The politician who wants to target the swing voter via television tries to seem as normal as possible. The politician who seeks to mobilise support online will do precisely the opposite.
WILL DAVIES, London Review of Books,
June 20191
Life was going well for Nigel Farage in January 2015. Or at least it looked that way. The party he led, UKIP, was riding high in the polls. Prominent Conservative defectors had crossed the floor to join him. A referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union was now a formal commitment of David Cameron’s Conservatives. But behind the scenes, Farage had problems. Internally UKIP was a mess, riven by in-fighting and disorganisation.2
Farage decided that he needed to build a new political vehicle, one that he could truly control. So he travelled with his advisors Raheem Kassam and Liz Bilney, who worked for Arron Banks, to a quiet residential street in an upmarket neighbourhood of Milan. The trio stopped at a set of heavy wooden doors. On the other side were the offices of Casaleggio Associates, the private company behind the anti-establishment Five Star Movement.3
In Milan, Farage and his entourage met Gianroberto Casaleggio. A 60-year-old tech utopian with a mane of shaggy hair, Casaleggio was the digital wizard who had orchestrated Five Star’s remarkable ascent from political start-up to Italy’s largest party. Casaleggio had devised and orchestrated the web platform where Five Star’s legions of supporters log on to vote for policy, stand for election and donate to the self-styled “movement”.
Although it all looks like a grassroots movement, the reality is very different: Five Star is actually micro-managed from the top. Five Star’s Rousseau web platform is run by Casaleggio Associates. Legally Casaleggio’s son Davide has control over the party’s data.4 It is almost impossible to say where Five Star the party begins, and the private company ends. This is not a spontaneous democratic movement welling up from the streets, like the anti-war movements of the 1960s or the Solidarity movement that transformed Poland. It is a carefully managed form of protest.
Farage liked what he saw in Milan. The UKIP leader returned to Britain with the zeal of the convert. He began to talk about digital democracy, about building a new party online. “I learned a lot from Five Star,” he later said. “They used the Internet to build up a grassroots movement. I was impressed by their energy and the commitment of their supporters, who were willing to pay €25–30 a year to participate in the movement.”5
But Farage bided his time. In early 2019, more than four years after his trip to Milan and a year after Five Star had become the largest party in Italy at a general election and entered government for the first time, the by now ex-UKIP leader re-emerged into electoral politics. As Theresa May’s EU withdrawal agreement turned to ash in the House of Commons, Farage presented himself as the reluctant saviour of the British public from the nefarious elite in Westminster. Out went the herring-bone suits, the blokey bonhomie and his old party’s tarnished, fascist-leaning brand; in came headsets, sharp suits and the shiny new Brexit Party. Farage had reinvented himself as a televangelist, preaching politics for the digital age.
The Brexit Party was officially launched in April 2019, in a crowded warehouse belonging to an industrial cleaning company in Coventry. One reporter noted that the atmosphere was “like a pop concert for the Leave-voting pensioners of Middle England”. There were Brexit Party t-shirts and posters and official lanyards.6 Farage confidently told journalists that he would “change politics for good”.7
New parties often make bold statements only to later flounder. A few weeks before the Brexit Party’s launch, a cadre of rebel centrist Tory and Labour MPs formed by the Blairite era left their parties to form a new ‘independent group’. What became the optimistically named Change UK soon sank without trace. Farage was far more buoyant. His new party’s belligerent press conferences and media briefings set the news agenda.
Support surged. Farage claimed that in the Brexit Party’s first ten days it raised a record £750,000 in anonymous online donations.8 Less than two months after its launch, Farage rode a wave of popular anger to top the polls in elections to the European Parliament that Britain was never supposed to contest, winning 30 per cent of the vote. Even when the Brexit Party failed to win a seat in Westminster in the general election a few months later, Farage’s party played a significant role in framing the contest that led to Boris Johnson’s sweeping victory.
In many ways, the Brexit Party is nothing new. A political chameleon with a populist touch spots an opening and seizes it. Opportunists and grifters have long abounded in politics. But there is something different about this tale, too. The Brexit Party encapsulates how the Internet has radically reshaped politics, from the rise of untraceable online fundraising to the splintering of a relatively homogenous media landscape into myriad shards, all competing for attention.
The declining power of traditional media is arguably the most profound political change in living memory, opening up new possibilities for political influence. Loosely connected networks spread misinformation into the digital ether. From bedrooms and pokey offices across Britain, hyper-partisan websites increasingly deliver highly partial news and views to millions of voters. Political half-truths and rumours travel at warp speed online, from old media to new and vice versa, propelled by anonymous digital armies.
Where the last generation of politicians needed to appear plausible in front of the television cameras, the leaders who thrive now are those who can best control a fragmented and disoriented media, harnessing the power of social networks as they push us towards extremes. In the long run, it is this misinformation revolution that could have the biggest impact of all on the future of democracy. Or on whether we have a democracy at all.
*
In early 2019, Steve Bannon organised a dinner for Nigel Farage ahead of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Maryland. Afterwards, the two men talked privately. As they talked, Farage outlined his plans for the as-yet-unannounced Brexit Party. Bannon was sceptical, at first. “I strongly recommended to Nigel that he stick with UKIP,” he recalled. “I thought it would be too big a risk. If they didn’t have a great showing in the European elections, I’m not that sure that the momentum would have been there to drive (Brexit) home.” But Farage won Bannon over.
“He had a very detailed plan,” Bannon told me. Farage wanted to be “just like Five Star. Make it an online party. He had this thing thought through and he pulled it off.”
Among the lessons that Farage gleaned from Five Star was the electoral benefit of being seen as coming from outside traditional politics altogether. Beppe Grillo, the pugnacious former comedian who fronted Five Star’s rise, often said that his movement was neither left nor right. It was, he said, direct democracy in action.
Farage did the same. The Brexit Party’s only substantive policy was its name. Its European election slate spanned the spectrum of British politics. The former Tory minister, ardent Roman Catholic and death penalty and gay conversion therapy evangelist Ann Widdecombe took a seat. So did Claire Fox, one-time Revolutionary Communist Party cadre and full-time controversialist, whose positions on many matters are often difficult to distinguish from those of the furthest extremes of the libertarian right.
A few months after her election, I went to meet Fox. She had just returned from Strasbourg. “I’m knackered,” she said with a gravelly laugh shortly before lighting the first of numerous cigarettes (she is an opponent of bans on smoking indoors) as we sat in the sun outside a bare brick south London café. On the table in front of us were two dictaphones, one for me and one for her. Hers was bigger.
