If you believe Britain’s commentariat, Labour’s new series of political ads, which make a variety of claims about Rishi Sunak, have polluted the nation’s politics. A consensus has emerged among them that they mark a ‘new low‘ in political debate, are undoubtedly ‘immoral‘ and could possibly encourage Q-Anon-like conspiracy theories. Even Labour front benchers Yvette Cooper and Lucy Powell seemed to want to distance themselves from the ads.
It is certainly true that the first of these ads was especially contentious. Asking if the reader thought adults convicted of assaulting children should go to prison, it claimed, juxtaposed next to a smiling Sunak, that the Prime Minister did not. The claim was based on a Ministry of Justice figure that showed that, since 2010, 4,500 such adults had not seen the inside of a jail. Sunak’s personal culpability for that number is problematic, especially as he wasn’t even an MP before 2015 and has never been responsible as a minister for the criminal justice system. To the many, Labour had crossed a line.
If getting attention is the measure of success, Labour’s new series of ads shows that attacking Sunak has worked
Yet if the party had crossed a line, it is a line that has been crossed many times before – and often by the Conservatives and their allies in the popular press. During the 2010 campaign Conservative posters masquerading as Labour ads appeared across the country, on which a smiling Gordon Brown called on voters to support him given he had let 80,000 criminals out of prison early.
Just a few weeks ago, the Sun blamed Starmer – or ‘Sir Softie’ as he was termed – for two assaults on women committed by a man set to be deported until at the last minute his case went to appeal. Yet Starmer had merely been one of many who signed a letter highlighting the possibly illegal nature of the proposed deportation. And who can forget the use to which the Sun put a photograph of Ed Miliband eating a bacon sandwich during the 2015 campaign as evidence of how he would make a ‘pig’s ear’ of Britain should he become prime minister?
Personalising politics is hardly new. In the Ancient World, leaders promoted their regimes through their own persons, using coinage and statues to emphasise their chosen virtues. If the means of promoting themselves have changed over the centuries, the messaging has often remained crude. In the early days of his Russian presidency, for example, Vladimir Putin was often pictured riding a horse bare chested and throwing Judo opponents on the floor to demonstrate his own masculinity and by extension the vigour of his regime.
In Britain such personalisation tends to be more subtle. But since becoming prime minister, Sunak, like John Major after replacing Margaret Thatcher in 1990, wants to persuade Britons there has been a change in regime even though the same party is in office.
Major was personally less strident and confrontational than Thatcher. But as prime minister, having dropped the poll tax, he persevered with the very same economic and social policies as his predecessor. Having ridden high in the polls during Thatcher’s last days, Labour ended up losing the 1992 election.
‘Rishi’ – as the Conservative press now call him – hopes he can perform the same trick by standing between voters and his party. So, those five pledges against which he wishes to be measured come election time are his personal pledges to voters. By emphasising his personal qualities as part of a strategy to keep his unpopular party in office Sunak has, however, made himself vulnerable to the kind of personal attacks launched by Labour.
But why personalise politics? Roman Emperors had the excuse they were trying to impress a largely illiterate population. In that case an imposing statue was worth countless words. In Britain today the situation is different but to some extent the same: while voters are better educated than ever, they are significantly disengaged from politics. Surveys suggest about one third of Britons pay little attention to politics, some 40 per cent think it hard to understand and in any case about two-thirds don’t think politicians care about them. As a result, most try to avoid thinking about politics if they can possibly help it.
How responsible our two main parties are for this situation is debatable. But confronted by a profound lack of interest and knowledge, the parties believe personalisation to be an effective way to make their case, and to destroy that of their opponents.
Certainly, if getting attention is the measure of success, Labour’s new series of ads shows that attacking Sunak has worked. And the controversy it has aroused has given the party the chance to make its case across the media that the Conservative party, irrespective of who leads it, has failed.
Rather than castigating Labour for polluting an already murky politics, perhaps we might ask why it takes such measures to win the party a hearing? Perhaps those who criticise such tactics might consider that it is only when Britons take their own politics seriously that the parties will start to treat them as adults and stop issuing such childish personal attacks.
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