Even Labour’s own MPs are deserting the party’s new ‘gutter politics’ approach

More concerning, for Labour, is that so few of Keir Starmer’s frontbench colleagues have voiced any support at all

It’s divided the Labour Party needlessly (Labour)

I’ve nothing against vicious, unprincipled negative political campaigning (not least because it’s not going to suddenly stop), but if t’were done, tis best t’were done properly. This is the real cardinal sin of Labour’s now infamous attack ads.

About five Labour MPs have come out against it, and there are plenty more activists who’ve expressed their distaste, understandably enough.

More concerning, for Labour, is that so few of Keir Starmer’s frontbench colleagues have voiced any support at all. They’ve gone very quiet indeed, in fact.

Even the shadow justice secretary, Steve Reed, has only gone so far as to make a reasonable comment about the fact that some 4,000 convicted child sex offenders have dodged jail and been left “free to roam the streets” under the Tories since 2010: “These figures will horrify communities up and down this country. Victims are terrified, constantly looking over their shoulders. This is reality in Tory Britain.” Reed has not said Sunak himself thinks that’s the way it should be, because it obviously isn’t.

There’s been disarray on the front benches and a briefing war, in which the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, let it be known she didn’t know about the ad; and a counter briefing, anonymous, that she was useless and facing the chop in the next reshuffle in favour of Wes Streeting.

Lucy Powell, shadow culture secretary, remarked that it wasn’t to everyone’s taste, a masterly understatement, while Emily Thornberry tied herself up into lawyerly knots about who was running sentencing policy a decade ago – a time when Starmer was director of public prosecutions. So the whole debate ended up with Starmer being dragged into the confusion himself.

The irony, of course, is that according to other briefings Starmer also wasn’t aware of what was coming: another argument about the minutiae of criminal justice policy in the early years of the Cameron administration, and his role in it.

He had a choice. He could either sack whoever was responsible for the mess; or he could pretend it was his brilliant hard-hitting idea in the first place, and he stands by every word.

He did the latter, presumably targeting the very voters he’s seeking to detach from their usual allegiance. Thus, a series of blunders looks like a cunning, Mandelsonian, strategy.

It hasn’t served Labour well, though, this particular ad, even if it’s highlighted the Tory record on law and order, and done so for pennies, with maximum amplification on social media and the mainstream outlets.

Yet it’s divided the Labour Party needlessly, and ended up as just “noise” so far as the voters are concerned. One doubts it’s shifted many votes, and it may even have repelled Labour supporters who expect better. There were surely better things to do at Easter.

All that said, though, the fact is that negative campaigning works and it’s a fact of life. It’s one reason why the Conservatives have been so successful. They, and their allies in the press, have been up to these sordid tricks for a very long time.

What about the Jimmy Savile smear by Boris Johnson against Starmer, one that incited a mob to attack him? Ed Miliband in Alex Salmond’s pocket? The personalised attacks on Gordon Brown in 2010? Blair with “demon eyes”? Thatcher calling the unions (and by extension, their allies) in the wider Labour movement “the enemy within”?

Perhaps we ought not be surprised that the Sunak attack ad is rumoured to have been the work of a “faith column” group of former Tory officials who have turned against their party and have been in contact with Labour to help shape the election strategy. Hence the uncharacteristic viciousness.

Even Churchill, who should have known better, said in a radio broadcast in 1945 that Clement Attlee (who’d been his deputy prime minister in the war) and Labour would require “a Gestapo” to implement their socialist programme. In fact, they did so using high taxation and ration books, but no secret police.

It is an old, old tale. Next year marks the centenary of the first Labour government, led by Ramsay MacDonald. It was a minority administration, and it didn’t last very long. It was brought down, in part, by the exotic Zinoviev letter affair.

The letter was purported to have been sent by the Russian (ie Bolshevik) Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Communist International, to a British Communist politician. A “red scare” was got up, but the letter was a fabrication. It was the viral attack tweet of its time, and it made some impact.

The truth is that politics has always been debased and devalued by all its practitioners, even if the Tories, in close collaboration with their friends in the press, have been the most proficient in such dark arts.

After all, it was the saintly Labour hero Nye Bevan who called Tories “lower than vermin”, just as Angela Rayner now calls them “scum”. Nigel Farage’s “breaking point” anti-refugee poster was a low point.

So was the Brexit bus with its “£350m a week for the NHS” claim, for which Vote Leave received a rebuke from the national statisticians. Even Liberal Democrat local election leaflets with their celebrated misleading bar charts served to pull electoral politics that little bit further into disrepute.

Politics is very often a game of “stoop to conquer”. Past Labour leaders rarely stooped, but also rarely conquered.