Fox talked me through her rapid journey from being a regular on the BBC to the corridors of the European Parliament. In mid-March 2019, as it became apparent that the UK would not be leaving the EU at the end of the month as originally scheduled, Fox started attending more pro-Brexit meetings. She was invited to speak at a large rally in London. In early April, she met Farage and Leave.EU co-founder Richard Tice, the Brexit Party’s chairman.
Why, I asked, had someone who still describes themselves as a Marxist joined a pop-up party created by a former commodities trader and a rich businessman? “I felt it was important that there was a left-leaning Leave voice among the MEPs,” Fox said. A few minutes later, she compared the battle for Brexit to the suffragettes winning the vote for women. “Progressive change is disruptive.”
Fox certainly knows about political change. Over three decades, like her former Trotskyite colleagues such as Brendan O’Neill and Mick Hume, she has surfed the tides of British politics in remarkable ways. From supporting the IRA and accusing other far-left groups of being insufficiently rigorous in their support for the ‘armed struggle’, and defending Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milošević in the 1980s and 1990s, the ranks of the Revolutionary Communist Party have provided some of the loudest – and most ubiquitous – media voices arguing against environmentalism, liberalism and the European Union.
Although the Revolutionary Communist Party formally disbanded in 1997, it has not exactly disappeared. I collected Fox from her office at the Academy of Ideas, a think tank that grew out of the RCP. Another RCP spin-off, the online magazine Spiked, is a fixture on the frontlines of Britain’s nascent culture war. Spiked’s stock in trade is a contrarianism so predictable you could set your watch by it. According to Spiked’s small stable of writers, vegetarians are bad. Climate change is overhyped. Corporations are good.
There’s money to be made in such intellectual promiscuity. In the years after the Brexit vote, Spiked’s US funding arm received $300,000 from the Koch brothers.9 Its writers regularly appear on British television, willing to defend almost any position. Meanwhile, former RCP comrades have gained influence in the heart of British politics; the drafting of the Conservatives’ winning 2019 election manifesto was overseen by Munira Mirza, a one-time RCP member who later worked for Boris Johnson as London mayor and prime minister.10
For Fox, there is no contradiction between taking money from American oil billionaires and claiming to represent ordinary voters against a corrupt establishment. She says: “What the Brexit Party did was to give voice to millions of frustrated people who were asking, ‘What happened to my vote?’ If you come along and say, ‘We are the Brexit Party,’ they say, ‘Yes, what a relief,’ because they had been left shouting at the television.”
When I posed a question about what the Brexit Party’s policies were beyond the self-explanatory, Fox chuckled. “Don’t ask me, I don’t know. You can quote me on that.”
*
Five Star and the Brexit Party are textbook examples of what sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo calls “digital parties”.11 They take a populist message, fronted by a strong leader, and mix it with the organisational techniques of the Internet age. Supporters register online. They watch party videos on their smartphones and share party messages across social media. As with the Internet itself, the digital party is disaggregated and fluid. There are few structures or hierarchies. Everyone can participate.
Or at least it looks as if they can. The Silicon Valley rhetoric of engagement and empowerment often masks the concentration of power at the top of the digital party. Much like Five Star, the Brexit Party is, as Farage put it, “a company, not a political party”.12 The former UKIP leader owns 60 per cent of the party,13 and the constitution effectively gives him total control. In late 2019, the Brexit Party had just three officers: a secretary, who was a little-known European election candidate, and two directors, Farage and Tice, who founded Leave Means Leave after the Brexit vote. Farage is the only person who can appoint and remove directors.
Traditional political parties spend time and money trying to build their membership, but the Brexit Party is a closed shop. Fewer than half a dozen senior officials are actual members. (The Brexit Party’s very corporate structure is highly unusual in British politics – but not completely unique. Change UK also registered as a non-trading company, headed by a former Labour MP. Britain could be set for an era where private enterprise and political parties become structurally inseparable.)
The promise of digital democracy often rings hollow. In May 2019, less than two weeks before the European elections, Farage told listeners to his regular LBC radio show that he was building an app that would allow supporters to “shape policy and shape our future direction”.14 When the app launched, it featured only lists of party candidates and videos of Farage and his colleagues speaking. There was no way for supporters to interact with the party, much less vote on policies.
One early reviewer on Google’s app store complained that it looked like it had been “created by a first-year computer science student and not a very talented one”. Another wrote: “I support Brexit, but this has to be said: For a party which is supposedly slick and media-savvy, this app is so awful it can hardly be classed as such. I can only hope the party’s MEPs perform far better.” This was a take-it-or-leave-it form of politics, not even a simulacrum of democratic decision-making.
The 100,000 or so people who each donated £25 to become “supporters” during the Brexit Party’s first couple of months were given no power over its policies. When, in November 2019, Nigel Farage unilaterally announced that his new party was standing down from 317 Conservative-held seats in the general election, candidates complained that they had not been consulted. Like more than 3,000 others, they had each paid £100 to apply to run under the Brexit Party’s colours. Farage – who refused to say whether any of these luckless candidates would be reimbursed – broke the news of his election climbdown at a rally in Hartlepool filled with supporters who had paid £2.50 to hear him speak for less than ten minutes.
Spiked declared that “the Brexit Party has betrayed us”.15 But there was nothing they could do about it. There was only one voice that mattered: Farage’s.
The importance of controlling a digital party’s internal machinery was not the only lesson Farage and his colleagues learned in Milan. The Brexiters were particularly struck by how Five Star was amassing data from the party’s Rousseau voting platform to hone its political strategy.16
Five Star’s digital approach to politics was the life’s work of Gianroberto Casaleggio. In the 1990s, Casaleggio ran a web consulting business and waxed lyrical about the “radical social and revolutionary” force of the Internet.17 He initially grew Five Star on the networking website Meetup, which had been popularised by Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign. Through Meetup, Beppe Grillo communicated with supporters and encouraged them to coordinate local meetings. Often the topics discussed were not directly political. ‘No incinerators’. ‘Ethical consumerism’. ‘Currency’. In June 2007, Grillo launched Vaffanculo Day in Bologna. ‘Fuck Off Day’ quickly spread across Italy, a ribald two fingers to a corrupt political elite. Casaleggio had set up and ghost-written Grillo’s blog, from which Five Star emerged.
As Meetup’s popularity faded and Five Star became an electoral force, many of the groups moved onto Facebook, again orchestrated by Casaleggio. Through closed Facebook forums, Five Star supporters often pushed misinformation and attacked their political opponents, just as Casaleggio had expected they would.
