Dry wit is a much under-appreciated quality in this age of high-impact sledgehammer communication. In an election full of sub-standard soundbites and slogans signifying almost nothing, there is an especially strong case to be grateful for the occasional appearance of wit.
There was the moment when Nigel Farage mocked the Plaid Cymru chap who was opposing a crackdown on foreign students bringing in dependents by telling him that if you had got a place as an overseas student at a British university it didn’t mean that you should be able to bring your mum. But the gold medal for LOLs must go to the retiring Conservative ex-minister Tim Loughton, who was asked on Sky News what he thought of the Tory campaign and replied with devastating under-statement: ‘I’ve seen better.’
To call the national service plan half-baked would be an insult to amateur bread makers
Loughton developed his point by making a comparison with the Tory landslide defeat of 1997 in which, he said, a lot of things had gone wrong before the campaign. The difference in 2024 he suggested was that right now there was ‘a heck of a lot going wrong during the campaign’.
There have been so many setbacks and disasters that it is difficult to give all of them a namecheck. But the launch choreography featuring Sunak getting soaked by a torrential downpour certainly set a slapstick tone rather than a statesmanlike one. Then came the D-Day fiasco, followed by the insider betting scandal.
Both of those appear to have achieved significant ‘cut through’ on the doorsteps, further sapping the prospects of those sporting blue rosettes of getting re-elected. The former implied a lack of profound patriotism and instincts having gone awry at the very top of the party about the proper way of doing things. The latter suggested greed and the return with a vengeance of the old curse of ‘Tory sleaze’. Sunak’s dithering and tardiness over the withdrawal of Tory candidates caught up in the scandal also allowed opposition parties to further promote the idea of him being too weak to lead.
Yet these were merely the most memorable moments of farce to have tripped up Team Rishi. Even when he and David Cameron failed to competently feed a flock of sheep in Devon, they clearly still fell a long way short of the antics of Lib Dem leader Ed Davey who has campaigned throughout as a nightmare cross between Buster Keaton and Buster Bloodvessel.
More profound failings by far concern serious deficiencies in the basic political proposition Sunak has sought to make to the country. Policy-wise, the pensioner ‘triple lock plus’ probably succeeded in binding in at least some of the one remaining core Tory demographic: the over 70s. But to call the national service plan half-baked would be an insult to amateur bread makers. And then the manifesto itself was notably devoid of eye-catching retail offers: the dullest suicide note in history. A further proposed shaving of national insurance rates, for example, made fewer waves than did Reform UK’s plan to raise the personal allowance to £20,000.
Reform’s campaign surge, on the back of Nigel Farage’s U-turn about not standing, was a major disaster for the Tories. We wait to see how much of the insurgent party’s progress was lost thanks to its leader’s remarks about Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine. Not enough to squash the Reform vote sufficiently to save many Tory incumbents on the cusp of defeat would be my guess.
Yet it was on the core business of attacking Keir Starmer and Labour that the very biggest Tory campaign failings occurred. The idea of £2,000 of tax rises per household over a parliamentary term under Labour was widely debunked and yet also insufficiently scary to gain traction given the escalating tax burden the Conservatives have themselves arranged.
Worse still, in the end Sunak and his lieutenants alighted on Labour’s perceived slackness about controlling both legal and illegal immigration as potentially their most potent weapon. This should have been obvious from the day Sunak became prime minister. Yet in order to exploit it, Sunak would have needed a record on both metrics that he could have sold to the migration-sceptic masses. Instead, official statistics landed early in the campaign about the enormous, unprecedented and pledge-shredding scale of legal immigration over which Boris Johnson and he had presided, to be followed soon afterwards by the 50,000th illegal arrival being escorted into Dover on Sunak’s watch.
He was reduced to claiming, incredibly, that those Rwanda flights will finally get underway days after the 4 July polling day that he decided to set when he could instead have waited for firm evidence of success. He didn’t stop the boats but almost certainly he has stopped a lot of the votes.
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