The best weapon the Tories have to throw at Labour? A pair of Starmer-branded flip flops

The Conservative Party chairman Greg Hands tweets ‘flip flop’ pictures of them roughly every 30 seconds. If this is the best example they’ve got of ‘attack dog politics’, the Tories are really in trouble, writes Tom Peck

Rishi Sunak has given up, and frankly who can blame him? (AFP via Getty Images)

Nobody bothered to turn up to Prime Minister’s Questions. The benches were half empty. The order paper, which is to say the number of people slated to ask questions, wasn’t even full. And it’s not immediately clear if Rishi Sunak was there, either.

The thing about Prime Minister’s Questions is that you do have to have some answers – and he simply hasn’t got any, on any subject. To take just one: can it really be half a year since he promised to halve inflation by the end of the year, and was roundly mocked for promising to do something that was widely forecast to happen anyway?

Well, it’s not widely forecast anymore. It’s not going to happen. He was mocked six months ago for the complete lack of ambition in his “five pledges” – the others included bringing national debt down and “stopping the boats” – and despite the lack of ambition or, more accurately, the underestimation of the challenge, he’s nevertheless failing on all of them anyway.

He has, Keir Starmer told him, “given up”. He was speaking, specifically, about his target of building 300,000 homes a year. He hasn’t officially given up on the target, but members of his party are currently putting leaflets through doors in Boris Johnson’s constituency, attacking the Lib Dems for planning to build, you’ve guessed it, 300,000 homes a year. “Protect the green belt”, they say. They would look less mad if they said: “Mine the asteroid belt”.

Sunak barely looked up. He is a man not used to things not going his way. “You can tell from his body language he has given up,” Starmer told him. He barely looked up for that either, just like his MPs had barely turned up.

The problem, as Starmer patiently explained to him, is that he doesn’t appear to be on the side of people who want to buy a home, or of people who already own one. For one, he is, presumably accidentally (which is just as damning) attacking his own housebuilding target. For the other, there is a widespread and entirely correct view all around the country, that the mortgage crisis has been, to a great extent, needlessly inflicted on the country by a party that can’t control itself – and as a consequence is on its third leader in under a year.

It hardly needs to be pointed out that homeowners and would-be homeowners constitute every voter in the country. If you’ve pissed off both, then there’s not much left.

There’s probably still a year and a half or so until the election. It is going to be painful, soul-sapping viewing. We are led to believe that the US pollster Frank Luntz has privately told the Tories that the only hope they’ve got is a negative campaign, that no one will possibly believe any positive message they have to sell. That all they can do is say that Labour will be worse.

But all they seem to have on that front is a pair of Starmer-branded “flip flops”. Greg Hands, the Conservative Party chairman, tweets pictures of them roughly every 30 seconds. It is arguably to his credit as a human being that he is so laughably bad at attack dog politics.

To “flip flop” in politics is to constantly change your mind. If they think they can sink the opposition through that, come election time, it will not be forgotten by voters that they’ve had three different governments since they were last asked, and one of them lasted six weeks but cost them several hundred quid a month, then the surprise they are in for will be even nastier than they imagine.

If Sunak looks like he’s given up, it’s probably because he’s not stupid. There’s not a lot else he can do.