Casaleggio said he wanted to fight the corruption of the Italian political system and to provide an alternative to the “fake news” of traditional media, but Five Star ran a clandestine network of websites that actively spread, among other things, anti-vaccination conspiracy theories and Kremlin propaganda.18 One blog with more than a million followers posted articles that claimed that the United States – backed by George Soros – was smuggling migrants from Libya to Italy, and that Obama wanted to topple the Syrian regime to prevent China accessing Middle Eastern oil. A Five Star member of parliament was criticised for tweeting a link to an anti-Semitic website claiming that Jews controlled the world’s banking system.19
Even though he had no official position with the Five Star Movement, Casaleggio had an iron grip on the organisation. He owned the web platform and the data that it gathered. “Casaleggio was far cleverer than Cambridge Analytica,” says Jacopo Iacoboni, an Italian journalist who has written two books on Five Star. “He never needed to steal data. With Five Star, the web company created a party, with the owner directly possessing all the data.”
The Rousseau online platform was formally launched on 13 April 2016. The previous day, Gianroberto Casaleggio had died following a long illness with a brain tumour.20 In what Iacoboni called a “dynastic succession”, Casaleggio’s son, Davide, 40 at the time, took control of the family business. Since then, Davide has held an annual convention on the anniversary of his father’s death. Each year some of the biggest names in Italian tech and business, including Google’s CEO in Italy, travel to the city of Ivrea, where Casaleggio began his career.21
Such is Davide’s control of the party that the New York Times described him as the “mystery man who runs Italy’s Five Star from the shadows”.22 Questions have been raised about the digital party’s online operation. Italy’s privacy regulator has said that it is impossible to guarantee that votes on Five Star’s web platform are not being manipulated from within by party staff.23
Five Star’s sophisticated set-up appealed to Farage, Kassam and, particularly, Arron Banks. After Liz Bilney came back from Milan, she wrote a report for Banks about the possibilities of digital campaigning. Bilney told Banks that he could, if he wished, build a new party on the Internet. “There is not currently any party in the UK with any true Internet presence,” her report said.24 Like Five Star, Banks’s new digital party should engage followers in a conversation. Bilney compared the approach to running his business empire.
“If you look at insurance, you want people to renew their policies,” Bilney wrote.25 Just like selling insurance policies, a political campaign should aim to “upgrade” a follower to a paying “supporter” through frequent contact and engagement. Leave.EU – the pro-Brexit movement Banks founded and Bilney ran – was fashioned in Five Star’s image. The political ‘movement’ was in fact a company, controlled by Banks. Everything was done online.
Even before Brexit had been won, Banks was thinking about building a post-UKIP political vehicle in Five Star’s image. He spoke to sympathetic Tory MPs about his admiration for Grillo’s anti-establishment movement. When the Brexit Party finally emerged, Arron Banks saw the Italian parallels clearly. “What the Five Star did, and what the Brexit Party is doing, is having a tightly controlled central structure, almost a dictatorship at the centre,” he told journalist Darren Loucaides, with remarkable frankness.26
There was one major difference between Five Star and the Brexit Party. Where Five Star had largely grown organically under Casaleggio’s tutelage, the Brexit Party was bootstrapped by paid-for Facebook ads combined with the huge social media reach of Farage and his allies. As soon as it launched, Arron Banks’s Leave.EU sent out a constant stream of supportive posts to its almost one million followers. Many suspected that Banks was also funding this slick new party, but Farage was at pains to stress that the Brexit high roller was not involved. The authorities were soon asking, however, where exactly Britain’s first digital party was raising its cash.
*
A few days before the European Parliament elections in May 2019, Gordon Brown gave a speech in Glasgow. The former prime minister covered familiar themes: the threat of Scottish independence; the Tories “banging on” about Europe; the need for investment in health and education. Brown also zeroed in on a new target: the millions of pounds that the Brexit Party was raising online.
“Democracy is fatally undermined if unexplained, unreported and thus undeclared and perhaps under the counter and underhand campaign finance – from whom and from where we do not know – is being used to influence the very elections that are at the heart of our democratic system,” Brown said.27
Farage responded angrily, accusing the one-time Labour leader of an “absolutely disgusting smear” against his party.28 Brown’s former party had, Farage correctly noted, installed several of its biggest donors in the House of Lords. Brexit Party co-founder Richard Tice dismissed the complaints as “jealous Westminster people who are just aghast at how we can capture the mood of the country”.29
Certainly, the Brexit Party had found that there was money to be made in Britain’s feverish political atmosphere. Within a month of launching, the party raised £2 million in online donations.30 Farage himself encouraged supporters to give money via PayPal. Yet questions about the party’s record digital donations still swirled. When the BBC’s Nick Robinson asked Tice about the possibility that foreign donors could be giving money to the party online, the Brexit Party chairman said that he didn’t “sit in front of the PayPal account all day, so I don’t know what currencies people are paying in”.31 This was hardly a ringing denial of the possibility of foreign interference in British politics.
The Brexit Party had a £500 limit on PayPal contributions – the point at which British political donations must be declared – but there was nothing to stop individuals breaking those limits by donating multiple times. Eyebrows were raised when The Times reported that the Brexit Party’s fundraising team included George Cottrell, a former Farage aide who had spent time in jail in the United States for wire fraud, after offering to launder drug pushers’ money.32 A fresh-faced aristocrat who went by the nickname ‘Posh George’, Cottrell had served as UKIP’s head of fundraising until he was arrested on his return from the 2016 Republican National Convention.33
Shortly after Gordon Brown’s intervention, the Electoral Commission decided to take a closer look at the Brexit Party’s finances. After a visit to the party’s London headquarters, the regulator reported that it was concerned about “the potential for individuals or organisations to evade the permissibility rules, which primarily seek to prevent significant sums entering UK politics from overseas”.34 In June, the watchdog said that the Brexit Party’s online funding left it open to “a high and on-going risk” of impermissible donations, and ordered the party to tighten its reporting procedures.35
By then, of course, the European elections were already over. Once again the stable door was being closed after the horse had been given ample time to bolt. “What people have been very good at is spotting loopholes in the law and exploiting them,” says electoral law expert Gavin Millar. “It is so easy to mask where money is coming from.”
The Brexit Party’s online funding model, borrowed directly from Five Star, could easily be replicated by others. It is the quintessence of murky digital politics: dispersed, loosely connected yet centrally controlled, and almost impossible to scrutinise. The old analogue system of political donations – of cheques posted off to fusty central party offices – is being replaced by contributions made with the click of a mouse. Tracing donations will likely become even more difficult in the coming years.
“In the future, people will use online payment systems to give, say, £1 million in multiple micro-donations that won’t be picked up,” says Conservative MP Damian Collins. “Facebook is launching its own platform currency – Libra – which could be a mechanism to launder money into campaigns with no transparency at all.”
One possible solution is to make political parties responsible for ensuring that the money they receive is untainted. The Electoral Commission’s head of regulation Louise Edwards suggested adopting the same anti-money laundering checks used by banks, art dealers and others for political donations. In the summer of 2019, the Electoral Commission had private meetings with the anti-money laundering team at the Treasury to discuss how the proposal might work.
