You’ve probably seen the videos. Kemi Badenoch delivering her Budget response in the form of a rap to a sobbing Rachel Reeves. Keir Starmer as a McDonald’s drive-thru worker. David Lammy as a Spice Girl in a tight dress. Reeves (again) as the Grand High Witch from The Witches. Behind the videos is one man. He runs the Crewkerne Gazette, an online publisher of viral political videos made with artificial intelligence.
The ‘Crewkerne Man’ would not give me his name when we met for lunch in Somerset last week. What I can say is that the most important political satirist of the moment is a large guy in his mid-thirties with a ginger beard and glasses; that when he entered the Crooked Swan pub he scanned the room shiftily; and that throughout our two-hour conversation he wore a red cap bearing the logo of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, an American seafood restaurant chain inspired by Forrest Gump. He wishes to remain anonymous. ‘One never knows when it will be their final day posting,’ he says. ‘Twenty armed officers with guns pointed at you in bed is a high price to pay for shitposting on the internet.’
‘Twenty armed officers with guns pointed at you in bed is a high price to pay for posting on the internet’
The Gazette first came to public attention in September, when it emerged that Angela Rayner had underpaid tax on a flat in Hove, and the Crewkerne Man wrote and produced a song called ‘How many homes can Rayner buy?’ A grime/garage beat accompanied a video of an AI-created Rayner dancing in big hoop earrings, fat gold chains and an Adidas tracksuit. The video has been watched 11 million times on social media and was celebrated on the front page of the Sun: ‘Rayner facing the rap: AI vid goes viral.’
The Crewkerne Man was enjoying a pint of Bass in Oscar’s Wine Bar, down the road from the Crooked Swan, when he saw the Sun’s front page. His songs and sketches – which he works on full-time and writes with a friend – had already collectively notched up a few million views before then. A music video of Nigel Farage dressed like a pimp and DJing in a nightclub had done well the previous week and featured on GB News.
But the Sun front page was different. To the Crewkerne Man it was a ‘historic’ sign that cultural power had shifted: the old media was following the new. During our interview he repeatedly quoted a tweet that Elon Musk posted on the morning of 6 November last year, just after it became clear that Donald Trump had won the US presidential election: ‘You are the media now.’
The Crewkerne Man was born in 1990 in Yeovil, about ten miles from Crewkerne, and left school without going to university. He says he got into cryptocurrency in his twenties and spent the late 2010s and early 2020s living and working in the United States, mixing with similar types who worked in crypto, AI and Republican politics. He gave unofficial support to Trump’s third election campaign, creating videos close in style to those he makes about Britain today.
In the US he spent a lot of time in Laurel Canyon, California, which was the centre of the 1960s hippie movement when the likes of Jim Morrison and the members of the Mamas & the Papas lived there. As he moved with his West Coast MAGA set, the Crewkerne Man believed he was witnessing a new counterculture emerge. ‘There was a cultural revolution that happened, and I feel like now the same is happening again, but we’re not lovey-dovey hippies,’ he says. ‘Memes are becoming the culture.’
Last year, the Crewkerne Man returned home to Somerset. ‘Keir Starmer was such a caricature, even during the election campaign,’ he says. ‘It’s just crazy that nobody was making comedy about this man, when everybody was angry about him… There are so many comedians that are just totally silent on the government.’
The Crewkerne Man wanted to change that by resurrecting an old style of British comedy. ‘Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse were so influential to me,’ he explains. Their sketches offered a lasting commentary on 1980s Thatcherism, and characters such as Loadsamoney and Tory Boy were effectively pre-internet memes. But after the turn of the millennium, that style of comedy lost popularity. Shows such as The Office, where the humour was bathetic and self-conscious, took off, and comedy programmes with ‘no jokes’, as Enfield described them, became the norm. The Crewkerne Man wants a revival of crudeness.
Reform wants this as well. After Shabana Mahmood announced her new asylum policies, the party released an AI-generated image of her sitting in a bedroom wearing teal Reform-branded pyjamas, the walls behind her covered in Farage merch.
The Gazette’s sketches are made using a proprietary program, drawing from a mixture of AI platforms. The Crewkerne Man and his friend write the lyrics for the songs and give directions to the AI for the visuals. The content renders quickly. The Gazette had released its video of Badenoch rapping her Budget response just a few hours after she delivered it in the Commons. The next morning, on Good Morning Britain, the video was played to her. She had seen it already.
The Crewkerne Man doesn’t just want to be funny. He wants the Gazette to become a politically influential media outlet, to wield power like the tabloids used to. This means doing more commentary. After the murder of 49-year-old Wayne Broadhurst in Uxbridge in October, the Crewkerne Man released a video of an AI version of himself delivering a monologue about it and warning his followers against responding violently. An Afghan refugee has been charged with the killing.
‘The second you lash out, the second you riot or try to take justice into your own hands, the people in power suddenly love it,’ he says in the video. ‘Because now you’re the story. Not the failed border system. Not the knife crime. Not the way ordinary people don’t feel safe. Now they get to point at you and say: “Look at the dangerous extremists.”’
In the five-minute clip his avatar wears the same Bubba Gump Shrimp cap that he had on when we met. He resembles the real Crewkerne Man – but enhanced. He’s given himself a muscle-tight pinstriped suit and shiny aviator sunglasses. He’s neatened his beard too. He almost looks American. A woman commented below the video: ‘Hero <3 xxx.’
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