Chaos, drama, sleaze and scandal – it sounds like the background to a prestige TV show, but it could also describe 14 years of Conservative government.
It’s this overlap that Labour is riffing on as the party releases trailers for Chaos & Decline, a spoof five-episode series stitching together broadcast clips of low moments under Conservative rule that pokes fun at Tory MPs while telling the story of the damage wreaked on UK society and the economy under the party’s five prime ministers.
A new season trailer video will air each day on a fake streaming platform, Conflix.uk, starting from Monday at 7am. The site states: “After 14 years, Chaos & Decline is coming to an end. If you vote for it to.”
Jonathan Ashworth, Labour’s shadow paymaster general, said: “The Tory chaos over the last 14 years has been like a tragic soap opera where every episode brings more psychodrama, scandals and broken promises. There is a real cost to this, and it’s paid by the British people every day.
“At every opportunity these five prime ministers put Conservative internal politics first and country second. Now they’re asking for another five years on the air with a prime minister who is a product of this exact chaos and who is willing to repeat the Truss-style economic catastrophe with his £46bn threat to the state pension.
“After 14 long years of Tory chaos, the country needs change. With Keir Starmer, Labour has been put back into the service of working people and we are ready to turn the page and finally give Britain its future back.”
The first season trailer is set against a backdrop of a rose garden, with David Cameron pledging to deliver “strong, stable, determined leadership”. It will then show how this led to the decimation of public services, from police officers taken off the streets to A&E and cancer waiting time targets missed. The episode will culminate in Cameron getting into hot water for using his contacts for a lobbying company that paid him millions.
The second trailer looks at Theresa May’s rule, including her “hapless attempts at controlling her own party”. It will explore how this distraction led to the NHS winter crisis becoming a permanent feature of the health service and to the eruption of the Windrush scandal.
The third season is characterised by sleaze and scandal during the Covid pandemic. “When the whole country was making sacrifices, Boris Johnson acted as if he was above the rules. And while he was hosting parties in Downing Street during lockdown, his government was spending millions on overpriced gloves and masks from their Tory mates which were completely unusable,” Labour says.
This is followed by “a short and devastating affair” in the fourth season, as Liz Truss’s premiership ends 49 days after beginning, after she “crashed the economy and set mortgage rates soaring”.
The fifth and, Labour suggests, “hopefully final season” of this chaotic drama examines Rishi Sunak, who is “as out of touch as he is weak”. It looks at his “£46bn unfunded spending plan” and warns that it could be “even more dangerous than Liz Truss’s mini-budget”.