But as so often in British politics, the talk of change did not develop into action. There were “a lot of chats but there didn’t seem to be any clear political will to do anything”, said someone close to the Treasury’s discussions with the elections watchdog. “It seemed there had already been nudges from Number 10 – ‘Don’t make life too difficult for our donors.’”
Donors are the lifeblood of British politics. As well as PayPal donations, the Brexit Party received more than £8 million from named donors between its launch in April 2019 and December’s general election. (By comparison, Change UK raised less than £275,000 in the same period.) Some of the Brexit Party’s biggest contributors had previously given money to the Conservatives and worked in finance.
Many of the names and the networks were very familiar. Brexit donor Jeremy Hosking, who donated heavily to Tory candidates in the 2017 general election, announced that he was backing the Brexit Party. Jon Wood, who donated to Boris Johnson’s Tory leadership campaign, gave money; Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based businessman and one-time member of the ‘leader’s group’ of senior Conservative donors, was dubbed “the new Arron Banks” by an online news site after donating an eye-watering £6.7 million to the Brexit Party.36
Other donors had links to the opaque world of libertarian think tanks. Richard Smith, who owns the building at 55 Tufton Street, contributed, as did George Farmer, the 20-something former chairman of the alt-right group Turning Point UK.
In September 2019, as a potential general election loomed, Banks’s right-hand man Andy Wigmore tweeted that Conservative and Brexit Party donors had been “having secret meetings on how to cooperate”,37 warning that if Boris Johnson did not do a deal with Farage “then Tories may be in for a financial surprise”. Newspapers reported that the Conservatives were offering honours to senior Brexit Party figures in return for standing aside.38 In the end, Johnson eschewed a formal pact with Farage, but the Brexit Party’s European elections success had already paved the way for Johnson to become Conservative leader and had galvanised his party around the pledge to “Get Brexit Done”.
Questions about the Brexit Party’s funding did little to blunt its appeal ahead of the European elections in May 2019. Criticism by the likes of Gordon Brown was dismissed as yet another manifestation of a compromised pro-EU establishment trying to protect itself. Negative newspaper stories gained little traction either. Voters seemed uninterested in Claire Fox’s past defence of an Irish Republican bomb that killed two and injured 56 in Warrington,39 or whether a Brexit Party candidate John Kennedy had shared a platform with Radovan Karadžić40 or secretly worked for Cambridge Analytica in Kenya.41 Meanwhile, Farage’s party adeptly harnessed new online tools to grab the attention of voters and spread its no-deal Brexit message. (The party’s only other substantive policy was a pledge to get rid of inheritance tax.)
A digital party can appear chaotic, but it is often carefully micro-managed. Like a multinational launching a new product line, the digital party carefully tests its offer with consumers. Voters are bombarded with targeted online messages to see what sticks, and what doesn’t.
Before the European elections, the Brexit Party appointed Steven Edginton, a 19-year-old former digital strategist at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, to head its online campaign. Just as Leave.EU did before the Brexit referendum, the Brexit Party specifically targeted Labour voters on Facebook. It spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on slick ads. Attacks on the British political establishment for failing to take the country out of the EU at the end of March 2019 were mixed with a more hopeful message: change politics for good.
“We knew that there was basically a ceiling with fucked-off people,” a party insider told Wired.42 “In order to open our horizons and reach out to more voters, we wanted a much more optimistic message.”
Like Farage’s clipped, emotive prose, the Brexit Party’s social media was succinct and powerful: its average Facebook post was 19 words long, compared with 71 for the doomed centrist party Change UK.43 It was wildly successful. By the end of the European elections campaign the Brexit Party had more than 120,000 Facebook likes, five times more than Change UK.44 Its content was shared more than all the other parties’ combined.45
Social networks and smartphones have not just changed how parties market themselves to voters. The digital age has ushered in a new type of politician. The Internet, as Will Davies writes, calls for “a very different set of political and personal talents: confrontation, wit, defiance, spontaneity and rule-breaking”.46 Where Bill Clinton or Tony Blair tried desperately to appear normal for the TV camera, digital politicians intentionally court the lulz. In his first speech in the European Parliament, the Brexit Party’s Martin Daubney called the EU’s key negotiator, Guy Verhofstadt, the “Darth Vader of Europe”. The clip was widely shared on social media.
Unlike the overproduced television politicians of the 1980s and 1990s, who needed to appeal to the news editors and producers that guarded access to the media, digital politicians can build their own media and their own following. The Brexit Party set up highly professional social media channels. Viewers on YouTube could watch a dedicated news-panel-style show called Brexbox. The party’s ersatz newspaper, the Brexiteer, was distributed in town centres and pubs by a small army of volunteers.47
“We are completely circumnavigating the traditional media stream who, let’s face it, are often hostile to us and don’t like us. And more to the point, our voters don’t watch them,” said Martin Daubney, himself a former editor of lads’ magazine Loaded. Rather than relying on journalists who, Daubney complained, tell “different versions of truth”, the Brexit Party decided to “be the news source”, the MEP told Wired.48
In becoming its own media, the Brexit Party was helped by another digital innovation: the rise of an almost invisible network of do-it-yourself, hyper-partisan websites that push political messages deep into the digital echo chambers where many voters increasingly get their views of the world.
*
When Jordan James was growing up, he dreamed of being a journalist. At school, James, who describes himself as “a mixed race lad from a broken family” on “the rough side of Bolton” in north-west England, walked around with a copy of the Sun folded under his arm. He studied media at a regional university and applied for jobs in journalism, but the closest he got to Fleet Street was the final round of the Sun’s apprenticeship scheme. So he decided to set up his own tabloid online.
James launched Politicalite.com in spring 2017. The site’s style was bombastic. Sensationalist headlines. Showbiz gossip side-by-side with hard-right talking points.49 On a good day, he was getting 50,000 visitors. His most-read stories covered three closely related subjects: the far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (better known as Tommy Robinson); Islam; and Brexit.
“That’s what people wanted. That’s what people wanted to share, the things that aren’t usually said in the ‘PC media bubble’. We fed the monster,” James told me during one of our many long text message conversations in the second half of 2019.
Politicalite is one node in a loosely connected network of avowedly partisan, hard-right British political websites that have sprung up in recent years. Their names are little-known beyond the depths of the Internet. Their stories are not read out on the morning media round-up on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, which has traditionally set the Westminster agenda. But these highly partial, anything-but-neutral outlets increasingly supply opinions to a vast swathe of the British public.
“People don’t trust the mainstream media anymore,” says David Clews, who set up the right-wing website Unity News Network in Glasgow with a couple of young UKIP activists in early 2018. “People don’t have an issue with partisan reporting. What they have an issue with is the mainstream media who dress up partisan reporting as news.”
