How Twitter Memes and Shitposting Took Over UK Politics

“The lettuce probably wasn’t the strangest thing that happened last week,” Ed Keeble tells VICE. “It reflects the state of politics.” As senior social video editor for Reach publications, including the Daily Star, it was Keeble who turned an off-hand comment in the Economist about Liz Truss having “the shelf life of lettuce” into a cultural moment: complete with googly eyes, a blonde wig, and a seven-day, 24-hour livestream next to a picture of the UK’s shortest-serving prime minister – who lasted 45 days before resigning and handing over to former Chancellor Rishi Sunak.

As the social media stunt garnered attention both nationally and internationally – becoming a talking point among MPs and a baroness, being picked up by the New York Times and even providing the subject of several memes itself – the moist lettuce proved one thing above all: memes have broken through in British politics, and are here to stay. 

Once upon a time, political satire was limited to quirky cartoons in broadsheets and terrifying puppets in 80s TV series like Spitting Image. But with the latter’s 2020 revival flopping and print publications in decline, a new partnership has risen higher through the ranks than ever before: politics and memes. “I'm coming to the slow realisation that tabloids and memes might be a very good fit,” Keeble adds. “Memes are intergenerational, but more and more they become a voice for people to express the 'shitposting' humour that might make them feel less powerless.”

Political satire like Private Eye has been around since the 60s, but as our consumption of news and current affairs becomes more and more social media-led – with nearly 80 percent of UK young adults between 18-24 considering the internet to be their primary news platform – the lines dividing political reporting, satire, commentary and memes are becoming increasingly blurred. Just take a look at Channel 4’s coverage of Truss’s resignation, which ended in a compilation vid set to Truss’s favourite song (apparently): Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space”.

“Perhaps more than anywhere else, the British media and popular culture and national politics are highly-connected and hyper-compressed,” Dr Phoenix Andrews explains to VICE. “All the politicians, pop stars and hacks go to the same schools and universities and wind up in the same green room, so there’s no need to force, for example, a link between Liz Truss and Taylor Swift to make a ‘Blank Space’ montage of her career, because the photos are literally on her Instagram.”

For Andrews, a researcher specialising in politics, fandoms, and digital culture,  the memeification of British politics is “unsurprising”. After all, as he argues, there has always been a “sarcastic, somewhat flippant and cheeky side to political culture” in the UK – so in a lot of ways, political shitposting from both media outlets and individuals is unsurprising, and just an extension of these underlying attitudes.

One 21-year-old student, who has asked to remain anonymous, set up the @PoliticsMoments in March this year to document “insane moments in British politics” – in just seven months, the account has amassed over 91,000 followers by simply highlighting and mocking some of the stranger-than-fiction things that have happened both in the past and in recent history, like Boris Johnson hiding in a fridge to avoid questions. 

“For me I think things are so absurd right now that it feels like a piece of fiction,” the person behind @PoliticsMoments tells VICE. While the Twitter account initially was designed to be “historic in nature”, the content has shifted to be more about current events because, as the they explain, “things have become crazier”.

According to Dr. Ysabel Gerrard, a lecturer in digital media and society at Sheffield University, Twitter is the perfect vehicle for political memes for three main reasons: the “dominance of political talk” on the app, the “text-based nature” of the memes (whether that’s text overlaid on memes or standalone) and Twitter’s algorithmically-driven timeline, which she notes is “controversial for some, but perfect for enabling virality”.

While the nature of memes themselves haven’t changed much, what has changed, according to Andrews, are the target audience for these memes. As British politics has become weirder and more memeable, he notes that these memes garner “more traction with ‘normies’ outside online culture and older people”. Indeed, Gerrard adds, political memes have become more “mainstream” and aren’t necessarily reserved for those with a ton of background political knowledge. “Some memes require deeper subcultural knowledge than others, and readers must be ‘in the know’ to make sense of memes and participate in cultural conversations,” she explains. “But others – like the Liz Truss lettuce memes – are broad enough for all (or at least most) to quickly understand and join.”

As the owner of a meme account themselves, @PoliticsMoments argues that the increased memeification of politics can be a force for good – especially when it comes to younger generations. “It allows people to see politics from a different angle from what has been presented in traditional media,” they explain. “ I think for younger generations like myself, these kinds of accounts also allow people to become more engaged in politics, whereas I feel previously younger people have been more detached from political events, seeing them as dry and boring.”

Clearly, memes like Lettuce Liz have come at a time when national morale has been low – and although iceberg lettuce isn’t exactly comparable to Blitz spirit, it cheered people up at a time when everything has felt a little shitty. “I think it gave people something to laugh about,” Keeble says. “I've had hundreds of messages saying it made them laugh during, I guess, not a time of personal crisis, but one of exasperation.”

Andrews notes that shitposting can be seen as the modern equivalent of a stiff upper lip, particularly at a time when national frustration runs high and the two most recent prime ministers – Truss and Rishi Sunak – were unelected by the British public. “We shitpost through crises because it’s cringe to be sincere and hard to express emotions,” Andrews explains. “It’s that or outright nihilism, disengagement and depression. We have very little say in politics outside general elections and not much then, so it’s how we cope with this but also how we cope with other areas we feel like we don’t have any control.”

But like all coping mechanisms, there are always dangers that they become unhealthy or unproductive, particularly when we substitute memes for actual political understanding and engagement. “Beware of simple stories,” Andrews warns. “[With memes] it’s all storytelling and it depends whether someone’s engagement with politics goes deeper than the meme.” 

For others, it’s a question of whether certain people engage with memes at all, especially those outside the Gen Z and millennial age brackets. While memes that mock Tories “seem to dominate our feeds right now,” Gerrard notes, “not everyone is part of meme culture”.

“Certain memes and discourses become so pervasive, crossing platforms and generations at breakneck speed, that they can feel representative of all,” she explains. “But it’s crucial to remember that, while meme culture is of course a big part of our current political climate, many many people still get their news and political talk from non-digital spaces.” 

In other words: Just because your boomer uncle shared a meme joking about Boris Johnson as Mr Blobby, it doesn’t mean he isn’t going to vote Conservative at the next election.

@colombochar