Dr Neil Ewen
Associate Professor of Media, Communications and Culture at the University of Exeter. He’s Cultural Report section editor of Celebrity Studies journal and co-editor of First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship, and Cultural Politics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), and Capitalism, Crime and Media in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
UK Election 2024
Section 8: Personality politics and popular culture
87. Ed Davey: Towards a Liberal Populism? (Dr Tom Sharkey, Dr Sophie Quirk)
88. Why Nigel Farage’s anti-media election interference claims are so dangerous (Dr Lone Sorensen)
89. Nigel Farage and the political circus (Dr Neil Ewen)
90. Binface, Beany and Beyond: humorous candidates in the 2024 General Election (Prof Scott Wright)
91. What Corbyn support reveals about how Starmer’s Labour won big (Prof Cornel Sandvoss, Dr Benjamin Litherland, Dr Joseph Andrew Smith)
92. “Well that was dignified, wasn’t it?”: floor apportionment and interaction in the televised debates (Dr Sylvia Shaw)
93. TV debates: beyond winners and losers (Prof Stephen Coleman)
94. Is our television debate coverage finally starting to match up to multi-party politics? (Dr Louise Thompson)
95. Tetchiness meets disenchantment: capturing the contrasting political energies of the campaign (Prof Beth Johnson, Prof Katy Parry)
96. “We’re just normal men”: football and the performance of authentic leadership (Dr Ellen Watts)
97. ‘Make the friendship bracelets’: gendered imagery in candidates’ self-presentations on the campaign trail (Dr Caroline Leicht)
98. Weeping in Wetherspoons: generative Al and the right/left image battle on X (Simon Popple)
99. An entertaining election? Popular culture as politics (Prof John Street)
100. Changing key, but keeping time: the music of Election 2024 (Dr Adam Behr)
101. Truth or dare: the political veracity game (Prof John Corner)
Gore Vidal had a famous quip about Ronald Reagan: “Prepare yourself for some bad news: the presidential library just burned down! Both books were destroyed. But the real horror: he hadn’t finished colouring either one of them.” To Vidal, Reagan was a puppet of big business: a slick ‘cue-card reader’ who helped corporations gain control of the country after the malaise of the 1970s.
A former Hollywood star, Reagan was, at the beginning of the 1980s, the best example to date of the celebritisation of politics: a process that, as John Street, Mark Wheeler, and other scholars of celebrity have shown, has long historical roots, but which, in the words of Wheeler, “came to maturity with the advent of mass communications in the early twentieth century”, was honed by waves of “celebrity politicians [who] incorporated matters of performance, personalization, branding and public relations into the heart of their political representation”, and is now ubiquitous across Europe and around the globe.
Reagan displayed a mastery of the process theorised by P. David Marshall in his book Celebrity and Power whereby, using the media, politicians “convey… affective information” that addresses “instinctive feelings” of voters rather than “rational decision making”. Where his predecessor Jimmy Carter would talk about the complexities of world affairs, Reagan’s simple rhetoric about the American Dream cemented his position as a beloved figure for many Americans. This man-of-the-people persona can be seen in a later cowboy president, George W. Bush, whose performance of folksiness appealed to a large swathe of the American population.
Another thing that tied Reagan and Bush Jr. together was the response they commonly induced from liberals in the mainstream media: that is to say, that they were both often branded as idiots or clowns. During Bush’s tenure there was a veritable industry based on pointing out the president’s assumed lack of intelligence, while the word “idiot” trended in 2018 when it became known that Googling it threw up images of Donald Trump.
The Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who was elected as MP for Clacton having stood unsuccessfully for Westminster on seven previous occasions, has often elicited the same kind of response. While these patronising responses to figures on the Right are sometimes amusing, they are increasingly less funny in an age where nativist parties and populist politicians are thriving, and serve to feed the sense of anti-establishment feeling that Farage – a consummate celebrity politician – is adept at fomenting and exploiting.
As such, an important response to the 2024 General Election from serious politicians and commentators across the respectable political spectrum should be careful reflection about how the radical right should be countered, now that Farage’s celebrity and cultural power has transformed into seats in Westminster and influenced a historical realignment of the right. This response should address three main points.
First, there should be understanding that the disorientation and anger that Farage has channelled is a valid response to the inevitable consequences of a long-term structural collapse, created by neoliberal economic policies which have led to deep wealth inequality, years of stagnant wages, historic levels of state and personal debt, and a contemporary labour market defined by temporary, precarious jobs that undermine possibilities of long-term life planning. Austerity implemented in the post-2008 period, and the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, turbo-charged this long process, but equally important was New Labour’s move to the right in the mid-1990s which resulted in a lack of political options for traditional Labour voters and waves of left-behind voters moving to UKIP: Farage’s first successful vehicle.
Second, while Farage has distinguished himself as highly adept at exploiting social media for clicks, and while it’s only to be expected that tabloids and partisan ‘news’ channels are happy to exploit Farage for content, the mainstream media should reflect on the key role that it has played in extending his reach, making full use his charisma as an easy way to boost viewing figures and to add some cheap spice to dull political analysis. The BBC’s Question Time stands guilty as charged, having Farage appear 36 times since 2000, as do other high-profile entertainment shows that have traded on his celebrity appeal.
And third: the political and media class should understand that calling opponents idiots and treating them like clowns is entirely counterproductive as a method of dampening the radical right, no matter how smugly satisfying it may feel in the short term. The increasing panic in Conservative ranks following Farage’s ‘shock’ announcement in early June that he would stand in Clacton after insisting that he would not run, and the suggestions that Sunak called the election early because they feared that giving Farage more time to build his campaign in Clacton would lead to an even bigger Tory wipeout, suggest that the penny may have finally dropped, albeit much too late.
As such, after decades building his brand, Farage has moved centre stage. The political circus continues but Farage is surely not the biggest clown.
