Borkowski Weekly Media Trends: Coutts vs Farage, PinkyDoll 'icecream so good' & More
PLUS Just Stop Oil | Desperate Tory Tactics
Nigel puts the boot into Coutts
Keen not to let the BBC win so easily, this week saw an additional entry into 2023’s own-goal-of-the-year award from Coutts Bank. Having decided to close Nigel Farage’s account earlier in the year, Coutts then briefed the media that it was because he fell below the financial threshold required to hold said account. Nigel, likely no stranger to such requests during his own time in the spotlight, then decided to submit a subject access request to force the bank to divulge its working.
Whilst awaiting the doc, many took to Twitter to accuse Nigel of conspiracies and delusion. No way could a bank have slipped so far that it found itself in 1984.
As such, the publishing of Coutts’ 40-page dossier was quite the bombshell. Amongst other points, the doc stated that Nigel was not “compatible” with Coutts due to his “xenophobic, chauvinistic and racist views” and history of using “Nazi-style propaganda”. Because of this, Coutts decided that Farage represented too big a reputational risk and decided to off him just in case. Slightly different reasoning than claiming he was just a bit too poor.
Although he was in some ways a commercial risk, it’s now clear that distaste for Farage’s political views was the chief reason for Coutts’ attempts to shut down his account.
Any cheap points Coutts may have hoped to score from this move were massively counteracted by a number of factors:
Firstly, Coutts appears to have broken its own rules and prompted the FCA and the government to weigh in on the matter – both of which are considerably more damaging to the bank than any customer who might upset their notion of corporate progressiveness.
Secondly, citing Farage’s failure to meet their financial threshold as justification was exposed as misleading – which in itself is bad enough for Coutts’ reputation, but it also allows the inference that, were Farage more salubrious, this might have sugared the pill of his political views.
Coutts’ reasoning gives the impression that Farage wasn’t deemed a ‘risk’ because he was a customer, but because the public knew (since 2019) that he was a customer, and therefore that the decision was more about optics than principles.
These factors forced Coutts’ CEO into a grovelling reverse-ferret and the bank now has a monumental communications task if it is to find a way forward. Apologising and retracting is Coutts’ only course of action where Farage is concerned, but there’s more firefighting to do but any situation in which the general public sides with Nigel Farage is pretty dire.
Coutts now needs to prove that it can meet its own professional standards, act with integrity and back up its corporate values with authenticity – all while attempting to resurrect its brand of dignified discretion. It’s a far more exacting challenge than Farage’s political views would ever have caused for them, and entirely self-inflicted.
(Coutts owner) NatWest’s CEO Alison Rose is now facing the prospect of having to leave the bank too. Either she falsely briefed the media about the reasoning (bad), or she didn’t even know the whole shambles was occurring (worse?).
As for whether she’ll keep banking with them, she earned £5.25m for the role last year, so she’ll probably never have a problem meeting the financial threshold for holding an account, but given she’s done more reputational damage than Nigel likely ever would have, one does have to wonder whether she’ll fall foul of her own rules and regs on reputation risk.
Ooh PinkyDoll so good! Yes yes yes!
Over the past week or so, iPhone screen recordings of a TikTok live streamer, 'PinkyDoll', began popping up on Twitter. Her bizarre on-screen set-up immediately caught people's attention, usually wielding hair straighteners - popping individual popcorn kernels, interacting with the live chat in a robotic, monotonous tone with her catchphrase, "Ice cream so good".
For anyone who's accidentally flicked to TikTok's live stream section, you come across many peculiar streamers trying to out-weird one another for clout. And PinkyDoll stole the show with a post-TikTok outbreak that saw millions sharing clips of her - demanding an explanation.
What's fascinating about this moment is its longevity - her live streams flooded Twitter for several weeks, and even international news outlets like the New York Times interviewed her. For those outside TikTok's bubble - this is highly unusual. But TikTok's rapid delivery can take niche community content - sub-sections of the internet - mainstream if it has enough 'normies' (distinguished folk like you and me who aren't 'terminally online') posting videos to Twitter.