These wildly opinionated websites can exert political influence far beyond their relatively meagre resources. The 2016 US presidential election was often framed as a victory for fake news. False stories proliferated. The Pope had endorsed Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton was involved in an apocryphal child abuse ring operating out of a suburban Washington pizza parlour.
Reports blamed the tsunami of misinformation on youths working for online ‘troll farms’ in Macedonia – which were subsequently found to have involved highly coordinated international efforts50 – but the most enduring pro-Trump messaging was crafted by hyper-partisan media much closer to home.
Breitbart, the site funded by Robert Mercer and overseen by Steve Bannon, was the most popular conservative news outlet in the 2016 campaign.51 Fringe right-wing outfits such as Gateway Pundit, Conservative Tribune and Truthfeed supplied jaundiced reporting to millions of readers.52 Fox News broadcast almost hourly attacks on the Democrats. This insular ecosystem played up conspiratorial thinking and minimised negative stories about Trump.
Ahead of the 2020 US presidential election, the Columbia Journalism School documented the sudden appearance of at least 450 websites that looked like local news portals, but which were actually pushing right-wing propaganda, mostly written by algorithms rather than human reporters.53 Most misinformation is not outright falsehood – which can be disproved – but “genuine content taken out of context”, says Claire Wardle of First Draft News. “You take things that work in the mainstream media, whether on the left or the right, and you just twist it further.”
The 2016 EU referendum had a similar effect on British political media as the Trump campaign in the US. New political websites opened up in its aftermath. Vote Leave’s Matthew Elliott established Brexit Central and hired former staff such as Darren Grimes to pump out pro-Brexit content. Brexit Central was even granted a journalistic pass to Parliament.54 Arron Banks bankrolled Westmonster, which was as belligerent as it sounds before going into abeyance in the middle of 2019. On the left of politics, the Canary, Skwawkbox and other sites became lightning rods for supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, often spreading partisan stories targeting political opponents and established media outlets, particularly the BBC.
You don’t necessarily need a financial backer or deep ties to a political party to run a successful news site. The barrier for entry to the media has fallen almost to zero. Registering a domain and setting up a basic WordPress site costs less than a family ticket to the cinema. At the same time, entrepreneurial young journalists have little chance of a job in an established newspaper or broadcaster. There are few opportunities in Bolton to intern at a Tufton Street think tank or write for a Fleet Street title. “I just thought, ‘Well I may as well do something myself,’” said Jordan James.
*
How does a website with no staff and no money mushroom into a platform with millions of page views? There is a long answer and a short answer. The long answer is about human psychology, the Internet and our attraction to highly emotive stories. The short answer is one word: Facebook.
When Politicalite first started, James mainly published stories praising Trump, but he quickly realised that readers were far more likely to click on radical home-grown content. But he needed an audience to know his stories existed. So James started to pay Facebook to promote his site in specific areas. He targeted working-class towns in England (“not the cities or Scotland”). A Facebook user living in Blackpool would see a story about a Traveller ploughing his car into a crowd outside a nightclub. If they lived in the next town, they got a similarly themed story from their own locality. James told me that he focused on “immigration, religion and talking about the things people say you aren’t allowed to say in the politically correct world”.
James did not just buy ads on Facebook, he seeded his pro-Brexit, anti-immigration stories into closed Facebook groups. This allowed him to push stories to an audience of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, almost completely below the radar. Facebook groups offer a positive experience to many users – mothers can talk about child-rearing, sports fans can chat about their beloved games and teams – but they are also a honey pot for fake news, conspiracies and misinformation. Through these private groups, stories can spread rapidly across a massive organic online network.
Once he had built an audience through Facebook, “Big hitters in the right-wing media world started working with us,” said James. The most significant was Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson. James, of mixed heritage, had once viewed the anti-Muslim activist as a racist. James said he had even fallen out with his stepfather when his mother’s partner had joined an early incarnation of Yaxley-Lennon’s far-right English Defence League in Bolton.
But after the terrorist attack on an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester that killed 22 people in May 2017, he started following Yaxley-Lennon’s videos on an extremist YouTube channel.* When Yaxley-Lennon appeared on breakfast television show Good Morning Britain with Piers Morgan, James wrote a positive report on his website. “I thought Tommy was standing up, saying what needed to be said,” he told me.
James met Yaxley-Lennon and was invited to meet Republican congressman Paul Gosar at a pro-Robinson rally in London in July 2018. James could not make the event, at which Gosar described Muslim men as a “scourge”55 on society, but by then Yaxley-Lennon was frequently sharing Politicalite stories. As UKIP shifted hard to the right – then party leader Gerard Batten hired Yaxley-Lennon as a political advisor in November 2018 – Politicalite became an important part of its digital support base. Farage’s former assistant Raheem Kassam wrote for the site. When the Brexit Party appeared, Politicalite ran positive stories about the new party, too.
James had graduated from a WordPress blog to the centre of the nascent alt-right British world. He was making enough money, mainly from Facebook ads, that he was able to quit his job to concentrate on Politicalite. “It was like winning the lottery,” he said.
That rise was brought to a juddering halt when Facebook banned Politicalite in 2019 for breaching its hate-speech policies. James said he was taking legal advice to overturn the decision, but he wore the ban as a badge of honour. The site carried the strapline “Britain’s most CENSORED news outlet”. (Caps are very popular in the partisan online world.) Without Facebook, however, Politicalite’s donations slowed markedly. Page views declined. James had to go back to work as a labourer.
Facebook had targeted others, too. A couple of months earlier, Yaxley-Lennon’s Facebook page, with about a million followers, was closed. (Moderators at the social media giant had previously been wary of taking action against prominent far-right pages because of their huge following, a Channel 4 investigation found.56) Yaxley-Lennon was later given a nine-month prison sentence for contempt of court after his Facebook Live videos almost caused the collapse of the trial of a gang in northern England that had groomed young women for sex.57 The Guardian also revealed that Yaxley-Lennon was heavily funded by US libertarian think tanks linked to Robert Mercer, among others.58
Over months of messaging, James told me that he wanted to move away from the alt-right and become a mainstream journalist. He said that he had been “groomed” and that, after briefly working for Yaxley-Lennon, he had seen a different side to his former hero. “Tommy isn’t working class like he says he is,” he told me. “I just thought, ‘Wow, I’ve been slogging away, blogging, supporting you, struggling to make ends meet, thinking you were this man of the people and you’re not.’”
In late December 2019, a week after Boris Johnson’s election victory, James published Politicalite’s final story. He gave it the headline “Populism won… we’re done”. The valedictory post included a photograph of him shaking hands with Yaxley-Lennon more than a year earlier. James was smiling.
