Inside the algoreform: how Jack Anderton became Nigel Farage’s Gen Z whisperer

In the time I spend getting to know Jack Anderton, I never get a clear sense of what his job is.

In political circles, he’s known as the 25-year-old making Nigel Farage’s Reform UK legible to his generation via social media. To The Standard, he’s ​“Farage’s Gen‑Z TikTok guru”. When I first came across him in June, his website described him as ​“simply a concerned citizen”. And when we meet, he tells me the most minimal version of the truth: that he’s a freelance consultant to Reform.

One thing’s clear: since 2023, he has shaped how Farage – whose own school days are becoming a media spectacle – is seen by today’s teenagers. He is positioning the 61-year-old as the straight-talking, cigs-and-pints aficionado uncle of a generation rapidly approaching voting age.

And that generation seems to be buying it: at the time of writing, Farage has 1.3 million followers on TikTok (neither Keir Starmer nor Kemi Badenoch have accounts) and Reform has more followers – over 450,000 – than Labour and the Conservatives put together. Anderton’s role in building the party and its leader’s platform online has been undeniable, speaking to people of his age and younger – often much younger – in an online vernacular that they understand.

Reform might be his day job, but Anderton also has a growing public platform of his own: a regular writing gig for the Daily Mail, 13,000 followers on TikTok, 27,000 on X and a blog where he writes about his own political views, all of which have already seen him get in trouble with the media. Here, and at many points during our interviews, he expresses views far more radical than the Reform party line, such as predicting broad public support for the death penalty. (Farage recently said that, while he is opposed to this, ​“there’s a younger generation coming through who seem to increasingly support [it]”.)

Naturally, claims like these back him into a career corner. The content of blogs like Anderton’s is of the kind that would leave most people socially alienated in their workplaces, to say the least.

“I definitely see myself in politics for life,” he tells me, ​“I think I’ve committed to it.”

As much as he telegraphs his views online, Anderton turns out to be quite difficult to get in touch with. I ask Reform’s press team about him, and, within minutes, receive a series of one-word answers that suggest he has little to no significance within the party. This runs counter to much of what Anderton himself tells me.

He is, in many ways, a much more private person than the politicians he works for, officially or not. He remains a mysterious figure in the little press that he does receive, rarely giving quotes to journalists.

So when I get his phone number from a friend after some sleuthing, I’m surprised he agrees to talk to me. I suggest meeting at a Waterstones cafe in central London. He counters with an upscale Italian restaurant in Belgravia, where we spend the best part of £20 on two glasses of apple juice. I ask whether he receives many requests from the media.

“I’d probably get more if I were a little more open,” he admits. We end up meeting at the same place three times over the course of last summer.

Over this time, I learn a lot about the Merseyside-raised, state-educated Anderton – about his dress sense, his views and the dark conception of the country that he tells me he shares with many. Most people, he says, ​“have a vision of Britain that is dark and gloomy and broken and lawless.” But much remains a mystery.

One thing is clear, though: he appears to have Farage’s ear.

TikTok is something of an anathema in parliamentary circles. In 2023, ministers were banned from using the app on their work phones because of security concerns. Its Chinese ownership worries MPs, most of whom don’t have accounts. And in any case, most of its users are below voting age. Anderton takes a fundamentally different view: he sees it as a political training ground for a generation that will be able to cast ballots sooner than most people imagine.

“Thirteen-year-olds today will be eligible to vote in 2029. They’re following Nigel on TikTok,” he says. ​“They’re watching a lot of this right-wing content; they’re watching me and watching other people […] They have a completely different way of observing information and viewing the world.”

“They’re not reading The Telegraph,” I suggest.

“They’re not reading any newspapers,” he counters. His own reading habits are similarly skewed away from traditional media: ​“Twitter. And Substacks. There’s no real mainstream publication that I read regularly.” During one of our meetings, he tries to find a news article to show me. After a few seconds on his phone, he gives up: ​“I don’t want to sign into The Guardian.”

Algorithmic radicalisation, a truly 21^st-century political phenomenon, is the mechanism by which scrollers are fed incrementally more extreme content by platforms. Arguably, it goes some way to explain the online rise of the populist right, making Anderton’s job easier. But he thinks that it’s more its principal subject – Farage – that gives his Reform content traction.

“The reason why he’s done so well on social media is because of him: his personality, his sense of fun, his policies, what he says, how he says it,” Anderton tells me. The way he explains it, he’s just the one behind the camera. ​“Don’t get me wrong, Nigel did not need me to be successful in social media.”

