How smartphones broke British politics

Why do U.K. prime ministers keep falling?
The answer might lie in their pockets.

By CHARLIE COOPER
in London

^{Illustrations by Arnau Busquets Guàrdia/POLITICO}

Stand still for a moment in Westminster and watch; you could be forgiven for thinking the lawmakers coming and going are in love with the smartphones glued to their hands.

But ask one how they feel about their device and you might get a surprising answer: “I hate my phone. I hate it, I hate it with a passion,” said Clive Lewis, a member of the U.K. Parliament and an influential figure on the resurgent “soft left” of the ruling Labour party.

“I hate my phone,” echoed an MP from an opposition party.

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“I bloody hate the freneticism” smartphones cause, said a second Labour MP, a serving minister, bemoaning “the lack of attention, focus and real listening.”

Be that as it may. Just like the rest of us, Britain’s lawmakers are hooked on their devices. Tune in to the House of Commons live feed during any given debate and count how many are scrolling.

Economic stagnation, Covid-19, energy crises, the furious debate over Brexit — there are plenty of reasons why the U.K. has been plagued by a decade of extraordinary political instability in the 10 years since it voted to leave the EU. Six prime ministers — potentially soon seven — have tried and largely failed to control the chaos.

And yet there’s another force that has helped disrupt British politics, one so ingrained in the daily business of Westminster that its effects are rarely considered: the rise of smartphones and the hyperfrenetic pace of politics they’ve engendered. 

“It’s changed political thinking, changed political consciousness, changed modus operandi,” said historian Anthony Seldon, biographer of seven of the eight prime ministers the U.K. has had in the 21st century. “And it’s made life more difficult for the prime minister at No. 10. Significantly more difficult.”

Westminster in your pocket

While it’s not easy to pin down the precise effect of smartphones, there’s no denying that their reach penetrates deep into Westminster. They are woven into every aspect of how MPs, ministers, journalists and party officials gather news, communicate, plot, scheme and maneuver.

“It’s the first thing I reach for in the morning and the last thing I put down at the end of the day,” said the opposition MP, who was granted anonymity to speak in frank terms about his personal smartphone use — which includes “sending WhatsApps and checking emails at four in the morning.” 

“X, Instagram, Facebook, it’s never-ending,” the MP said. “Even when away or on recess, due to smartphones, you now carry Westminster with you everywhere you go.”

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Political grievances are amplified, while demands for change gather momentum and culminate (faster than before) in calls for drastic action — such as, say, ousting the prime minister.

“It definitely contributes to the churn,” said the MP, who outwardly appears to enjoy the cut and thrust of political life. “No one switches off, takes time to reflect or think. Everyone has to be commenting on everything, all the time. If you haven’t commented on a news story within 10 minutes of the BBC Breaking News alert, then you’re yesterday’s news.”

James Lyons, who served as director of strategic communications in Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Downing Street between 2024 and 2025, calls it “swipe-right culture.”

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer facetimes while attending a defense summit in Helsinki in March. | Pool photo by Adrian Dennis via Getty Images

“You can order a takeaway, you can buy a book, you can even organize a date [on your smartphone]. That kind of instant gratification culture doesn’t lend itself to … long-term fixes for the country,” Lyons said. “Via social media on their smartphone, MPs are at the beck and call of constituents and can be pressured by lobby groups all the time.”

Even those who see their relationship with their phone as toxic acknowledge it’s too deeply embedded in political life to abandon. “I would love to get rid of my phone, but I’m terrified,” said Lewis, the Labour MP, speaking (on his smartphone) in a rare quiet moment one afternoon during the May parliamentary recess. “Terrified I’ll lose out on the things that are going on.”

When historians look back at the last decade of political upheaval, Lewis believes “there will be whole books written on this, about the impact of this technology; how it affected people’s brains.”

Groupthink

Smartphones have done more than make politics faster and more frantic: They’ve changed how power is organized. The phenomenon exploded during the years after the Brexit vote of 2016, as the U.K. debated how exactly it should leave the EU — and WhatsApp emerged as the country’s (and the world’s) favorite messaging app.

