Keir Starmer has been accused of trying to mimic Donald Trump’s social media output after posting a TikTok video about the crisis in the Middle East overlaid with the prime minister’s voice and the Dire Straits song Money for Nothing.
The video opens with footage showing Royal Navy Wildcat helicopters flying over his head before cutting to British military jets in action and a drone being destroyed, as Starmer’s voice states the position he has taken on the conflict.
“Our number one priority is protecting our people,” says Starmer, overlaid with the sound of electric guitars played by Dire Straits.
Starmer refused to join the US and Israeli strikes on Iran but has since authorised “defensive” action.
Al Pinkerton, a Liberal Democrat MP, said the choice of song when the military was “crying out” for the government’s defence spending plan seemed “particularly cloth-eared”.
“Trump’s illegal war in the Middle East is not a movie for promotion despite what [the president’s] press channels may imply,” he added, referring to social media posts by the White House that celebrated the bombing of Iran with a montage of clips from Hollywood films and television shows.
“Downing Street seems unable to avoid being sucked into the orbit of Trump’s deranged confusion of blockbuster with international conflict.”
The Green party said the TikTok clip “has echoes of videos coming out of the White House glorifying war”.
Asked if the prime minister approved the music used on his social media posts, his spokesperson told reporters: “I’m not going to get into internal processes but you have his words on his commitment to defence spending.”
Starmer told the Munich Security Conference last month that the UK was “going to have to spend more, faster” when it came to defence, after promising last year to spend 2.5% of national economic output on core defence by April 2027.
TikTok has increasingly become a social media platform of choice for the prime minister, whose output has been previously praised as “borderline competent”.
He used the platform earlier this week to post clips of a phone call with the leaders of France and Germany where they discussed the outbreak of the war, with a more generic musical sound in the background.
There was speculation that the choice of Dire Straits may have been a result of an algorithmical prompt by TikTok itself.
