Robert Jenrick, once immigration minister and still, just, MP for Newark, said on Sunday that the Tories lost not because ‘they had this slogan or that slogan… but because they failed to deliver’.
Yes, absolutely, they failed to deliver, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that the slogans were diabolical too. In fact it was because of how awful the Tory slogans were, and the tenor of their whole social media campaign, that I couldn’t in the end bring myself to vote Conservative, though I have no other natural political home.
Messages from Conservative HQ, sent as if from different senior Tories, all had the same crazed voice
When the election was announced, I somehow inadvertently signed up to receive messages from Conservative HQ. For the most part these took the form of emails sent as if from different senior Tories, though all in the same crazed voice.
It’s a visual world. No one reads much any more, but that makes the few words that we do absorb – slogans, captions, subject fields – all the more important. They create a voice, and a voice creates a relationship.
The Conservatives could have adopted any voice. The reassuring tone of a senior consultant, say, or the bright, faux–casual tone of a PR even: ‘Hi Mary, just reaching out to check that you received my last email…’ But the one they went for, in the crucial weeks before the election, was the voice of Thames Water just before they pass your unpaid bill on to the bailiffs.
‘Final warning!’ read my emails from Rishi Sunak: ‘Mary. 48 hours. That’s all you have left. TIME IS RUNNING OUT.’ From Conservative HQ: ‘Did you miss this URGENT WARNING from the Prime Minister? There is still time to ACT.’ The image below the text here was of a digital clock display: 00:00:00. Not much time to ACT left there. Another had a big red stamp, FINAL NOTICE. I wonder if any Conservative pensioners died of fright.
As the campaign heated up, so the remnants of sanity left it. Jeremy Hunt took to sending me messages that looked like old-fashioned kidnap ransom notes compiled from cut-up newspapers. There were bits in sudden red, random words underlined in black, weird blocks of black text on a yellow background. None of the sentences were complete and few made any sense. ‘Don’t let them. No plan. Back to Square One. AND IT GETS WORSE.’ Jeremy?
In June, I had an email from James Cleverly with a subject field I heard clearly in the voice of Hannibal Lecter: ‘Tick-tock, Mary. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock tick-tock.’
The serial killer energy was eccentric, but the actual substance of the campaign, its drive and focus, was round the twist. The stated intention of every message I received and every video I watched on every social media platform was to PREVENT A LABOUR SUPER-MAJORITY, MARY. But after a final mad, threatening crescendo, what I was urged to do every time was not to vote but to donate. ‘CHIP IN, MARY.’
‘It’s disturbing,’ wrote Rishi to me. ‘But the good news is that it hasn’t happened yet. So join the Conservative party today to make sure it never does. Chip in any amount!’
Was I to prevent a Labour super-majority by donating a fiver to Tory HQ a few days before the election? I’ve read that the party is skint, and that the pledges made to them before the campaign failed to materialise, but this was on the eve of polling day. Inside CCHQ, they began their morning by listening to ‘A Little Less Conversation’. Next time they might read their own literature instead.
Was this really the brainchild of the comms guru Isaac Levido? Was anyone in Conservative HQ paying attention? I’ve heard it said that Levido lost heart and lost interest and is now keen for people to know that he wasn’t remotely responsible for the campaign. I’ve read that while we were all being urged to chip in, Tory staffers had abandoned their posts and were lying about sunning their pasty faces in St James’s Park, or spending their days scanning LinkedIn for jobs.
So perhaps no one properly thought it through – perhaps it just emerged in a thoughtless, unguided way. But any which way it was revealing, because it made it so very clear what Tory HQ thinks of its own supporters and the electorate.
As the Euros began, the campaign adopted a football theme. We were treated to a little picture of a pitch with two teams playing, 11 red players to only four blue ones. ‘Don’t let this be the state of play on 5 July! Keep going to the final whistle, Mary.’
You could almost hear the chat in the comms room: ‘Yeah, final whistle, get it? They’ll like that, those Red Wall Tories. And those racist footie thugs who might vote Reform, they’ll understand that.’
I wanted to yell at them: but that’s not even how you play football! Why 11 red players to four blue ones? You don’t win by taking players off. It’s not flaming chess. Did they think the meatheads wouldn’t notice?
In the ‘football week’ campaign film that ran on social media, a blokey voice-over says: ‘Polls are showing that we’re headed for a Labour super-majority that will change this country in a way that many simply haven’t bargained for. Parliament will become the political equivalent of Barcelona going up against a Sunday league side.’ Oh right! Now I get it. ‘So consider a contribution to the party. CHIP IN. Yours sincerely, Rishi.’
As I thought about who to vote for on election day, those emails kept coming back to me. Could I vote for a party that thinks its own voters are morons, one that takes no responsibility for the predicament they’re in? The message was loud and clear: if you let in Labour, it’ll only be yourselves that you have to blame. Nothing to do with a collapsing NHS or the laughable charade of the Rwanda policy. It’ll be because you missed the FINAL WARNING.
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