Break out the comedy air quotes, because Tony Lee, the Conservative party’s director of campaigning, has taken a “leave of absence”. A development to which one’s immediate response is: wait, this Conservative campaign has a director??? Does he work in the snuff genre? If not, this is surely the Heaven’s Gate of general election campaigns – and you have to remember that fabled cinematic flop collapsed not simply an entire genre (the western), nor simply an entire legacy movie studio (United Artists), but the entire promise-filled era of film-making known as the New Hollywood.
Righto: metaphors. In the weeks leading up to Rishi Sunak’s general election announcement, you would think the one thing the party who’d been in charge for the past 14 years wasn’t short of was metaphors. Britain was now a country whose own excrement was literally lapping at its shores.
