The journey from Supe to deep in the hole can be disconcerting

It's also final

“Homelander”, one of the superheroes in the Amazon Prime series, isn’t necessarily going to improve your day. Photo: © Amazon

If you haven’t seen the TV series The Boys, now in its fourth season on Amazon Prime, then you have truly been missing a feast. Though as with those people who innocently say “No, I’ve never seen The Sopranos” or “What is The Wire?” I’m envious as hell of you, because it means that you’ve got such a treat in store.

The Boys posits a present day in which superheroes are real, and controlled by a gigantic corporation which can create more of them almost on demand. The superheroes themselves are just ordinary people with super powers; which naturally then means that they see themselves as above the ordinary run of mortals, because (let’s face it) they are. Though they initially rely on the corporation to fix up their messes, and are anxious as hell about how the public might view them when they err—there are cameras everywhere!—the “Supes”, and the corporation, gradually realise that if they manipulate the media correctly, and control the narrative, the Supes will not just be admired, but adored.

Naturally, this goes to the head of the most capable of the Supes, a blond-haired man who can fly and, oh, also shoot laser beams from his eyes. He’s called Homelander, and his cape is an American flag. The symbolism is both hilarious and terrifying, because Homelander knows he can turn you into steaming meatloaf with a glance, and he knows you know, and you know he knows you know.

Season 4, the newest, has been leaning hard into the topic of what happens when you intentionally inject “alternative truths” into the narrative. Vought, the big corporation that creates the Supes, also owns a TV network (of course!) and makes films and series and runs Supes On Ice (actually actors, the Supes are busy). So it can, when it wants, push out whatever sort of narrative it wants that will support the Supes. Which they need, because despite everything, there’s a sizeable chunk of the population—proportion unknown—that doesn’t like the Supes and thinks they need to be reined in. (Rather like the first scenes of The Incredibles, in fact, except the Supes aren’t nice people.)

So how do you get the population to love you? The strategy, the smartest Supe figures out, is to get the two sides warring with each other, and make it look like the other side is taking things too far by killing people, for instance. Deniability is pretty difficult when you have people who can plant evidence at speeds too fast to be picked up by a camera. The whole show, in the first half of the season, is a clever play on how we let social media overrun our ability to examine questions that we feel partisan about: don’t think, feel—especially if you feel angry.

And why am I telling you this? Because watching the Tories’ attack ads on social media, one week out from the general election, is a wonderful example of how not to do it. If Vought had run a campaign this way, they’d have been totally screwed.

Take the utterly bizarre animation released on Thursday 28th. It shows Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner in an interview with Sky’s Beth Rigby. And then a comedy moustache and a red hat—possibly a beret, though it might be something from Little Chef—are slowly placed on her head.

What? What is this about? Is this Super Mario? There was a lot of puzzlement about this, but apparently the idea is that Rayner would turn the UK into France, with French employment laws. So, incomprehensible.

And then there was the simply mendacious, a little earlier in the week. Martin Lewis, who a long time ago was an FT journalist, is one of the most trusted non-political people in the country, as the creator of the MoneySavingExpert.com site and a persistent lobbyist for better pricing for home energy. Just as an example of how trusted he is, he was able to remain entirely neutral on Brexit—advising people only to assess the facts—and not harm his reputation in the slightest.

As he frequently does, he’s been speaking to both parties about various topics. While hosting a breakfast program, he alluded to have spoken to Labour about something that would be, in his opinion, a good policy to enact. He didn’t, and still hasn’t, said what. But the Conservatives, who have been yammering on about tax since calling the election (possibly a bad move, given that everyone thinks public services are in the toilet because too little tax revenue is spent on them), immediately assumed the “policy” was a tax raise:

A claim which incensed Lewis, who publicly rebutted it - meaning that the Conservatives’ tweet quickly got an embarrassing Community Note appended:

You’d think that would have been bad enough. But no, having dug themselves into a hole, the geniuses at Vou—I mean Conservative Central HQ—decided they could dig themselves out of the hole, and followed up later on the same day with another on the same theme:

This is a bizarre descent into childishness. No manifesto contains every policy that a party intends to implement, especially if the party actually expects to be in government. (There is a difference: if you’re the Monster Raving Loony Party, it’s unlikely that your policies will be implemented.. oh, really? .) And there’s no apology to Lewis. This is cackhandedness on a colossal scale, in front of everybody.

Which only goes to show that the election is not being won or lost on social media. Labour’s lead hasn’t shifted. The Tory deficit hasn’t either. The Reform vote has grown because of mass media coverage of the appearance of a well-known figure, who is well-known because of mass media. On the Private Eye podcast, Matt Muir (who I think has the vaguely official role of technology correspondent there) commented that this is the fifth social media election: the first was 2010, then 2015, 2017, 2019 and now this. But you’d struggle to demonstrate that social media made any difference to any of them. Who Targets Me says that the Tories’ social media ad campaign “is losing to Labour in every possible way.”

You only have to look at the above to see how. For a long time, the Tories thought they were the Vought Corporation: that they made superheroes, and that the little people loved them for who they were. Just one more week to go.

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