Past research suggests that institutions, which are descriptively more diverse are also more representative of a variety of societal sub-groups. However, most of this research has focused almost exclusively on (visible) demographic characteristics. We argue that there are compelling normative arguments for going beyond visible characteristics (e.g., gender and ethnicity) because certain shared lived experiences could help politicians ‘react more or less the way the voter would have done, on the basis of descriptive similarity’ (Mansbridge 1999: 644), especially under unprecedented circumstances or in the context of unarticulated interests. We address this question by using a novel custom-built data set, which links information on the self-professed interests and family status of each sitting representative of the UK House of Commons and the Scottish Parliament with their Twitter communications between March 2020 to May 2021. We focus, in particular, on their tweets about the Covid-19 pandemic, lockdown rules and regulations. Our preliminary findings suggest that politicians’ interests and family status impact upon which specific effects of the pandemic and lockdown rules they most emphasise in their tweets, with those having outdoor hobbies being more concerned about the stay-at-home orders than those with no such interests.