The Conservative Party’s distracted, out-of-touch election campaign is failing already

Editorial: It is sometimes said that nations get the politicians they deserve. If so, Britain must be receiving a visit from some unusually cruel spirit of karma

Wednesday 06 November 2019 22:14 GMT
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Boris Johnson arrives at Buckingham Palace to inform Queen of General Election

The Conservative election campaign of 2019 deserves to go down in history if only for the fact that it is the first that had to be relaunched before it was actually launched. It takes a peculiar talent for misadventure to engineer such a political outcome, even in these confused times.

For anyone under the misapprehension that the Cummings-Johnson Conservative Party is some kind of ruthlessly efficient machine pumping out exciting ideas, recent events should serve as a sobering corrective.

The Tories, in other words, are perfectly capable of inflicting more damage upon themselves than the official opposition. It has sometimes been said that Boris Johnson is his own worst enemy; it turns out that many of his colleagues are equally self-lethal.

Who, for example, in the world of political fiction could have penned a storyline where a cabinet minister is forced to resign on the very morning of the prime minister’s big moment in front of the cameras in Downing Street?

The timing is instructive. For anyone, let alone someone at the top table, to resign from this shameless government invites some speculation about what they must have done to justify such an act. Alun Cairns, the outgoing Welsh secretary, stated that he “will cooperate in full with the investigation under the ministerial code which will now take place” and that he is confident he will be cleared of any “breach or wrongdoing”.

The allegations, which centre on the conduct of one of his staff during rape trial, and the extent of Mr Cairns’ knowledge of it, could scarcely be more damaging for a party already with a severe image problem among female voters.

Although not (yet) tendering their resignations, the leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and the Conservative Party chair, James Cleverly, have proven themselves outstanding gaffe-meisters. Mr Rees-Mogg’s appalling comments about the Grenfell disaster are well known, and the attempt by his fellow European Research Group member Andrew Bridgen to justify them on the grounds that Mr Rees-Mogg is very well educated only served to undermine the Commons leader’s slightly awkward attempt at an apology. Mr Rees-Mogg will find himself spending more time in his lovely orchard in Somerset than the television studios from now on.

Not to be outdone, Mr Cleverly tried to justify his party deliberately doctoring a video of the shadow Brexit secretary, Sir Keir Starmer, as some sort of jolly jape. He was also “empty chaired” by Sky News’s Kay Burley. Ms Burley is proving herself a more intimidating host and assassin of political careers than most of her counterparts, so much so that Mr Cleverly failed to “man up”, as Mr Johnson might say, and attend the scheduled interview with her. Michael Gove let slip, perhaps deliberately, that a no-deal Brexit remains an option at the end of 2020; and every Conservative spokesperson looks and sounds shifty when challenged on the suppression of a report into Russian interference in the 2016 referendum.

The impression is of a gang of men who think themselves far smarter than they actually are, who are utterly out of touch with the electors they seek to fool, and who have a great deal to hide.

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It is not a pretty sight, and makes the 2017 Conservative campaign – run so shakily by Theresa May and her aides – look like a positively Mandelsonian master class in political communications.

It may yet get worse, and probably will. Someone, somewhere, will inevitably leak the report on Russian interference in our political life, which could be a deeply embarrassing affair for those at the top of the Leave campaign of 2016, namely Mr Johnson and Mr Gove.

And yet the concern is that the opposition parties remain too weak themselves to take much advantage of these gaffes, missteps and occasional unintentional glimpses of truth.

By the same token, this distracted and jaded Conservative machine seems content to parrot a few over-familiar lines about getting Brexit done, and how Labour cannot be trusted on the economy or the union – but without a huge impression of conviction or much detail. The prime minister has fallen back on some dreadful old journalistic instincts that kicked in a little too readily. He attacked Mr Corbyn as being the heir of Stalin. His allusions to the assaults on the kulaks in the 1920s and 1930s are offensive, even at this distance from those terrible events. In trying to compare Mr Corbyn’s proposals to tax the super-rich with the extermination of a class of wealthy peasants in the early years of the Soviet Union, Mr Johnson just looks like a clown who should stick to the varsity debating society circuit.

It is sometimes said that nations get the politicians they deserve. If so, then the British must be receiving a visit from some unusually cruel spirit of karma as we enter the very early stages of what may prove to be the most dispiriting election of modern times. At any rate, it’s not a strong start for the Conservatives.

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