to try and ward off the threat from Reform, was brought out on Twitter. Sunak was likely aware that Elon Musk’s ownership of the site and broad cultural trends made a populist patriotic approach sensible. On 5 June, for instance, he posted himself standing next to His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, applauding D-Day veterans in Normandy on official business. On the 23rd, he uploaded a picture of himself having tea with some old ladies, a prominent Union Jack just above his head. This was surely getting two demographics at once - or, more likely, just focussing hard on the patriotic elderly, a very active voting demographic.

The issue is, Sunak’s clothing choices and photo-ops simply came across like he didn’t care. He faced constant accusations of laziness or resignation to his own defeat throughout the campaign, and his appearances in hi-vis-bedecked workplaces or military bases in finance bro clothes didn’t help. He looked like he was trying to imitate Johnson’s successes without really believing in himself - his relatively low number of tweets with himself actually pictured in them supported this impression. The finance bro twist he added in from his own personality played into the worst parts of his public image as an out-of-touch rich guy trying to play culture warrior. 

Sunak’s issues are perhaps best summed up by a photo he posted on 2 July, talking about the comeback of a breakfast wrap he’d previously gaffed about in 2022 and his re-election chances with the line, ‘I love a comeback.’ He does not look like he believes that he will actually would make a comeback. He does not look like he cares about the (unopened) wrap he is holding, and he does not look like he cares about much at all short of getting the campaign over with and returning to wealthy obscurity. It is much like Starmer’s attempts to look like he thinks football is his number one priority as a politician, despite the fact that most people don’t think it’s very important for politicians to be interested in football. Sunak couldn’t shake the impression that he had already given up.

What No Filter Can Fix

In a way, this can all be summed up in both men’s attempts to use football in their social media strategy. As Joel Golby put it, the politicization of football consistently came across as inauthentic from both men. Both are uncharismatic, and filters and well-chosen angles couldn’t fix their forced facial expressions, and nor could anything quite replicate the energy Johnson had while bowling over a 10-year-old boy in Japan in 2015. That Johnson could not only do this but get away with referencing it in his speeches as a positive thing proves that he had something they didn’t.

Politicians forget things all the time, and make mistakes constantly. Yet brushing them off takes charisma, and charisma can’t be forced. Johnson made all sorts of gaffes into endearing jokes, or simply let them wash off him. Contrastingly, Sunak was ridiculed for weeks after asking Welsh people if they were going to enjoy the summer’s football after they had been eliminated from the Euros. And Starmer couldn't avoid the perception that he was a grey, passionless bureaucrat.

Part of charisma is knowing what to do with yourself. Johnson knew, and knows, that he works best leaning into his image as a roguish public schoolboy, ill-behaved and energetic in a disarming way. It’s not clear that either Sunak or Starmer knew what to do with themselves. Sunak embarrassed himself doing the world’s least enthusiastic Johnson tribute act while dressed like a 25-year-old at Goldman Sachs, and Starmer fell on his face attempting to “do a Blair”. Doing a Blair is much harder than it looks. Social media might not be real life, but there are some things no filter can fix.

By Oliver Haythorne

Recommended Resources

Jessica C. Smith - Bulldozing Brexit: the role of masculinity in UK party leaders' campaign imagery in the 2019 UK General Election (2021)

Joel Golby - It's eerie, it's excruciating ... Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, please stop talking about football (June 2024)