Londoner’s Diary
Why did Nigel Farage suddenly get good at TikTok? The Reform leader has been racking up thousands of likes on the platform since he returned to frontline politics this month, with videos featuring Eminem’s Without Me (“guess who’s back, back again?”) and jokes about “lovely melons”.
The brains behind his social media blitz is 23-year-old Jack Anderton who has been working for Farage for a number of months.
Anderton, originally from Liverpool, describes himself as “a concerned citizen”. While he works for Farage, we understand he is not part of the official Reform UK election campaign.
“Jack works for Nigel,” said a senior Reform figure, “he’s a contractor that was hired in quite recently to help with TikTok and has been very successful.”
Anderton, who is active on X and TikTok, seems to share some of his boss’s views. On foreign policy, he has written: “I’m concerned with London and Liverpool, not Kyiv and Jerusalem.” Farage stoked controversy last week after blaming Nato for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The social media whizz has also remarked that Rishi Sunak “doesn’t believe in our people, our history, or our culture” following the D-Day debacle, and has claimed that “Britain has millions of people living here who hate our country”. He has argued that “immigration is stealing the future of the British youth”.
The rise of the Gen-Z Right-winger, of the so-called “Zoomer Right”, has been a phenomenon across Europe. With Farage’s campaign, it appears to have landed here. Polling by YouGov shows that a larger proportion of 18 to 24-year-olds plan to vote Reform than 25 to 29-year-olds.