“Many was the occasion, when I bemoaned the existence of WhatsApp groups,” former Prime Minister Theresa May complained in her recent memoir “The Abuse of Power,” reflecting on the events that led to her ouster in 2019.

Much of the opposition to May was mustered via a Brexiteer WhatsApp group organized by Steve Baker, a former Royal Air Force engineer who at the time was a Conservative MP. The new technology, Baker said, enabled “the acceleration of everything.”

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“When you’re the one holding the firing trigger on the broadcast list, it’s an immense power,” Baker said. “It was absolutely imperative to operate a twin-track of WhatsApp for private communications (at least until they leaked) … and X [then called Twitter] in order to get things done and be seen by journalists.”

Baker now works with a behavioral scientist, coaching businesses to overcome groupthink — a dynamic he put to use via his WhatsApp group. 

“Human beings are absolutely hardwired to agree in groups,” he said. Did every Brexiteer MP in his WhatsApp group read all the policy papers and stop and consider before deciding to rebel? “In most cases” no, he admitted. They waited for him “to send out a broadcast message.”  

“I used that phenomenon ruthlessly, and I was trusted. I would argue that I was right [and] that they were right to trust me. Because I’d done the work.”

Brexit effect

To be sure, the disruption of politics by smartphone is not a uniquely British phenomenon. Donald Trump turned Twitter into a platform where world-changing announcements were made — before switching to his own soapbox, Truth Social. European leaders now have high-level WhatsApp groups where they organize their countermoves against him. And every national capital and power center has its own version of the Westminster addiction.

But Baker believes that for the U.K., the potency of the Brexit debate — occurring just as social media and WhatsApp were reaching near-universal adoption — helped to lock the country into a habit of instability.

“I remember thinking to myself: My goodness, how are journalists ever going to come down off this high … the adrenaline roller-coaster ride of such big news almost every day?” he said. “How are they ever going to return to engaging with dreary minutiae of NHS reform, when we’re giving them such big stories all the time? And I remember genuinely thinking this feels consequential. And dreadful.”

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These days, the WhatsApp groups aren’t aimed at May but at Keir Starmer. The faction to which Lewis, the phone-hating Labour MP, belongs is currently hoping to replace the prime minister with Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester. 

WhatsApp is “the ultimate insiders app,” Lewis said.

Unlike May, who had to contend with a slim parliamentary majority, Starmer commands a large one. But MPs now have the “ability to more quickly and easily drum up dissent,” said Lucia Hodgson, a former press secretary in the government of Boris Johnson, who replaced May in 2019 only to be ousted three years later. 

Then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson and then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak in London in 2020. | Pool photo by Heathcliff O’Malley via Getty Images

Parliament was once dominated by all-powerful whips, enforcers of discipline in the legislature who corralled MPs to vote with the government, said Seldon, the biographer of prime ministers. 

But with the real action playing out on WhatsApp, they are finding it harder to “know what is going on,” he added.

Lewis, the Labour MP, agreed. “I increasingly suspect the whips’ intelligence networks, the face-to-face personal intelligence networks have atrophied,” he said. Smartphone-addicted MPs may be losing “the art of persuasion and the power to meet people and engage,” he added.

Nuclear age

For Baker, the smartphone revolution is only the opening chapter. The next phase — driven by artificial intelligence — could prove even more destabilizing.

The U.K. has already seen AI-fueled attempts to destabilize politics. In 2023, a deepfake audio recording of Starmer — then opposition leader — swearing at his staffers went viral on X. The next year, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, condemned as fake an AI-generated audio recording in which he purportedly denigrated Remembrance Day commemorations and called for a “one-million-man Palestinian march.”

“We’re definitely in the foothills of deepfakes,” said Lyons, Starmer’s former comms director. “The problem is you can no longer believe the evidence in your own eyes, right? They’ve got very good at voice fakes, but they’re getting much better at the visual stuff. There’s a real question about how platforms can help to police that.”

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Baker warned that things will likely get worse.

“It might well be that in the age of handwritten letters and radio broadcasts, that was the age of bows and arrows, and then television comes in and we move up to swords,” he said. “This is the age of Gatling guns and the beginnings of biplanes dropping bombs.”

“I think by the time AI is running the attacks on politicians, we’ll be up to the nuclear age.”