The New Media Unit in the Cabinet Office is spending eye-watering sums on influencers to propagandise the activity of the government. The things people will do for cash…
Guido’s FoI Unit established last month that the unit, whose salary costs now number £1.28 million annually, has only engaged five influencers in its lifetime: 3 in February 2025, 2 in March 2025, and 1 repeat in April 2025. At the time it refused to say how much they were being paid because “disclosure would be likely to harm the Cabinet Office’s business reputation and weaken the Cabinet Offices’s position in a competitive environment”…
Now Cabinet Office ministers have revealed the to-date costs of the unit’s for-hire influencers in a parliamentary answer: £114,796.51. Labour claims the “investment has supported multiple campaigns of varying scale and reach. Influencers have proven to be effective in reaching audiences that traditional marketing channels find hard to reach.” Here comes the fag packet maths operation…
Guido has that at £22,959 per influencer engaged. Nice ‘work’ if you can get it…
Tom Baldwin, author of Starmer’s hagiography, spoke to Times Radio:
Tom Baldwin: “I think he’d like to do something. He’s very dutiful and driven by service. That’s why he came into politics. I think that’s characterised his time as prime minister. He hasn’t always sought popularity or been good at being popular. But I think he has some of the necessary qualities that we actually do want in a prime minister. That resilience, that relentlessness, that ability to carry the weight and the job really does weigh very heavily on people and he carries that weight very, very well.”
Jo Coburn: “NATO Secretary-General?”
Tom Baldwin: “I think that’s something that he would be interested in. I think it probably requires Andy Burnham’s government to support him in that and these are some of the questions which Andy Burnham has to resolve quite quickly.”