Katie Hopkins effect: why candidates live in fear of a celebrity endorsement
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Version 0 of 1. If Labour manages to win this election – or, more realistically, if it comes as close to winning as this infuriating stalemate of a campaign will allow – the history books will show that victory was cemented back at one minute past 10 on the evening of 26 March 2015. Because that’s when Katie Hopkins watched Ed Miliband on television and tweeted: ‘If this man is Prime Minister I will leave the UK’. Instantly, in the minds of millions of people around the country, the Labour leader’s face changed. Where once it was awkward and ungainly, now it had blossomed into a thing of beauty, like a glorious figurehead on the majestic ship that would scoop up Hopkins and dump her off somewhere miles away from everyone. From then on, it didn’t matter what his party promised. Increased taxes. Comprehensive greenbelt development. Mandatory death-camps for the flatfooted. Nothing could reverse the gains made by “Vote Labour to make Katie Hopkins go away”. Everyone would vote Labour after hearing that. I would. You would. You sense that the bulk of the immediate Hopkins family probably would. Obviously to ask what Hopkins was thinking would be utterly redundant, because her mind is constantly and exclusively full of nothing but fire and screaming and the sound of crying children. But she should have at least known that there’s precedent here. Phil Collins tried the same thing in 1997, promising to leave if Tony Blair got in, and ended up schlepping off to Switzerland two years later. Related: Celebrities sign statement of support for Caroline Lucas – but not the Greens Celebrity endorsements don’t help anyone. There isn’t even a parallel universe where they come close to helping. Who on Earth would Griff Rhys Jones have possibly convinced to side with him when he threatened to leave the UK if Labour brought in the mansion tax? Realistically, only the person who has to book the third-choice backup guests for The One Show twice a year, and even that’s a bit of a push. If they aren’t met with uniform apathy – and it’s hard to respond to Martin Freeman’s Labour video with anything other than a fixed grin and noncommittal thumbs up – celebrity endorsements can actively hurt the party they’re meant to help. Gary Barlow might have thought he was doing David Cameron an enormous favour by hovering his tornado-sized charisma void over the Conservative campaign in 2010, but the scale of Barlow’s tax avoidance has repeatedly come along to kick Cameron in the arse in the years since then. Similarly, it’s hard to feel anything but pity for the Green party today, now that Joanna Lumley and Thom Yorke and Bianca Jagger and Alistair McGowan have thrown their weight behind the re-election of Caroline Lucas. Not because barely any of the celebrities actually live in Lucas’s constituency, which makes the whole thing stink of eat-your-vegetables condescension. And not because they’ve all specifically endorsed Lucas, and not the rest of the Green party, which makes the whole thing look confused beyond belief. No, it’s hard to feel anything but pity for the Green party because their one MP might lose her job specifically because people rebel against celebrity hubris. There are probably people in Brighton Pavilion who hate Lumley, or Brian May, or Jeremy Irons, or Rory Bremner enough to sink Lucas’s chances out of spite. She’d have probably been better off if they hadn’t bothered. Maybe someone could convince Katie Hopkins to tweet her support for Lucas’s rivals. That’s probably the only way back for her at this rate. |