Rishi Sunak dressed as a purple wizard and Sir Keir Starmer’s feeble punches in a gym.
These are the images teenagers are sharing in school on TikTok – all being pushed out by party campaign teams to target the young.
For our Bench Across Britain series, we took our people’s parliamentary bench to Cardinal Newman Catholic School in the Bedfordshire town of Luton, where we discovered young people are following this election closely online.
“I’m getting some from the Conservative Party and some from Labour,” says 17-year-old Hope Campbell, a Year 12 pupil.
She and other students quickly pull up a photoshopped image of the prime minister dressed as a wizard with the caption “you’ve been cursed by the Auramancer (-999999 aura if you don’t send this)”, which refers to an on-trend joke among teenagers about “aura”.
Hope explains: “So basically there’s a whole joke about aura – you get positive points if you do something good, and then if you do something like embarrassing or bad you get negative points.
“So, this is kind of like something put on by the Labour Party to say that if you vote for the Conservative Party, you’ll get like minus nearly a million points.”
Hope and her friend Eve Kelly, 17, say Labour seem to be winning the TikTok war, someone from Gen-Z must be producing their content.
But the Conservatives are pushing back. A TikTok video put out by them shows Sir Keir doing a bad job of punching a punchbag.
“He’s obviously not the best boxer,” Hope says. “And they’re saying, I think the punch bag might have won this one.
“It’s kind of funny in the way that it’s parliament that’s doing this, which should be like something very serious. And they’re kind of making it into a bit of a joke.”
Read more: Reform UK may be winning the first TikTok election
Teenagers…
