Borkowski Media Trends: Starmer, RFK & MORE

PLUS: Britishcore | MomTok

Sticky week for Starmer: Football, Finances & Internal Friction

It’s been a challenging week for Kier Starmer and a signal that as we approach Autumn, he’s now a long way from the post-election honeymoon period. This week’s most eye-catching story stroke mini-crisis centres around his beloved Arsenal, a part of his identity that was important in his journey to No. 10 when you consider only one football league club (Bromley) now exists in a Conservative constituency (clearly his overt football fandom resonated with supporters).

It’s taken a sour twist following news Arsenal has given the PM a corporate box, an attack line the tabloids are lapping up while many critics cry hypocrite. However, he is a genuine fan and isn’t the kind of politician to be seen with an Arsenal scarf around his neck for a photo opp. And in isolation, the argument that he was a season ticket holder and the box is a security measure should fly in the long run.

But there’s a bigger issue here considering the other questions he’s faced this week: firstly, the undeclared £5,000 donation for his wife’s dresses and secondly, the leak that Starmer’s chief of staff is earning more than he is. These have converged to form a minor crisis, with Starmer at time of writing confirming that he and his senior ministers will no longer accept any donations relating to clothes.

It’s worth a reminder that all this is above board, and he hasn’t broken any rules. This is more down to his judgement and whether his comms team fully considered the optics. This is another stern reminder that communication rules aren’t the same when you’re in power, especially when Starmer has actively attempted to draw a line under the Tory sleaze prevalent in the government he succeeded.

The Sue Gray incident is a fascinating communications challenge that centres around the following: does the leak portray in-fighting and power struggles within the party so soon after being in power, or does it represent a more transparent government that is upfront about what’s happening behind the scenes?

The problem with the timing is we’re approaching Party Conference season, and while Starmer would ideally like to be rallying around the fact that for the first time in over a decade Labour are entering in power, he’ll likely be fielding questions over these controversies, which are undeniably a distraction. Starmer will be hoping those in charge of managing his communications have a robust plan to put the narrative back onto his terms.

I did have textual relations with that woman

RFK Jr has once again found himself at the centre of a scandal - a Kennedy sex scandal for the 21st century- this time involving allegedly having a relationship with Olivia Nuzzi of New York Magazine. Nuzzi has taken a leave of absence at the publication after news broke alleging that she had a personal (not physical) relationship with Robert F Kennedy Jr about whom she had written a long-form profile for the magazine earlier this year.

No stranger to scandal, RFK attracted media attention only recently for saying that he is being investigated by federal authorities for collecting the head of a decapitated whale carcass with the help of a chainsaw, and admitting on video that he was behind the dumping of a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park over a decade ago.

The bizarreness of these incidents aside, what is perhaps most interesting in our post-truth, post-seriousness political era cultivated by Trump & Co, is that none of these wild scandals seem to have permanently defenestrated RFK as a public political figure.

Such is our addiction to insane political scandals, that each of these events individually only serves to fire up the meme machine and Twitter storm. Arguably the sex-scandal involving a pseudo liberal journalist was more damaging to his political aspirations than mutilating a dead sea beast; but even so, none of these bonkers events appear to be the career enders we would expect. 

Having run for the Democrats, then as an independent, before dropping out to endorse Trump, even RFK Jr’s wildest political dreams can only extend to a position in the Trump cabinet. But madly there is no sign that any of these unhinged scandals will turn out to be the final nail in that coffin.

What seems disturbingly clear however, is that in our post-Trump world, when an insurrectionist soon-to-be felon is once again a few thousand Arizonan votes away from the White House, the definition and implications of scandal have shifted, and with this, the ways in which we respond.

Britishcore or cringecore ragebait?

We’ve previously analysed some of what makes the Guardian one of the most powerful news sites in the world (even as rumours abound that its Sunday newspaper is about to be sold to Tortoise).

But seemingly not content with the virality generated by Simon Hattenstone’s celebrity interviews, this week a new tactic, or possibly just a happy accident emerged: an article by Dylan B Jones – the pop culture writer whose bylines make eclectic reading – on the rise of ‘Britishcore’.

Already the headline laid down a gauntlet for the reader, because the consensus is that the word ‘Britishcore’ was far from established vernacular before the publication of this article.

What followed was a subjective, 2010s Buzzfeed-style listicle of 100 tropes of this so-called phenomenon, many of which were so unrelatable as to be utterly alienating to the article’s baffled audience.

But of course this is 2024 and bafflement does not necessarily lead to obscurity. Vexed readers turned to social media to express their confusion at the article and so it spread through hundreds of thousands of shares and subsequent ‘hate reads’.

Part of the article’s inverse appeal is its mystery. It’s hard to retrofit what was going through the author’s head when concocting dozens upon dozens of attempted humorous aphorisms, many of which read like an AI -generated attempt at observational comedy.

The mystery of what deeper layer of irony might underpin these anti-jokes remains unsolved at time of writing, but it matters not; for after the confused social sharing and the hate reading came the memes, ensuring that this bewildering spectacle, which appears to have squeezed through a wormhole from an alternative 2012, was ubiquitous for the whole week.

The only mystery that remains is whether this article was intentional ragebait, or a coincidence that backfired in the right direction for the Guardian’s web analytics…if not its editorial integrity.

Can MomTok even survive this?

In the grand tradition of TLC’s Sister Wives and Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, the slight frisson of cultishness that surrounds Mormonism has always made for strong reality television. Arriving on Disney last week, then, was the surefire hit The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, a kind of amalgamation of those two aforementioned shows, with the added bonus of TikTok dances and the hideously evocative phrase “soft swinging”.

MomTok, a loose collection of Mormon mothers, became a TikTok phenom in 2021 and 2022, with the majority of their videos consisting of them dancing in leisurewear, lipsyncing to popular songs, and generally not being very Mormon. The group fell apart following an explosive TikTok Live from de facto leader Taylor Frankie Paul, wherein she alleged, while announcing her divorce, that the entire group was “soft swinging” with each other. The series picks up a year later as Paul looks to reconnect with the other moms, including arch-rival Whitney Leavitt, and the first episode ends with her arrest for domestic violence. Events spiral from there, with the general drunken bad behaviour and arguments seen on other reality television shows sitting alongside straight-faced conversations about whether promoting sex toys on Instagram can align with Mormon values. Each episode ends with someone asking the ineffable question, “Can MomTok even survive this?”

There are, of course, other pleasures in the series. Breakout star Jen Affleck is quite literally only ever referred to as Jen Affleck, being as she is the wife of a second cousin to Ben and Casey. Paul is an honest and amenable narrator, owning up to her mistakes as she tries to navigate her relationship with alcohol. Of course, none of it is remotely consequential, but then what else could be expected of a reality show about TikTok influencers, regardless of the added religious element.

Much of the in-episode conversations revolve around the securing of brand deals – many of these women became the provider for their families by promoting products during MomTok’s initial apex, and their concern that Paul’s antics may have affected their income is undoubtedly genuine. It is almost certainly for this reason that many of the original MomTokkers, the presumed soft-swingers and Paul’s former close friends, do not appear at all in the show – her rivalry with Leavitt is also driven, even if never explicitly said so, by these reasons. But the contradiction at the heart of the programme is that, as we’ve seen for years on Big Brother, Love Island, and the Real Housewives, bad behaviour actually begets brand deals. Paul’s actions are frequently incorrigible, but she’s also the show’s main character, and now the most popular of the moms on Instagram by quite some distance. There’s nothing new about the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives itself, but it’s a useful reminder that while behaving badly might put you at a disadvantage online, it’s golden once you’re on TV.