*
Politicalite is unlikely to have been mourned for long. There are dozens of news sites like it. Often the most basic are among the most popular. PoliticalUK is run by just one person, a former UKIP member from Essex who declined to give his name when I contacted him. It launched in early 2018, and within eight months the site’s populist stories about immigration and Brexit had accumulated more than three million interactions on social media.59
On average, these articles are far more popular than stories on their left-wing equivalents. “There is a reason that the right does so well online,” says Claire Wardle. “The right is generally better at generating fear, which is the driving motivation for engagement.”
Once again, Facebook is crucial. Almost every PoliticalUK story is also posted to a Facebook group called ‘EU – I Voted Leave’, which has more than a quarter of a million members. The algorithms used by tech platforms often drive users to more extreme content. A 2019 study of 360 alt-right channels on YouTube found that users were often recommended increasingly hardcore, racist videos.60
When I looked at the ‘EU – I Voted Leave’ Facebook page, Facebook itself suggested I might like “related” pages including the alt-right Turning Point UK and the Football Lads Alliance, a radical anti-Muslim group which the English Premier League has warned clubs to avoid. PoliticalUK’s proprietor stressed that his site had been given a positive rating by Newsguard, an online tool that rates the trustworthiness of news sites.
The popularity of proudly partisan news sites is partly a product of a very human response to sensory overload. We all employ cognitive biases to navigate the unending sea of information we face every day. We seek out information that confirms our beliefs. Conflicting opinions are often rejected. These feverishly biased websites go even further, providing an almost hermetically sealed worldview of good and evil, delivered with flashing arrays and screaming all-caps headlines.
“It’s all about making us angry,” tech writer Jamie Bartlett told me. “How the message is being delivered really matters. The way you consume it. How your faculties are being used. The medium is driving you to hyper-partisanship.”
These ‘news’ sites also have a social function. Their audiences are older, predominantly men with time on their hands. In an increasingly atomised world, the online rabbit hole is a place to make friends, and to win status. “So much misinformation is people sharing content because they want to be the performative person at the centre of things,” says Wardle. “There is a dopamine hit from online engagement.”
These websites are businesses too, often run by canny entrepreneurs with a sophisticated understanding of the changed economics of news media. The key challenge is to gain a big enough audience to make money from clicks, while also delivering something that readers will consider paying for.
Unity News’s David Clews told me that he knows “what buttons to push”. He talked about the Overton window, the notion that the range of ideas that are acceptable to the public can be shifted. “We cater our content to suit our audience, which is what any business would do,” he said.
As well as subscribers, Unity News runs an online shop selling pro-Brexit gimcrack. One of the more popular items is a badge with Winston Churchill flashing the V-sign, embossed with the legends “We want our country back” and “We will never surrender”. When I saw it, I was surprised that the Mail or the Express had not thought of it already.
*
It is very tempting to divide the media into ‘good’ established outlets in large offices holding power to account, and ‘bad’ insurgents spreading ‘fake news’ from their bedrooms. (As a journalist, I am particularly keen to cleave to this professional distinction. We’ve all got bills to pay.) But, really, how different are old and new media?
Let’s take a look at the front page of Unity News on a random day in September 2019. There was a story about Boris Johnson, another on the Brexit Party. A dispatch from Germany about the far-right Alternative for Germany, and an attack on London mayor Sadiq Khan.
The most outlandish piece claimed that Britain had actually already left the European Union due to a legal technicality. It was straight misinformation, or what would once have been called a glaring lie.
It also seemed strangely familiar. I did some more digging around. The online story was lifted almost entirely from a blog on the Spectator website that had appeared a few months earlier, tantalisingly titled “Does this EU small print mean Brexit has already happened?”61 It did, the writer concluded. A very similar story ran in the Express around the same time. The new fake news is not always that different from the old.
The young men who run partisan websites – they are almost all young men – often speak about themselves as inheritors of Fleet Street’s mantle. “Once upon a time the red tops were dominant for the more populist message, the Sun, the Express,” said Unity News’s David Clews. “Now their influence is waning.” Jordan James told me he was inspired by Rupert Murdoch. “He fucking owns what he does like a boss,” James said of the man who owns Fox News, the Sun and a vast empire of other media outlets.
The distance between a cottage industry run out of a bedroom in Bolton and the offices of a national newspaper should be measured more in degrees than absolutes. I have lost count of the number of times ‘established’ media have spun stories I have written elsewhere to suit their own narratives. A few years ago, one repeat offender produced an entire web story based on a handful of cherry-picked quotes from a long piece about Brexit I had written for a major European outlet. I called to complain. A tired-sounding sub-editor picked up the phone. He apologised profusely but assured me there was nothing he could do. “This is just how it is now,” he said.
Newspaper sales in Britain have declined markedly, as has trust in the press. A 2019 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University found that just two-fifths of the British public felt they could “trust most news most of the time”.62 The figure had dropped by ten points in just four years. Reflecting on possible reasons for the decline in trust, the authors noted the growth of political polarisation, the rise of ‘clickbait’ news in an age of declining revenues and the proliferation of misinformation.
Another source of mistrust, of course, is the culture of the British press itself, which is often tolerant of mistruths, especially when the solecisms are committed by members of the elite that dominate its upper echelons. Boris Johnson’s career is a case in point.
As a cub reporter, Johnson was sacked by The Times for fabricating a quote about the 14th-century King Edward II’s catamite lover and attributing it to his godfather, the historian Colin Lucas. In many walks of life, that would be a career-ending deceit. Instead, the Daily Telegraph hired Johnson to run the paper’s Brussels bureau. (He was 24, the same age as Jordan James when he bought an off-the-shelf website and a domain name for £9.99.)
At the Telegraph, Johnson excelled in an emerging newspaper genre: the confected European Union story. Eurocrats, he told his readers, wanted to ban prawn cocktail crisps and limit the size of condoms, to the dismay of Italian men. Editors on other papers ordered their often staid Brussels correspondents to follow suit. When Johnson left the European beat to become the Telegraph’s chief political correspondent in 1994, James Landale, then a reporter at The Times, marked his departure by penning a satirical poem based on Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Matilda’. “Boris”, Landale wrote, “told such dreadful lies/It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes.”63
Johnson was far from a lone voice punting stories about the EU that strained credibility. Rupert Murdoch was stridently Eurosceptic long before most of the British public felt so strongly about the issue. An infamous 1990 Sun front page declared “Up Yours Delors”. Just in case the headline was too subtle, it was accompanied by a picture of two V-shaped fingers protruding from a Union Jack shirt cuff and aimed at the European Commission’s then president.
