Jo Swinson is the only one of the five major leaders who can really be thought of as a new face to the British electorate. While she has some experience as a cabinet minister in coalition with the Conservatives and as Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats, the perception is that she could have walked down the street unperturbed until this summer. This is backed up by social media engagement data – of the 2,196,432 reactions to articles about her in the past five years, 90% of them came since the start of June.
While traditionally this might have been considered a handicap, in turbulent political times relative obscurity may be an advantage with an electorate crying out for change – as evidenced by political insurgencies from the likes of Salvini, Podemos, Syriza and to a lesser extent Corbyn, Sanders and Trump in the last decade.
Less helpfully for her party, our findings indicate that since emerging on the national scene Swinson has had issues with credibility, in two senses. Firstly, we have observed a tendency to believe and spread misleading information about her more than anything she’s actually said. Secondly, there is an observable trend of people mocking what Swinson says, when they do see it.
Problem 1: Attack Lines and Misleading Information
A quick glance at the most popular posts about Swinson in the past year shows she has not really caught hold amongst a sizeable chunk of the electorate. Three of the top ten pieces – including the most significant – are direct attack pieces, coming from the Corbyn-supporting Nye Bevan News and Evolve and the Brexiteer Unity News Network.
While we don’t see above the left-wing Twitter joke about Swinson revelling in the murder of squirrels that the Lib Dem leader derided as a ‘sophisticated’ fake news operation, we do see some prominent pieces with questionable authenticity.
The top piece is on Nye Bevan News and is one of several stories based on the fact that Swinson’s husband works at a company (Transparency International) that has received substantial EU grants.
The BBC has demonstrated how this discovery has been twisted to imply that Swinson’s ‘family company’ benefitted from a £4 million grant. The true amount granted to Transparency International’s UK office was less than £40,000 over two years.
Nye Bevan News is not the originator of the story but is the first source to claim that Swinson’s husband is the owner of Transparency International - he’s not - and to raise links between the organisation and George Soros, the Brexiteer’s favourite bogeyman.
The piece sitting in tenth earns itself 20,000 engagements by running with this story and embellishing with a link from Transparency International to George Soros – often seen as a bogeyman with antisemitic undertones in pro-Brexit discourse. These two pieces alone – not the only mentions of the claim – represent 8% of the total reactions to coverage of Swinson on social media in 2019.
Problem 2: Is Jo Swinson Becoming a Laughing Stock?
While the reactions measured as a whole paint a relatively bleak picture of Swinson’s progress, splitting them by their emotional nature appears to make things worse.
While the standard ‘like’ reaction can be a little ambiguous when viewed at scale, Facebook’s different range of emotional responses gives a better indication of how people are viewed.
Here we see Swinson experiencing a credibility problem. Including the nonspecific ‘like’, which is typically the Facebook user’s go-to response, we see that 10% of her Facebook likes come with a ‘haha’ response. If you discount generic likes, more than half of her emotional reactions were ‘haha’.
While this doesn’t necessarily indicate a perception of unserious (as we’ll cover with Farage being ‘milkshaked’, it can indicate something closer to hatred) what’s telling with Swinson is that these come mostly in response to her own pronouncements.
Most of these reactions come to the staunch Remainer’s claims that she can become Prime Minister at the upcoming elections – with the party having won 12 seats in 2017 under previous leader Tim Farron.
Losing the Narrative
All political leaders are a lightning rod to anger and ridicule, and it is also true that more people are still supportively ‘liking’ her talking up her chances of becoming PM than are laughing them out of hand.
More serious than a tendency not to take her seriously, is the fact that misleading news and attack lines are outstripping what she’s saying herself. With a lack of recognition of her and her stances, she may struggle to keep hold of the narrative.
While it’s easy to wonder whether it’s better she wasn’t on the debate show in that context, as a politician she really needs to make a genuine imprint of some kind on the public – which as yet she has been unable to do.
What Should the Liberal Democrats be Doing?
The Lib Dems have made their leader the focus of their campaign and have often rebranded the party as “Jo Swinson’s Liberal Democrats” in this election cycle.
While a lot of the world is in thrall to leaders who seem to have surged from the wilderness into the political limelight, this doesn’t seem to have worked out for Jo Swinson. With only 11 MPs to choose from in July, of whom two had led the party already, there was a sense of emerging from a limited pool.
The Liberal Democrats have pledged to invest in buses. It's unclear how much of this will go towards Jo Swinson decals.
There are other routes the party could have gone down instead of trying to thrust the then-untested Swinson to the forefront of the public consciousness.
Prior to the election, the party had seen a surge in members to a level greater than they’d seen before. An attempt to make itself seen as a mass movement – as opposed to the traditional sense of the Lib Dems being a small network of well-meaning middle class types – could help to reinvigorate their image.
This may have been behind Vince Cable’s ultimately failed move to allow non-MPs to enter the leadership contest, but even with Swinson in the helm it could be possible. A future way forward could be to emphasise the power of the membership by increasing direct participation as a way around a political situation often seen as stuck.
Internal democratic reforms could help to promote this. Calls for direct democracy or e-democracy are relatively unheard of in this country but are proving to have some purchase among parties across the political spectrum in Europe. This would be a left-field way to take pressure off the leader and may be too drastic for the Liberal Democrats.
At this stage, the focus is likely to be on messaging and presentation. A spotlight on a large membership comprised of multiplicities, making the party seem like an inclusive place for open discussion, could just help to reframe the part and reduce the cultish prominence of their leader. With this, it could seem like a strength to have taken on MPs elected as Labour or Conservative representatives, and the Lib Dems might give an impression of providing a current and future home to people who are lukewarm on the two big figures in British politics today.