Senior Labour figures are urging Keir Starmer to take a leaf out of Donald Trump’s book and make more frequent media appearances in an attempt to dominate the political agenda as the US president does.
MPs told the Guardian they want the prime minister to act more like Trump, who has upended political convention by televising large parts of his cabinet, holding long bilateral meetings on camera and calling in to live television shows.
The strategy is very different from that employed by the prime minister, who has said he wants politics to intrude less in people’s lives, and sometimes goes several days without doing a public appearance.
Some in his party believe that Starmer’s safety-first approach to media is ill-suited to modern politics, where the news agenda moves rapidly and traditional outlets have less power than ever.
One minister said: “Trump and [the vice-president] JD Vance have shown the advantage of getting out there and not worrying about making mistakes.
“In the run-up to the election, Vance did multiple disastrous podcast interviews, but people did not focus on them for long. Eventually he started getting noticed for the things he wanted to say.”
They added: “That style of media strategy seems to make a lot more sense than making the occasional appearance on the [BBC] Today programme or Laura Kuenssberg.”
Another Labour MP added: “I watched the first few days of the Trump administration with envy. He was out there making announcements all the time.
“Imagine if we had done the same thing. It doesn’t even matter whether your announcements are going to happen – the point is you are telling people who you are and what you want to do.”
Even in his first term as US president, Trump took an unusual approach to communications, often making policy announcements or even firing people on social media. He would also call in to his favourite Fox news shows to give impromptu and freewheeling interviews.
Trump and Vance took a similar approach in their recent election campaign, often taking part in lengthy podcast interviews with hosts such as Joe Rogan, Logan Paul and Theo Von.
Those interviews would often throw up awkward moments, such as when Vance laughed along with Von’s reference to the Sackler family, who are Jewish, as “money lizards”. But they were generally regarded as having reached parts of the electorate – often young and male – that other politicians struggle to engage.
Since taking over, Trump has extended this strategy even further, going as far as to broadcast large portions of his first cabinet meeting, at which the billionaire Elon Musk defended his plans to slash the size of the American government.
After his recent televised row with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president remarked to the press: “This is going to be great television.”
The approach echoes what the Trump ally Steve Bannon told the writer Michael Lewis in 2018, when he said: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Starmer’s Downing Street, however, prefers to keep a much firmer grip on message discipline, issuing reams of “lines to take” for ministers to follow in interviews and cancelling interviews at the last minute if they have not been entered into the No 10 “grid” of planned media appearances.
“Politicians need today to be able to communicate in 30 seconds on TikTok, but also for three and a half hours on Joe Rogan,” said Lee Cain, Boris Johnson’s former communications chief and founding partner of the public relations firm Charlesbye.
“The ‘line to take’ is dying, the ‘grid’ is dying,” he added. “That whole process where we send politicians on to news programmes with a goal of not saying anything, not creating news, not making a mistake, killing authenticity – is a failing strategy.”
A recent analysis by Charlesbye found Rogan’s podcast now attracts almost as many daily listeners in the UK as BBC Radio 4’s entire output. Facebook has overtaken the BBC as the most widely consumed source of news, while for the under-35s, TikTok dominates.
Some in Labour, however, while acknowledging that the media landscape has changed, believe it would not work for Starmer to try to take advantage of it in the way Trump has.
One Labour MP said: “Trump can do that because that is his authentic persona. If Starmer suddenly tried to follow suit, it would not look authentic – and what matters most in this media landscape is authenticity.”
