It’s a big week for British political leaders and new media. First, the former prime minister, Liz Truss, launched her own YouTube channel, and then future former prime minister Keir Starmer announced a Substack.
Truss’s debut episode, released late on Friday evening, showcases all the qualities that made her time at the top of politics so memorable: the horrified awkwardness when a camera is tuned on, the monotone delivery, the obvious disconnection from reality. On top of these were layered the production values of a primary school class project: rambling interviews, terrified pauses and jumps between segments that leave the viewer seasick.
Starmer’s Substack is a superficially more professional offering. It helps that the form suits him. Truss has taken to television like a duck to a woodchipper, but a long wall of grey text is very much our current prime minister’s natural medium.
“I’m not going to send you something at the same time every week,” he wrote in a first outing, a clear sign that this will be the kind of Substack where posts become more and more infrequent as the author realises they’re running out of things to say.
Although it’s traditional for prime ministers to wait until they’ve actually been slung out of Downing Street before they launch their media careers — Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak both have newspaper columns, though there’s no reason you should know that — it’s smart to get ahead of the game. Substack is very much the place for middle-aged men who are surprised to find themselves out of work, and if that doesn’t describe Starmer this Christmas, it probably will by next December.
Obviously the prime minister is still feeling his way, but he’s already mastered many of the key features of the medium: like all the best Substacks, his has graphs and bullet points, opens with an anecdote to illustrate his point, and then takes two thousand words to make a point that could have been covered in two hundred.
Although he’s just starting out, it’s not too early for Starmer to start thinking about monetisation. Traditionally, Substack writers offer several different levels of charging, to extract more money from people willing to pay extra. We would suggest the prime minister start at three “Keir Tiers”:
- FREE: Endless screeds appearing in your inbox whenever the government is in trouble, focused on answering questions no one is asking (“Why do you care about starving kids?”) and ignoring more pressing ones (“Why was this a terrible idea last year and a great one this year?”).
- STARMTROOPER: For £10 a month, receive everything in the Free tier, plus access to live video feeds of the prime minister taking questions from factory staff who only really want to know if they’re going to have to work late to make up for the delays caused by this visit,
- KEEP STARM AND CARRY ON: For £20 a month, receive none of the above, and simply bask in the knowledge that you’re supporting a Labour government without having to deal with the disappointing reality of it.
So subscribe today! Or don’t. If there’s one thing we know about both Truss and Starmer, it’s that ignoring them will make absolutely no difference.
