Inside Politics: Boris Johnson ignores pleas not to politicise London Bridge tragedy

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Monday 02 December 2019 09:03 GMT

General Election 2019: Opinion polls over the last seven days

There are only 10 days until we go to the polls

Everything is political, so they say – everything from the trivial to the tragic. Brazil’s far-right populist leader Jair Bolsonaro has pulled Leonardo DiCaprio into his revolting blame games – claiming the actor gave money to NGOs to set the Amazon rainforest on fire. But wildly obnoxious trash talk is no longer reserved for the politics of other countries. We’re pretty obnoxious ourselves. It took no time at all for the London Bridge attack to get dragged into our election campaign, with the Tories and Labour blaming each other for the attacker’s early release. Get ready for a whole lot more vulgar antics: Donald Trump hits Britain this week – and will no doubt manage to drag our low-down and dirty campaign further into the muck. I’m Adam Forrest, and welcome to The Independent’s daily Inside Politics briefing.

Inside the bubble

Our deputy political editor Rob Merrick on what to look out for on the campaign trail today:

Labour will make an eye-catching pledge to save the average rail commuter more than £1,000 a year, by slashing regulated fares in England by one third from January. The Lib Dems, meanwhile, will be highlighting their plans to invest £11bn into better mental health services, more than either of the other two major parties they say. The Conservatives, meanwhile, will be claiming that Brexit is a “once in a generation opportunity to strengthen the security of the UK border” – no doubt conveniently ignoring the experts’ view that leaving Europol and the European Arrest Warrant will make Britons less safe.

Daily briefing

BIG NIGHT OUT: Last night’s ITV debate was supposed to see seven party representatives debating the future of the UK, but it descended into a slanging match about the US president. Challenged to defend his good buddy Trump’s remarks about grabbing women by the you-know-what, Nigel Farage said: “Men say dreadful things sometimes. If all of us were called out for what we did on a night out after a drink…” he said, before Jo Swinson countered: “Is that what you do on a night out after a drink?” While the Tories’ chosen mouthpiece Rishi Sunak couldn’t give a direct answer on the possibility a no-deal Brexit, Labour’s appointed prolocutor Richard Burgon wouldn’t say how he would vote in a second referendum. No-one will ever mistake Burgon for a genius, but he had a reasonably good night – accusing the PM of going “straight from a tragedy to reheating pre-packaged political lines” over the London Bridge attack.

SOUR TASTE: Swinson was relatively kind to the prime minister, accusing him of being “pretty distasteful” for politicising Friday’s terror attack. Johnson doesn’t do tasteful, and he will continue to make it an election issue this week. Having blamed a “leftie” Labour government for the system of automatic early release, the Tories are today making a series of knee-jerk “get tough” pledges: including making it more difficult for people with criminal convictions to enter the UK from EU countries. Johnson’s own 16-tweet thread attempting to spin complex legal history – addressing the Tory-led government’s scrapping of indeterminate sentences in 2012 – was condemned by anonymous legal writer the Secret Barrister as “weapons grade s***housery”. The father of victim Jack Merritt, meanwhile, has tweeted about a government “blitz” on jihadists featured on some of this morning’s front pages. “Don’t use my son’s death … to promote your vile propaganda.”

NOT-SO-CUNNING STUNT: The Tory party’s artless social media operation has been banned from posting a misleading video that splices clips of BBC presenters talking about Brexit delays. Facebook has decided to pull it because it infringed the Beeb’s intellectual property rights. Huw Edwards, one of the presenters featured in the ad, tweeted: “Good. My thoughts on this kind of stunt are unprintable.” The Tories are far from done when it comes to Facebook, however. The party is reportedly ready to spend, spend, spend on the platform as we head into the election’s home stretch in a replication of the Leave campaign’s “Waterloo” strategy. It was named after Wellington’s Napoleon-defeating tactics, sending his men out at the last moment. Over past month Labour has spent three times as much as the Tories on Facebook ads. But CCHQ is about to make sure Johnson’s messages get spaffed all over your Facebook wall.

STUCK ON REPEAT: The Conservatives will claim they were expecting the polls to tighten. But the weekend’s BMG Research poll for The Independent – showing a five point bounce for Labour and the Conservatives down two points – will have caused the tightening of quite a few sphincter muscles. It was borne out by diminished leads in surveys by YouGov, Opinium and Survation. Everyone in the Tory party, still out front but now close to hung parliament in most of the polls, is well aware of the uncomfortable echo of 2017. “The polls are narrowing, like they did two years ago,” said a Tory official. “We’ve had a terror attack at London Bridge, like we did two years ago. It’s turning into a two-horse race again. People have seen this movie before and they don’t like the ending.”

SICK BUCKET: Labour will be buoyed by the poll bounce, and party activists have a bound-to-be-popular new policy to shout about today – a 33 per cent cut in regulated rail fares and free travel for under-16s. But there has been disquiet about the tactical shift towards clinging onto Leave voters in the north. “Marginals like Hastings and Putney are getting absolutely no resources where Remain messaging would work,” one aide told The Sunday Times. Another complained that Jeremy Corbyn’s name was “going down like a bucket of sick” on the doorstep. He’s not the only party leader who appears to be attracting revulsion. A Lib Dem insider said: “People just hate [Jo Swinson]. I have been in a pub when she has been on the telly and people have started shouting at the screen.”

On the record

“I find him such a strange, strange character. Boris Johnson just seems to care about himself – No 1 priority, No 2 priority, No 3 priority.”

Jo Swinson claims to be genuinely puzzled by the prime minister’s self-interest.

From the Twitterati

“Can you both agree to something and not agree to something? Does the Andrew Neil interview now have more power as a metaphorical concept than as 30 minutes of television?”

The Guardian’s Jim Waterson is confused by the PM’s willingness to be interviewed by “any interviewer named Andrew from the BBC”...

“If you’re too scared to do a 30 minute @afneil interview on the telly, then you probably shouldn’t run to be Prime Minister of this country. Full stop.”

...while the normally-supportive Julia Hartley-Brewer is not impressed.