Prof Beth Johnson
Professor of Television and Media Studies at the University of Leeds. Research interests include social class, inequalities, television and politics.
Email: b.l.johnson@leeds.ac.uk
Twitter: @BethLJohnson
Prof Katy Parry
Professor of Media and Politics at the University of Leeds. Research interests include visual politics, political performance, and representations of (post-)military experience.
Email: k.j.parry@leeds.ac.uk
Twitter: @reticentk
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)
It never rains, but it pours. Rishi Sunak’s rain-soaked General Election announcement on 22nd May, drowned out by the unmistakable 1997 Labour-landslide anthem, D:Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, attracted an array of media commentary, ridicule, and memetic activity. Symbolically, a tone for the election campaign had been struck. The Guardian’s political sketch writer John Crace captured the public mood: “the country felt a mixture of indifference and relief. Indifference to Rish!’s (sic) exit, relief that we were to be put out of our misery”. The weather, Sunak’s own misguided attempt at statesmanlike ‘optics’, and Steve Bray’s powerful speakers, all conspired against the prime minister. Bombarded by the elements; atmospherically, visually and aurally, who wouldn’t be irritated?
The election announcement set the low octane tone for what has followed, with a sense of attunement between the depressed tetchiness of Sunak and the mood of disenchantment and disorientation that has emanated from citizens. As the campaign progressed, commentators repeatedly drew attention to Sunak’s tetchiness, a quality already noted by Ben Williams in his Conversation piece in January 2024. Sunak already had a reputation for being tetchy, with such behaviour unlikely to win public support. When political authenticity is a valued currency, tetchiness presented a break-through authentic emotion in an otherwise sterile, low energy, uninspiring campaign.
We are interested in this term particularly because it conjures an almost involuntary reaction to suppressed anger, a physical manifestation of irritable energy. Our own survey of newspapers in the Nexis database during the campaign period demonstrated that while other political actors have also been deemed ‘tetchy’ during this election, Sunak accounted for by far the most references (69 out of 102 relevant articles; by contrast Starmer had 9, mostly from the Daily Mail). Unlike Sunak’s repeated claims to be ‘incredibly angry’ about the election betting scandal, while delaying any action to suspend implicated candidates, tetchiness conjures an affective reaction, readable to a public who are losing faith in the quality of our political leaders. Televised debates showed us grim-faced audiences asking wince-inducing questions full of hurt and contempt. The issues raised appeared almost secondary to the charged manner of the asking. A NatCen report released during the election campaign showed a marked fall in the public’s trust and confidence in the British political system and its leaders. Disillusionment with democracy is particularly stark among younger voters. Our argument is that tone, mood and energy are integral to understanding how public attention and energy coalesces around certain issues, and how the media intervene to shape such configurations.
Continuing our interest in the affective energies around political moments, we see the disappointed tone of media commentary about political actors’ performances as emblematic of the contentious relationship between members of the public and politicians. As Stephen Coleman argues, paying attention to mood stories and accounts of political intuition “takes seriously the force of pre-cognitive affectivity and its shaping of public disposition”. For Coleman, “intuition may well carry greater epistemic authority than logical cognition”, and so shapes not just citizens’ immediate political reality but the scope for future actions. Our own 2019 Election Analysis piece focused on emotionality, and specifically the toxic parliamentary atmosphere that had led many MPs, and especially women, to stand down. Here we argue that opening up the metaphorical scope beyond emotionality and mood, to encompass energy and tone, allows for a richer understanding of how voters subjectively experience their own political reality and their levels of attention, commitment, and expectations in the political arena.
The concept of political energy is used here to capture degrees of affective commitment, but also the motivation and opportunity for action, and the way such forces ebb and flow over time. ‘Energy’ affords agency to political actors, but it also recognises the inequalities that constrain opportunity to express and exert such energy. Synonyms of power, liveliness, and strength speak to the qualities associated with the concept, and which can be applied to examine how values of weakness or strength are revealed through critical analysis. ‘Energy’ also has the advantage of avoiding the normative disapproval sometimes associated with emotions in politics – it implies action, or potential for action, but with potentially constructive and destructive consequences.
A voter turnout of around 60% confirmed this public malaise with the politics on offer – as Gary Gibbon dubbed it on Channel 4 News, this is a ‘loveless landslide’ for Labour, which oxymoronically captures the challenges the new government now faces in changing citizen perceptions of politics and how they can meaningfully intervene in political life. The current electoral energy might not match the optimistic enthusiasm of 1997, but a parliament with a record number of female MPs, a commitment to the most working class Cabinet of all-time, and a rhetorical focus on public service signals a renewal in the affective formation of political realities. Despite the low turnout and Labour’s low vote share, there is now a new political energy, and the opportunity at least to re-ignite democratic trust.
