A video of East Midlands Mayor Claire Ward welcoming chancellor Rachel Reeves to the UK Real Estate, Infrastructure and Investment forum (UKREiiF) in Leeds has been removed from TikTok after it was noticed that the song overlayed on top contained sexually explicit lyrics.
The clip, posted after the event last Wednesday (may 20), used the song ‘Nasty’ from Ariana Grande’s 2020 album ‘Positions’ over footage of the Mayor and the chancellor embracing before the Mayor is seen to lead her Labour colleague into the ‘East Midlands’ tent at the conference.
But the snippet of the audio used came from a portion of the track with particularly suggestive wording.
The song, referring to the female genitalia, says:
“I just wanna make time for ya (yeah),
“Swear it’s just right for ya,
“Like this ***** designed for ya (yeah)”
The video had garnered nearly 45,000 views at the time of its deletion, in less than a week online – far more than the other posts on the Mayor’s “mayor.claire” account, which average under 1,000.
Most commenters did not appear to notice the questionable choice of music, with many instead focusing on the politicians themselves and one remarking that the video made it look like Rachel Reeves was meeting Rachel Reeves due to the pair’s similar hair colour and green suits.
But one comment, which received 34 likes, said: “Can someone pls explain the choice of song…”
The track, which is packed full of innuendos, also contains phrases like “don’t wanna wait on it, tonight, I wanna get nasty” and “promise I’m a give it to you like you never had it, I do it so good, it’s gon’ be hard to break the habit”.
But sections are also more clean, with lyrics such as “know I would sign on the line for ya (yeah), bet I look nice on you (yeah), open my mind for ya (yeah)”.
The chancellor was visiting UKREiiF to give a speech on regeneration and devolution around the country and announced plans to give more transport powers to mayors – making it easier to do things like building tram networks.
She also announced the creation of a new “Mass Transit Taskforce” group to look into why big transport projects like tram networks are so complex and to study the work of other countries’ transport networks to make recommendations as to how they can be delivered more quickly for cities.
The Mayor and the chancellor are good friends and have been seen together in public before.
A spokesperson for the East Midlands Combined County Authority said: “We have immediately removed the video. It was genuine human error, the full extent of the lyrics hadn’t been checked during what was an exceptionally busy week. We will make sure to be more careful in future.”
By Joseph Connolly (Local Democracy Reporter)