But it’s not just social media where Anderton lends his perspective. Though he appears cagey about his significance within the party, he admits that his role is multifarious: ​“I quite enjoy getting involved in lots of things,” he says, ​“so there’s not much I’ll say is not my job.” At one point I ask how his absence might be felt within Reform if he left. ​“I probably wouldn’t comment on that,” he replies. At another, I ask if he can see himself leading the party one day. He doesn’t hesitate: ​“I think that’s a ridiculous question.”

The picture of Anderton painted for me by Reform’s press office is even more minimal: Does he have any input into broader campaign messaging? ​“No”. A formal title within the party? ​“No”. Does he attend internal meetings? ​“No”.

Anderton isn’t one for the bluff and bluster usually associated with the British right. He’s the antithesis of a popular image of Reform: pint-drinking, pink-faced, heavy-footed and loud-voiced. He doesn’t drink or smoke, and never has.

“If you’re a drinker and a smoker then you’re probably at an advantage,” he says of the party. ​“I’m probably at a disadvantage.”

He’s tall and slight, clean-shaven with clear, pale skin. One person in Westminster described him as the ​“evil Troye Sivan”. He’s incredibly graceful, seeming to float rather than walk – at a press conference, I see him haunt the room, appearing next to colleagues silently and speaking to them while continuing to look straight ahead.

Born in 2000 and raised just outside Liverpool, any accent he might have had has now all but disappeared – though its guttural consonants are just audible when he says ​“TikTok”. He attended a Catholic state school in his town and, although he didn’t inherit his views from his parents, who he describes as ​“not of my political persuasion,” they supported his growing interest and debated him across the dinner table. At sixth-form, he built his own computers and was a member of the debating society. ​“I don’t think we [ever] won,” he says.

At 18, he moved to London to study Religion, Politics and Society at King’s College. According to classmates, he spent a lot of time with the conservative influencer Emily Hewertson. (This year, she was the first housemate to be evicted on Big Brother.) After university, Anderton took a year off, ​“just sort of reading and deciding what I really wanted to do”. He knew that it was politics and he was a fan of Farage. In August 2023, a job looking after Farage’s social media came up and Anderton applied. He’s been at his side since.

He dresses almost all in black, usually in the same style of slim-fitting long sleeved T‑shirt, which he buys from a shop called Entire Studios in Hong Kong. ​“In my work,” he says, ​“I quite like to break things and disrupt things, and I think the style is a big part of that.” If Farage’s parliamentary uniform – ill-fitting blue suits with sheeny ties – is that of a politician from the fringes attempting to find his way within the system, Anderton’s is of a futuristic technocrat whose power exists outside of traditional public office.

Some people in the Reform office refer to Anderton as ​“The Matrix”. ​“There was a party that I went to a few weeks ago and the dress code was ​‘summer chic’,” he says with a laugh during one of our meetings. ​“I just wore my usual all black. It suits me and I feel comfortable in it.”

On his TikTok page, Anderton speaks about a familiar gamut of Reform-adjacent topics: ​“What is causing unhinged levels of extremism on British campuses?” (foreign students). ​“Why is your rent so high?” (immigration). ​“Sex crime has majorly risen since 2014 in Britain. Why?” (asylum seekers). But his politics don’t always echo the party’s rhetoric. As one political commentator put it to me, Anderton’s views ​“seem much more radical and system-destruction-oriented than most of the other people around Farage”. Dominic Cummings comparisons write themselves – both are unelected advisors, prolific in sharing their own opinions online. But as Reform grows serious about its prospects, with Farage reportedly telling donors that he expects to make a deal with the Tories, Anderton may find that, like Cummings, his outspokenness is more of a hindrance than a help.

In his blog, Anderton writes about some unexpected subjects, arguing that Britain building the world’s first space elevator ​“would solidify itself as the most ambitious and advanced nation on earth,” and mocking people who join the Foreign Office ​“to promote HOOMAN RITES, FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY”. (He thinks they should do so to protect national interests: ​“Britain is not a charity.”) The idea that people are too concerned with issues that don’t impact them – from foreign aid to genocides playing out in other countries – is a cornerstone of his writing and thinking.

Recently, The Guardian published a report covering the more extreme corners of his blog, from questioning the UK’s support of Ukraine to admiring El Salvador’s penal system. The headline was ​“Farage adviser said UK would be better off if it had not fought in WW2”. I was rattled when I saw it: would that sudden mainstream media coverage mean Anderton would duck for cover and stop speaking with me? Would he be fired? Neither happened. ​“Slow news day, obviously,” he says with a shrug when we next meet. ​“Was it particularly pleasant? No. Did it upset my family? Yes. But it’s just something that you have to deal with.”

