The UK is about to get its seventh Prime Minister in a decade.
Seven. In ten years. Downing Street has more turnover than a startup's first product team. A lettuce once outlasted one of them, and honestly, the lettuce had clearer positioning.
Keir Starmer walked out the door last week. Won a landslide two years ago, massive majority, the lot. And the thing people kept saying as he left? Nobody could really tell you what he stood for. Not the policies. The point. What was the one thing?
That isn't a politics problem. It's a branding problem. And it's the same one that quietly kills most personal brands, founders very much included.
So if I were advising anyone building a public profile, politician or not, I'd skip the "just post more reels" advice everyone gives and start here.
Make people able to finish your sentence. If they can't say what you're about in one line, you don't have a brand, you have a logo, though but not a brand. Pick the one thing and own it until you're sick of it, because that's usually the exact moment the public is finally starting to hear it.
People remember what you're clearly for and clearly against. Say it plainly. Nuance is honest, but vague is invisible, and the feed doesn't reward invisible.
Be the easiest version of your own story to find. When someone asks an AI who you are or Googles you, the answer should sound like you, not like your opponent's version of you. If you don't write your story, someone else writes it for you, and usually less kindly.
And lose the polish. People forgive almost any flaw faster than they forgive feeling managed. A shaky 40-second clip of you actually meaning something beats the fifty grand ad every time.
None of this is spin. It's the opposite. It's deciding what's actually true about you, and saying it on purpose, again and again, until it sticks.
Politicians keep learning this one the hard way. Seven times in ten years, by my count.