Britain’s predominantly right-wing tabloid culture has exerted an almost uniquely strong pull on the nation’s politics. At times, the red tops have rushed to follow political changes – the Sun endorsed Tony Blair’s New Labour – but more often it has been a jingoistic press that has succeeded in pushing fringe positions into the centre of political debate. The Conservative right’s obsession with Europe went mainstream on the pages of its newspapers. Through the 1990s and into the early years of the new millennium, there were almost endless stories about how Brussels bureaucrats were meddling with the venerable traditions of British life.
In a 1999 “exclusive”, the Sun told its readers that a new EU labour law meant the Queen would suddenly have to make her own tea, as her servants would be forced to clock off. (The working time directive had actually been agreed by the British government, six years earlier.) The Daily Star once declared that the EU was going to limit the speed of children’s playground roundabouts. (It wasn’t.)
There were so many mistruths about the EU that the European Commission set up a rebuttal website ahead of the EU referendum. Around a thousand people read each meticulous fact check; by contrast, the Mail’s website, which frequently featured dubious stories about the European institutions, had an average monthly audience of around 225 million at the time.64 Intriguingly, a study has even suggested that a long-running boycott of the Sun on Merseyside following the Hillsborough Stadium disaster in 1989 – which the paper blamed on Liverpool fans – contributed to the largely working-class city voting Remain in 2016.65
The power of the British press is concentrated in a handful of owners. In 2019, just three companies – the Daily Mail and General Trust, Reach and Murdoch’s News UK – controlled 83 per cent of the British newspaper market (up from 71 per cent in 2015).66 The agendas of these newspapers, and their owners, matter. Successive prime ministers have been said to have made decisions based on the front page of the mid-market Daily Mail.
The press has fed Britain’s growing polarisation. In November 2016, less than six months after Jo Cox MP was murdered by a neo-Nazi sympathiser, the Mail declared High Court judges “enemies of the people” after a ruling that Parliament would have to vote to give notice on leaving the EU. A year later, the Daily Telegraph published on its front page mugshots of 15 Tory MPs who had indicated that they would vote against a government proposal to enshrine the putative Brexit date in law. The paper, owned by the billionaire Barclay brothers via an offshore trust, labelled the parliamentarians “mutineers”.
The barrier between Fleet Street and Westminster has long been porous.† Winston Churchill, Michael Foot and Nigel Lawson all worked as journalists before going into politics. After being elected to the Commons in 2001, Boris Johnson spent his first four years in the House combining his job as an MP with editing the Spectator. When the Spectator’s new chief executive Andrew Neil replaced him in 2005, Johnson continued to write for the Daily Telegraph, renegotiating the fee for his weekly columns up to a quarter of a million pounds a year.
During the 2019 Tory leadership contest, while he was still a columnist, Johnson appeared on the Telegraph ’s front page 22 times in a single month. As is often the case, these stories were regularly picked up by broadcasters. The sound of BBC morning bulletins being led by reports of Johnson’s latest op-eds was so frequent that the former Conservative minister Chris Patten rhetorically asked, “What did our poor country do to deserve government by the editorial columns of the Daily Telegraph?”67
When Johnson became prime minister a few weeks later, a message congratulating the paper’s star columnist ran on a big screen in the lobby of the Telegraph’s offices in central London. “The Telegraph has become like Fox News in the US, a for-profit commercial press outfit for a single political figure,” says media scholar Martin Moore. On 31 January 2020, the day Britain officially left the European Union, red, white and blue Union Jack bunting was hung up in the Telegraph’s newsroom.
As in the US, British political reporting has become increasingly histrionic. There are flashing lights and countdown clocks. Celebrity reporters narrate politics as a theatre played out by sniping, bickering personalities. The public are tacitly encouraged to root for one side or another – Boris or Jeremy? – and to treat them all with equal disdain and disbelief. “They’re all liars anyway,” was a frequent refrain among British voters in 2019.
Instead of debates about policy, the couches of late-night political discussion shows are filled by cadres of ever more partisan commentators from the left and the right who often have little, if any, discernible expertise beyond the ability to parrot party political talking points. No wonder so many are switching off the news completely.
An alienated, disengaged electorate and a media that, in the name of balance, often creates a false equivalence between facts and lies is as much a boon for populists and political snake oil sellers as dark money and disinformation. The shift to high-octane, 24/7 reporting has made it easier for those in power to manipulate journalistic conventions.
Almost as soon as Boris Johnson became prime minister – bringing with him Vote Leave’s press operation – on-the-record interviews almost completely ceased. In their place, a rash of stories appeared citing only anonymous government sources, widely assumed to be senior advisor Dominic Cummings: Downing Street was investigating pro-Remain MPs for “collusion” with foreign governments; on a private phone call, German chancellor Angela Merkel had accused the prime minister of trying to play “a stupid blame game” over Brexit; Johnson’s Irish counterpart Leo Varadkar had “reneged on a secret deal” with the prime minister ahead of a crunch Brussels summit.
Many of these stories were subsequently proven to be false or vastly exaggerated, but they frequently led the news agenda while giving the government plausible deniability. British journalists were being “played like an instrument”, warned Rasmus Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Politicians spinning stories is not new. Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, frequently briefed the media to settle internal party scores. Alastair Campbell was so successful at controlling the press that he became immortalised as the sweary spin doctor in Armando Iannucci’s satirical sitcom The Thick of It. But, as with so much else, the Internet has changed the rules of the game. Where once the news day started with a set piece interview on the BBC, it now increasingly kicks off with a tweet thread from a prominent journalist setting out the government’s key talking points for the day. There is no space for rebuttal. By the time scrutiny arrives, hours or even days later, the message is already out.
Linguist George Lakoff calls this “framing the narrative” – what is being talked about matters far more than whether it is true or false. Boris Johnson and Australian spin doctor Sir Lynton Crosby have another name for the same strategy: the dead cat. Chuck a lifeless feline on the table, and it will immediately dominate the conversation.
Johnson has been a master of the dead cat. The only time he looked under severe pressure in the 2019 general election was when a television journalist, during a live interview, showed the Conservative leader a photograph on his phone of a sick child forced to sleep on the floor of a full hospital in Leeds. Johnson refused to look at the image, and instead snatched the reporter’s phone and put it in his pocket. The clip quickly went viral on social media. For almost the first time in the campaign, a Labour message – that the NHS was in crisis – was cutting through.
What happened next was classic dead cat. Conservative advisors briefed senior political journalists that an aide to Health Secretary Matt Hancock – who had been dispatched to the Leeds hospital – had been punched during a mass protest by Labour supporters. The reporters tweeted out the news, and it spread like digital wildfire.
But it wasn’t true. Footage soon emerged showing that rather than a melee of Labour protesters, there were only half a dozen people and no punches had been thrown. The journalists who had amplified this disinformation apologised for their mistake, but it was too late. The dead cat had become the story.
