When a bronzed former Apprentice star who grew up in the suburbs of a global city starts making political noises, it’s best to take them seriously. And maybe JD Vance saw a flicker of his boss’s bolshy spirit in Thomas Skinner when he decided to invite the TV personality for a barbecue during his Cotswolds holiday this week. Either that or, like any good X poster, he just wanted to meet one of his online friends in person. The response has been predictable: Adam Miller lamented in the Metro that “Skinner insists he’s not far-right, but gleefully poses with one of the most extreme vice-presidents in recent memory.”

Skinner has been on a journey, and not only from Romford to Charlbury. After his appearance on The Apprentice in 2019, he built up a dependable social media shtick — shepherd’s pie and Christmas dinner for breakfast, pouring gravy without looking, saying “bosh” a lot — and progressed onto the C-list celebrity TV circuit, with appearances on 8 Out of 10 Cats, Celebrity Masterchef and the rest. Truly, what more could a man want? Why throw away the chance of another turn on Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel with the hearty praise for Donald Trump he tweeted last November? Why speak alongside Rupert Lowe and Danny Kruger at the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation’s “Now and England” conference in June? Why film vertical videos with Robert Jenrick?

Not that it actually seems to have harmed his old media career: Skinner has now been announced as a contestant on next month’s new series of Strictly Come Dancing. Though there’s been a half-hearted backlash to the news — including from his regular X sparring partner Narinder Kaur — there’s no blood-in-the-water sense of genuine cancellation here, partly because Skinner maintains a degree of geezerish cuddliness that your average Right-wing social media personality very much lacks.

His posts are still packed with generic motivational slop. Examples include “Life is crazy. Gotta grab everything with both hands and take it for what it is” and “Never take any criticism from anyone you wouldn’t take advice from.” And as with many political animals, Skinner presents his politics not as politics — “I’m not political myself,” he has maintained — but as common sense. He just loves his country, and London, and hates to see anyone do them down.

But the fact he has veered into politics at all is noteworthy, and in contrast to similar influencers like John “Big John” Fisher, the other man who says “bosh” while shovelling down Chinese food on our timelines. Skinner’s politicisation could be a straightforward grift in keeping with his wheeler-dealer history: in 2011 he was convicted of handling £40,000 in stolen Body Shop merchandise. But the Right might say, similarly straightforwardly, that he’s just a regular bloke whose conscience has been inflamed by the material conditions of life in modern Britain.

Both explanations probably have truth to them. More important are the conditions of posting on X in 2025. The platform’s facts of life are Right-wing, like they used to be Left-wing in its previous incarnation as Twitter. The way to get engagement is either to bait Right-wingers, like Kaur does, or to stroke their egos and validate their concerns. Viral videos of migrants behaving badly have the same function as pastel-coloured infographics on BLM-era Instagram: they set the political tone, structure the debate and let people signal, via reposting and commenting, where they stand in relation to the dominant ideology.

Skinner has probably spent a lot of time on X, and seen a lot of those videos. But his white-working-class presentation means he only needs to deliver the occasional cheeky wink — a “London has fallen” here, an England flag emoji there — to assure his audience he’s one of them. Nigel Farage has already proved, via his potency on both TikTok and I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!, that Britain’s populist Right can span across both new media and old media. Indeed, the most effective figures use each to amplify their presence on the other. It’s Skinner on Strictly this year. Next year, one of the X anon accounts might unmask for their go on the dance floor.

---

Josiah Gogarty is a writer at British GQ.

josiahgogarty

---