And whilst PinkyDoll's attention will begin to fade (her moment in the sun in unsustainable), her core audience - those that watched her before the hype - will remain loyal. We saw loads of people across TikTok and Twitter mimicking PinkyDoll's stream with slight variations to her speech, but whilst they'll have some short-term success, the key to TikTok and other channels like YouTube and Twitch is about creating a community of loyal viewers and building your profile from there.
Whilst PinkyDoll has the opportunity to jump on a reality TV show or work with a reactive brand that's looking to cash in on her short-term success with an influencer marketing campaign, as long as she prioritises her core community, she'll build on this mainstream moment to expand beyond TikTok to become a multi-channel influencer, if she so wishes. But somebody's got to pop that popcorn!
Just Stop Oil attack sign of growing unrest…
Another busy week for Just Stop Oil. This Wednesday, a 21-year-old activist was thrown to the ground, punched, and kicked while slow marching in South Kensington. The attacker was the partner of a pregnant woman who supposedly crashed her car due to the protest. Coincidentally, the attacked activist was the same student who had previously been carried off the pitch at Lord’s Cricket Ground by Jonny Bairstow after throwing orange dust and disrupting the Ashes.
This unpleasant escalation in the negative attitude towards Just Stop Oil should draw our attention to increasingly desperate attitudes towards protesters and strikers more generally. Just today, a planned week-long tube strike got called off by the RMT union due to a sudden ‘breakthrough’ in their conversations with TfL. Despite the biggest wave of industry strikes having dissipated for now, it seems that the British society is only just reaching boiling point. With protesters of all kind showing remarkable resilience and, in case of the Just Stop Oil activist, the willingness to literally turn the other cheek, we can only hope that the government will finally be able to barter in more effective ways than until now, seeing how quickly continuous disruption can turn into unrest.
Taliban Tobias
Given the headlines have been dominated by one or two other scandals this week, you’d be forgiven for having missed this week’s second entry into 2023’s own-goal-of-the-year-award.
Earlier this month, Tobias Elwood MP decided to escape the rainy British summer for the sunnier climbs of the tourist hotspot, Costa-Del-Kabul. There, Mr Elwood MP-come-diplomat-come-influencer created a travel vid so moronic you’d think it was an April Fools. Afghanistan is a “country transformed”, where security has “vastly improved, corruption is down and the opium trade has disappeared”. The whole speech is so moving you almost don’t realise he’s wearing a bulletproof vest.
He goes on to encourage the UK to reestablish diplomatic ties with the country. After all, it is now a rebuilt nation with solar powers, an electricity network, an irrigation system and much more. “Why didn’t these game changing programmes not happen when NATO was here?”
As the video pans to women walking around the safe and leafy streets of Kabul, you’re inclined to agree with him. Of course, that is because nowhere in the video does he explain women have been banned from doing almost everything apart from walking around the streets of Kabul.
The whole stunt was less Lawrence of Arabia, and more Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. Within seconds of it hitting Twitter, the video was panned by MPs and the public alike. Given the plot to oust him is now well advanced, Elwood should soon have plenty of time to explore some other regions – perhaps Pyongyang!
Shnappsy’s ‘Just Stop Starmer’ tactic backfires
In a normal week Tobias Ellwood’s unhinged pitch for greater sympathy towards the Taliban would be an outlier in the category of odd communications from senior political figures but clearly there was a full moon at CCHQ this week because on Wednesday Grant Shapps (Shnappsy to his friends – who incidentally was responsible for mandating the very same ULEZ against which Tory opposition helped them cling on to Boris’ old seat…) pulled the truly bizarre stunt of writing an open letter to Kier Starmer requesting that the Labour Party pay for damage cause to Energy Security Department by Just Stop Oil. Given Starmer’s consistent opposition to Just Stop Oil it didn’t land a scratch on Labour and caused a torrent of eye-rolling in media and on socials.
The Susan that launched a thousand Karens…
Not content with one angry letter we were treated another fit of Conservative pearl-clutching in response to the Evening Standard’s cheeky use of an unflattering photo of their London mayoral candidate Susan Hall. It was a brattish outburst riddled with the kinds of ironic hypersensitivity (e.g. calling the cover sexist) that the very same complainants would surely dismiss as woke snowflakery were it to come from their enemies, amid tantrumy threats not to work with the (staunchly Conservative) Evening Standard during the election.