Journalists have struggled to react to this rising tide of distraction and dissembling. “We are just reporting what politicians say,” is a common defence, rooted very reasonably in the commitment to fair and balanced reporting. But as politics has become another form of entertainment, it is very easy for journalists to be manipulated by skilful, self-serving political disruptors. Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump – all know how to frame narratives that will spread quickly through established media and onto partisan news sites.
A good example of this is an interview that Farage gave to Talkradio in September 2019. The Brexit Party leader said that the BBC had treated him “like a war criminal” at Nuremberg during the European elections. His comments were quickly picked up by the Sun, a Murdoch stablemate of Talkradio. The pro-Brexit Daily Express carried the story on its website. PoliticalUK followed suit, reporting that “VOTERS SAY ‘NIGEL IS RIGHT’ AS FARAGE LOSES TEMPER WITH REMARKS AGAINST THE BBC”. In less than 24 hours, the PoliticalUK story was liked more than 1,500 times on the ‘EU – I Voted Leave’ Facebook page. Hundreds of commenters agreed with Farage.‡
It is a grim irony that the more journalists are successfully manipulated by populist-minded politicians, the easier it is for the very same leaders to delegitimise and undermine one of the few potential sources that could scrutinise and hold them to account. The BBC has been assailed from the left and the right. After an error-prone general election, trust in the corporation declined markedly, according to a post-election opinion poll.68
Perfect timing, then, for a politician to attack the public sector broadcaster. Having unexpectedly announced on the campaign trail that he was “looking at” the licence fee that pays for the BBC – another dead cat that was dutifully pored over – Boris Johnson issued a diktat banning his ministers from appearing on Radio 4’s Today in the immediate aftermath of his election victory.69 Other than the show’s editor complaining that the move was “Trumpian”,70 the reaction was muted.
Similarly, when Nigel Farage compares his experience on the BBC to a Nazi on trial in Nuremberg, he can be sure that heads will nod in agreement, from the news desks of red tops to the febrile audiences in Facebook groups and message forums. It also makes it even more likely that he will be invited back onto the BBC. Farage, who has stood seven times for election to Parliament and never won, has appeared more than thirty times on its main political debate show Question Time. Few politicians have appeared so regularly.
Farage “learned from Five Star in Italy how to bludgeon the media”, a public relations expert told trade magazine Campaign shortly after the Brexit Party’s launch. “He gets so much airtime on Question Time because he has, with the help of the tabloid press, cowed the BBC. The focus on the media as biased servants of the liberal elite is relentless.”71 And it’s relentless because it works.
*
There has seldom been a better time to be a prevaricating politician. Where once a run of negative headlines could end a career, now it can all be dismissed as “fake news”. Established arbiters of truth have been decentred. The nightly news bulletin and the front page of a broadsheet paper still exist, but they carry much less weight. Fewer and fewer families crowd around their television set each evening to receive a shared view of the world.
The decline of once almost monolithic media has had many positive effects. Fresh voices have emerged. The ‘official’ version is far more open to contestation. But the ‘post-truth’ epoch has also been a boon for misinformation and political disruption.
Already, digital parties are pointing the way to a new version of politics, supercharged by almost invisible networks of aggressively partisan websites. The digital democracy promised by Five Star and the Brexit Party has, according to sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo, “mostly proven a sham”.72 Behind the digital party’s glittering egalitarian promise sits a tiny leadership cabal. Decisions taken on high are rubber-stamped by a pliant movement that does not have the same rights and powers as traditional party members. Crepuscular hyper-partisan news sites flood social media, often aided by a disoriented established media that has played up the very same narratives of fear and betrayal.
Rather than demonstrating utopian transparency, digital parties are often extremely opaque. Money flows in from anonymous sources. The elision of the political party and the private business hints at a dystopian digital future, in which democracy becomes even less participative and pluralist. (This is a particularly worrying vista in Britain, where the first-past-the-post electoral system and the consequent marginalisation of smaller parties has already reduced much of the country to political irrelevance.)
Digital parties have, of course, struggled in the face of real-world politics. In Italy, Five Star’s support has plummeted since 2018, when Beppe Grillo went into government with the far-right League led by Matteo Salvini, who is a far more ruthless political operator. The two parties had plenty in common: Eurosceptic, anti-immigrant and pro-Russian. But after less than eighteen months, the coalition collapsed when Salvini walked out, with his League party far ahead in opinion polls.73
In Britain, the Brexit Party did not win a single seat in the general election in December 2019. Despite President Trump calling in to Nigel Farage’s radio show to tell Boris Johnson that he should form a pact with the Brexit Party – foreign political interference is often far less subtle than Russian bots on social media – the Conservatives refused to countenance a ‘Leave Alliance’. Under pressure from his former patron Arron Banks and his Leave.EU digital juggernaut, Farage stood down in all Conservative-held seats. But the Brexit Party still took over half a million votes, mostly in working-class constituencies. On election night, Farage claimed, with some justification, that the Brexit Party had allowed the Conservatives to come through the middle to take a swathe of once solidly Labour seats in northern England and the Midlands. Farage “accomplished everything that he said,” Steve Bannon told me. “Nigel eventually got the Brexit he had always fought for.”
The Brexit Party is unlikely to be a lasting force in British politics. After the general election, Farage sacked the party’s staff, despite having raised at least £11.5 million in less than a year.74 Farage told journalists that he intended to campaign for Trump in the 2020 US presidential election.
His digital party, however, is less the final word in how the Internet has changed politics, and more a taste of things to come. What does democracy look like in a world of political grifters, echo chambers and orchestrated misinformation? Will any safeguards really be able to stop the flow of anonymous online funding? Can the digital-era politician ever be held to account?
The UK is far from the only state facing such existential questions. It is time to take a deeper look at how dark money and hidden influence are feeding a global populist surge.
* The YouTube channel was run by a British nationalist based in the north of England who listed Nigel Farage and Enoch Powell as his political heroes.
† There is often a revolving door between journalism and political communication, too. Party press offices tend to be heavily populated by former hacks. There is also movement in the other direction. In the middle of 2019, Steven Edginton made a dramatic move from the Brexit Party comms team into journalism when he published, with Isabel Oakeshott, leaked British diplomatic cables about Donald Trump that led to the resignation of the UK ambassador to Washington, Kim Darroch. Edginton soon joined Guido Fawkes. After just two weeks, he was hired by the Sun.
‡ Steve Bannon used very similar tactics ahead of the 2016 US presidential election. The then Breitbart boss fed stories about Hillary Clinton’s finances to the New York Times that were subsequently reported by his own site with links to respected mainstream titles adding credibility. From Breitbart, the stories soon spread across the hyper-partisan right-wing media world and into the news feeds of tens of millions of American voters.