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Sam Bright tracks the rise of Topham Guerin, the New Zealand ‘propaganda pair’ in charge of the UK Government’s online Coronavirus communications
Attempting to gain a semblance of control over the Coronavirus crisis, the UK Government has embarked on an unprecedented spending splurge. The Conservatives – usually known for their fiscal prudence – have shelled out tens of millions of pounds in a desperate and largely unchecked private sector procurement programme.
Masks, ventilators, gowns, testing swabs and a litany of other items have been urgently solicited from firms, without the usual competition and checks. Taking advantage of a European Union law that allows governments to avoid competitive tendering during an “emergency”, Whitehall departments have been throwing around more fast cash than a Monaco playboy.
One of the recipients of the Government’s largesse, as revealed by Byline Times last week, is the communications startup Topham Guerin. The Kiwi firm, that worked for the Conservative Party during the 2019 UK General Election campaign, has been awarded a £3 million contract for handling Government Coronavirus digital communications from March until September.
The Topham Guerin contract marks a trend in the Government’s great procurement binge, with several large contracts handed out to known quantities. One of the beneficiaries – to the tune of £840,000 – has been a company called Public First, a policy development platform co-owned by Conservative insiders James Frayne and Rachel Wolf.
The former is a close ally of the Prime Minister’s chief advisor Dominic Cummings, having co-founded the short-lived New Frontiers Foundation with him in 2003 and later working alongside the Downing Street enforcer at the Department for Education under Michael Gove. As for Wolf, she co-authored the 2019 Conservative Party Manifesto.
A separate company has meanwhile managed to score a £252 million contract to supply an undisclosed number of face masks to the NHS. A senior board advisor to the company, Andrew Mills, is one of 12 advisors to the Government’s Board of Trade, which is chaired by International Trade Secretary Liz Truss.
In any normal setting, this seemingly preferential mentality would make sense. In a time of crisis, people instinctively fall back on companies they have worked with before, and can trust. But when it’s the Government, and mates of the regime are raking in millions in rushed contracts paid for by the taxpayer, the system looks less like a sensible alliance with dependable partners and more like a Putin-esque funding racket.
“It cannot be the case that Government contracts, even during a pandemic where fast decision making is essential, are awarded to political insiders and friends of this government and its ministers,” Labour MP Dawn Butler told Byline Times. “That’s cronyism, or worse.”
This perception is only intensified when the commissioned companies are not necessarily “world-beating” experts in the service they have been requisitioned to deliver. For example, questions have been raised about why the Government handed a £108 million contract for personal protective equipment (PPE) to a small pest control company with assets of just £18,000. As many outside observers have remarked – indeed it is the subject of a legal challenge from Jolyon Maugham QC – it seems as though the Tories could have picked a firm more equipped for the job.
The case of Topham Guerin is less clear. The firm, last year described as “boutique,” boasts an extensive portfolio of work. But their efforts seem to have come largely in the arena of election campaigns and right-wing political lobbying – earning them the title in the Guardian of the ‘Facebook propaganda pair’.
Boomer Memes: ‘Anger, Excitement, Pride, Fear’
On 29 May, 2019, Topham Guerin co-founder Ben Guerin appeared as a special guest at the Friedman Conference, a right-wing event hosted by the Australian Libertarian Society (ALS) and the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance (ATA).
A week before, his bootstrap firm had played a major role in propelling the right-wing Liberal Party, headed by Scott Morrison, to victory in the Australian Federal Election.
Reflecting on the social media strategy he deployed during the election, Guerin describes a campaign of highly repetitive messaging – what he calls “water dripping on a stone” – to convince voters that the opposition Labor Party would hike-up taxes. Guerin boasts an especially high-performing piece of content was an image of a dog accompanied by the message ‘tax is bad’.
In this spirit, the social media spin doctor goes on to explain how “crude,” poorly-produced memes attracted more engagement than slick, formulaic graphics.
“You’ve got to surprise people. You’ve got to shock people. Unlock and arouse an emotion in people,” he recommends, to his right-wing audience.
“The particular emotions we’ve got to unlock are arousal emotions,” he continues. “We’re talking: anger, excitement, pride, fear. Your content should be relating to one of these emotions”.
Emotive content was pumped out relentlessly by the Morrison campaign, says Guerin, and the professionalism of that content literally didn’t matter.
“That’s how you get what we call the ‘boomer memes’. Because you have to crank stuff out quickly. You couldn’t spend too long doing an artisanally perfect graphic. You’re going to slap some Calibri font on a shitty, reused meme and you’re going to publish it, and then get on to the next one. And you know what: that content is going to do better than the thing your poor graphic designer spent a week on.”
This tactic, Guerin claims, resulted in Morrison and the Liberal Party receiving twice as much engagement on social media than their Labor opponents.
“And when most of that is concentrated in marginal seats, that’s how you win an election that no-one thinks you’re going to win,” he opined, with just a hint of smugness.
Crosby to Downing Street
The 2019 Australian election wasn’t the first taste of political campaigning for Guerin and his partner Sean Topham, nor the last. The pair had cut their teeth on a contest two years earlier, drafted in by the centre-right New Zealand National Party to hold back the tide of support for Labour Leader Jacinda Ardern.
Gaining notoriety in right-wing circles, the Kiwi meme manipulators – still only in their 20s – entered the patronage of Lynton Crosby, the conservative campaigner-in-chief. According to the Guardian, Topham and Guerin consulted for CTF Partners – a communications company run by Crosby. It’s claimed the pair helped Crosby run Facebook pages that “sidestepped Facebook’s rules on transparent political campaigning” on behalf of clients including major polluters, the Saudi Arabian Government, anti-cycling groups and various foreign political campaigns.
All parties have previously pointed out that they operated entirely within the law.
It was during this period, from 2017 to summer 2019, that Topham and Guerin crossed paths with the man who would propel them into the maelstrom of a UK general election campaign.
Having run Crosby’s operation in Washington DC, Australian political strategy Isaac Levido was rushed back to his native country to help Morrison’s 2019 election bid. Operating as the deputy director of the campaign, Levido – dubbed “the new Lynton” – was evidently impressed by the work of the two Kiwi upstarts. And so, when Levido was commissioned to run the Tories’ 2019 general election bid, he brought Topham and Guerin in his suitcase.
Under the wing of Levido, the pair unleashed meme warfare of the British public. Following the model of the Australian election, Topham Guerin deployed all their expertise in shitty fonts – notably when they posted a graphic on the Conservative Party’s official social media channels, using Comic Sans.