With almost eight million views on a five-second video of him mouthing the lyrics to an Eminem song, “guess who’s back?” Nigel Farage is the unexpected breakout star of TikTok this election.
The 60-year-old Reform UK leader’s passion for hip-hop was not previously well-known; his inexperienced social media team created the video.
Still, other content branded with the Farage name routinely performs better than anything produced by his rivals in politics, and the quantity of followers on his own account surpasses that of Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats combined.
Even though Reform UK has 197,000 followers and fewer footage of Mr. Farage posing for the cameras, it is still more popular than the Tory account.
The first video that the Tories created, headlined “this will change lives,” had Rishi Sunak enthusiastically endorsing his national service idea for fifty seconds. It was the best-performing of the bunch. Remarkably, 4.2 million people viewed this.
5.1 million people saw Labour’s 11-second takedown of it, nevertheless.
The caption read, “Rishi Sunak turning up on your 18th birthday to send you to war,” and the old clip of showbiz icon Cilla Black belting out “Surprise, Surprise” was included. The lowercase S in Sunak perhaps contributed to the gritty, real tone of the image.
