If the last year has taught us anything it’s that, for every story, no matter how seemingly esoteric, there is always a way to make it about Taylor Swift. Doubly so, it seems, when it comes to politics.
The Swift-political-industrial-complex has, in recent months, gone into overdrive. Earlier this year, the 34-year-old was accused by Trump supporters of being a Pentagon psy-op asset of the US government, over the summer, she hit headlines after her best friend Brittany Mahomes liked, and then unliked, an Instagram post by Donald Trump (she too, then, must surely be a supporter, and by extension a white supremacist, went the argument). And when she made her much-anticipated endorsement of Kamala Harris last month, Vote.org recorded more than 400,000 people visit its voter registration site via her Instagram story.
But while Swift may have handed the Democrats a boost, she has inadvertently been stirring up trouble for the left flank across the pond.
It started last month, when it was revealed that the Prime Minister, along with a host of Cabinet ministers, had been raking in thousands of pounds worth of freebies – including tickets to Swift’s Eras Tour over the summer. Though it was all above board, the fact that the tickets had been notoriously hard to come by, with fans battling Ticketmaster and paying thousands to resale tours, meant that it was obviously not the best look for a party who had vowed to crack down on sleaze (duh). While Starmer initially defended the decision, he has since backpedalled, announcing last week that he had paid back £6,000 worth of gifts, including the Swift tickets.
I wonder what Swift makes of all of this political psychodrama
Now, Sky has revealed that Home Secretary Yvette Cooper also managed to get in on the free Swift tickets, at the same time as encouraging the Met to give Swift a special blue-light police escort to her Wembley concert. (She attended as a guest of her husband, Ed Balls who had been given four tickets by Universal Music). Along with Mayor Sadiq Khan, she encouraged the Met to give Swift a “VVIP escort” typically reserved for senior members of the Royal Family and high-level politicians – and which, crucially, comes at huge expense to the taxpayer. Downing Street, though, said that any decision was an operational matter for the Met Police.
Naturally, the Tories have leapt on freebie-gate. The (somewhat inexplicable) leadership frontrunner Robert Jenrick told the Sun: “This is a government so shameless they’d seemingly sell our police for a couple of concert tickets and a friendship bracelet from billionaires. Three months into office and they are unable to Shake Off the stench of sleaze.”
Yet I’d hazard a guess that most of the public wouldn’t begrudge Swift a blue-light escort – she’s the most famous person in the world, brings in tons of cash to our struggling hospitality sector, and, mere days before her Wembley gig, was forced to axe her shows in Vienna due to a foiled suicide bomb plot which the CIA later said was intended to kill tens of thousands of people.
I wonder what Swift makes of all of this political psychodrama. Perhaps, after a cursory Google search this morning, she is second guessing whether the police escort was worth her now knowing who Robert Jenrick is. The idea that she even orbits the same universe as the likes of say, Ed Balls, feels slightly unfathomable.
Of course, the more pertinent (but boring) story in all of this is one about comms. The Government’s decision not to announce a summer budget, has left a months-long news vacuum, allowing newspaper inches to be filled with overblown noise about tickets, and terrible puns by Robert Jenrick. Something of a Blank Space, if you will.