Reform’s response to the article was simple: Anderton isn’t employed by the party. His freelance status serves as a kind of invisibility cloak, allowing him to operate quietly and without an official role or set of responsibilities. When I ask whether he runs the party’s TikTok strategy, I receive a monolithic ​“No”. Similarly, Reform recently told The Guardian that Nick Candy – a member of Farage’s inner circle who recently traveled to the US with him to meet Elon Musk – ​“has no operational involvement in the party beyond helping raise funds.” The relationship between claims like these and the truth of Reform’s internal power structures remains unclear.

In mid-July, I attend a Reform press conference in a grand hall on the second floor of a Westminster hotel. It’s dark when I enter, and faux-distressed ​“case files” are displayed on large screens. Each one contains someone’s photograph, name, details of a crime that they committed and their – apparently too short – sentence. Farage speaks at a lectern with the words ​“BRITAIN IS LAWLESS” printed on the front. Anderton admits he was heavily involved in this campaign. ​“I feel like I can offer, and do offer the party, my personal perspective, [and] that is perhaps a little bit darker,” he tells me afterwards.

Despite mixed opinions on its accuracy, even from right-wing pundits like former Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, this so-called rampant lawlessness is an important part of Anderton’s understanding of today’s Britain.

“If you speak to most people, they do have a vision of Britain that is dark and gloomy and broken and lawless. And ultimately, Reform is representing them,” he contends. He himself was mugged in Bermondsey, South London, at 18. As he sees it, the party’s crime focus was necessarily ​“quite a dark campaign. It was talking about serious problems: lawlessness and justice. And my eye for ideas and my viewpoint, I think, lend themselves to that. You can see that in a lot of my own content, that’s what I talk about and the angle that I come from. That’s where I thrive.”

He says the darkness is a good counterpoint to Farage, who is ​“very good at doing the fun and light-hearted stuff”. But the reality is that – by coincidence or not – Farage’s own messaging sounds increasingly like Anderton’s. Speaking recently on far-right violence in Epping, he was fatalistic: ​“I don’t think anybody in London even understands how close we are to civil disobedience on a vast scale in this country.” Predictions like this from political leaders are rare, to say the least.

Dark as it is, Anderton has a knack for presenting his vision of the country as though it’s a self-evident fact. ​“We’re trying to tell a narrative of what we think the country looks like and is feeling and experiencing,” he insists. He’d rather come across as, in his website’s words, ​“simply a concerned citizen” than a radical ideologue. Undeniably, some of the desires that he ascribes to his imagined majority are dystopian: ​“If crime continues to get worse and nothing’s done about it,” he says, ​“then I think you will start to see the debate move towards people, as in the general public, backing the death penalty.”

The last time Anderton and I meet is a few days after Charlie Kirk’s murder. He met Kirk, who was known for his viral debate clips, earlier this year at a Cambridge Union event. In videos from the evening, Anderton is visible behind Kirk’s various opponents. Wearing a black nylon gilet, he looks ahead impassively. There are obvious parallels between the two men: young, internet-savvy right-wing figures building online platforms aimed at pulling their once-fringe points of view into mainstream debates. In an article for the Daily Mail published the morning of our meeting, Anderton wonders whether, in the wake of Kirk’s death, his generation will abandon the spirit of debate and turn towards ​“something darker and altogether more ruthless”.

I point out their similarities. ​“He’s far more successful than me,” Anderton says with a laugh, adding that, ​“I’m a very miniscule figure.” Nonetheless, he goes on to tell me that he’s starting a university tour of his own and that after Kirk’s death, he’s looking into security options.

Titled with – depending on your political leanings – sunny optimism or agitatory rabble-rousing, his A New Dawn tour kicked off last month. Its recent stop in Edinburgh was cancelled after three venues pulled out of hosting him following protests from Stand Up to Racism. In a TikTok explaining as much (“these people are deeply, deeply evil,” he says), there’s a satisfied glint in his eye.

It’s Anderton’s serial downplaying that leaves the biggest impression on me. Some of it might be genuine humility, but I’m sure that it’s also strategic. For the extent of his influence within Reform to remain largely unknown is no bad thing for him. At less than half of Farage’s age, he could have a long political career ahead of him.

What’s more, he’s good at stopping short of giving me a good headline. He’s very measured, I suggest. ​“I’d like to think so,” Anderton says. ​“We’ll see how the story turns out.”