The general election campaign is nearly finished at last, and we trust you’ve enjoyed the ride. Soon it’ll be all over bar the counting – but for now, who and what were the real high and low points of the past six weeks?
On the up
Camera doorbells
Knock, Knock. Who’s there? Theresa May. Theresa May who? Ba-doom tish, etc.
No, really, it’s Theresa May, and could I give you a leaflet?
Be honest, who had cold-calling former prime ministers going viral on their election bingo card? Unexpected or not, both May (in Perth and Kinross-shire) and David Cameron (in Hamble Valley, Hampshire) have been captured on video doorbells leaving messages for homeowners who were either not home or crouching behind the sofa with the TV hastily on mute.
Creating new former Conservative prime ministers, to be fair, is one of Britain’s last great manufacturing industries, so there are a lot of them to go around. (Although the campaign contributions of Liz “I’m not the worst PM ever” Truss and Boris “two holidays” Johnson have arguably been less helpful.)
Not that everyone welcomes the advent of Ring doorbells. In Kingston and Surbiton; one camera recorded two Tory canvassers apparently discussing the number of immigrants on the street, while Labour’s candidate in Aberdeen South was filmed telling a resident the party “didn’t bother at all” in 2019 to help the Tories win.
Maybe best stick to just popping through a leaflet, eh?
Ed Davey’s best life
Is it statesmanlike? No. Has it got anything remotely to do with potentially being the third largest party in Britain’s lower parliament, or with any of the problems facing the country? Not even slightly.
But for sheer relentless abandon in tossing his dignity to the four winds, and then doing it again and again for six long weeks, Ed Davey’s campaign on behalf of the Lib Dems has been a thing of giddy joyfulness. Which is not something one ever said about Tim Farron.
From the campaign launch on Windermere (number of wholly accidental tumbles into the lake – five) to a look-mum-no-hands bike ride in Wales to playing giant Jenga in Stockport to having a makeover on This Morning (there were many, many, many more), Davey has been putting the fun back into fundamental reform of the health and social care system. And who’s to say “I’m daft, me!” can’t be a winning electoral strategy?
It concluded with a bungee jump from an Eastbourne crane and the most surreal photo in political history. Will anyone ever want to tour factories in a hard hat again?
Mel Stride
If there’s something catastrophic in your polling numbers, who you gonna call? Mel Stride! If there’s something weird about the way all your other cabinet colleagues have gone awol, who you gonna call? Mel Stride!
Yes, not to jump the gun or anything, but if anyone deserves a head-pat in Rishi Sunak’s resignation honours it is surely Stride, the hardest working man in British broadcasting. Day after day at Tory campaign HQ, faced with some cock-up or dodgy bet or other, it was Stride who leaped up to declare: “I ain’t afraid of no Mishal Husain!”
On the morning of 26 June alone, Stride appeared on Times Radio, GB News, Sky News, BBC Breakfast, BBC Radio 4, LBC and Good Morning Britain, the last of which had even made a little montage comparing his fashion choice with his five previous appearances.
Fair play to the man – anyone who can describe Labour’s 20-point lead to Sky News as “wafer thin” has an assured career in PR ahead whenever his constituents wish him to take it up. “How big are the wafers in your house?” scoffed an unconvinced Kay Burley.
Metaphors
British voters are not the most subtle of thinkers – at least, politicians evidently believe so. How else are we to interpret the leaden reliance on very, very literal metaphors to make their points? Take the Tory manifesto launch at Silverstone race track, accompanied by leaflets reading: “Revved up and ready to go.” Do you get it?
Granted, it’s not quite as literal as Davey at the Lib Dem manifesto launch at Thorpe Park – “I’ve been told that an election is a rollercoaster so I’m going to go on a rollercoaster. Thank you” – but Sunak did his best, telling the assembled photo-fodder activists that the choice of venue illustrated that “the economy has turned the corner” and had the “hi-tech and oomph” that Britain needs. Yes, thank you, Paul Verlaine.
(Labour have carefully steered Keir Starmer away from doing anything overly metaphorical, or indeed interesting – although they did crack in the past week and issue nightmarish “attack pillows” warning against waking up to a Tory government.)
The problem with leaning into metaphors, though, is that everyone else gets to have a go, too. The wheels are coming off! They’re the pits! He’s crashed and burned! Most pressingly – did no one point out that turning a corner at Silverstone just brings you back to where you started?
Plunging down
Toolmakers
On the plus side: it worked. In April, just 11% of people knew what Keir Starmer’s dad, a toolmaker, did for a living (he was a toolmaker); by June, after a relentless campaign of talking-about-the-toolmaker-thing, it was 27%, according to More in Common.
One might argue that at the point when audiences began laughing when Starmer mentioned his father’s job (toolmaker), the repetition thing had perhaps backfired. On the other hand, toolmaker’s son Starmer is clearly proud of his father, Rod, a toolmaker, and his toolmaking job making tools.
Is the problem that no one knows what a toolmaker actually is? Maybe we need to talk more about toolmakers, something the electorate would no doubt welcome at this stage.
Or perhaps Starmer missed a trick in not re-upping his joke from his 2021 conference speech: “My dad was a toolmaker. Although in a way, so was Boris Johnson’s.”
Canadian politics
Nigel Farage is many things, but an original thinker is not necessarily one of them. When it came to rebranding the Brexit party in 2020, he looked very explicitly to Canada and the example of the insurgent rightwing party – called Reform – that almost obliterated the governing Progressive Conservatives in 1993 before in effect taking them over.
Some have long warned of potential parallels, but it wasn’t until Farage declared a month ago his ambitions both to stand as an MP and to inflict the same thing on the Tories, that the broader political establishment scrambled to beef up on grunge-era Canadian federalism, Saskatchewan oil and wheat revenues and the influence of Québécois provincialism, for clues as to what could happen.
“People often think: ‘Well, things can only get so bad,’” one Canadian political expert told the Guardian. “No, things can get really bad – and then worse.” Oh great, because there was I thinking there was too much good news around.
The England men’s football team
Let’s leave aside Switzerland for the time being. England’s footballers have had a challenging time of it at the Euros so far, creaking under the weight of national expectations and held back by the apparent lack of a single left foot among them. The last thing they need is a bunch of politicians piping up.
Well guess what, England! Consider yourselves co-opted into an election campaign.
For Sunak, that meant a post on X, immediately after the team’s dramatic last-minute rescue from defeat by Slovakia on Sunday, reading: “It’s not over til it’s over.” Evidently emboldened by the Times’s description of his trip over a ball early in the campaign as a “Cruyff turn”, he now invites us to picture him performing a 94th-minute scissor kick to reverse his party’s fortunes. And I for one can totally see him pulling it off.
Starmer, too, posted on X after the match, his own message reading: “Never in doubt,” suggesting things always go exactly as predicted and that thing that everyone expects to happen always, always happens.
Davey, meanwhile, has restricted himself to the briefest of messages in his football posts during the campaign: “Get in!” (16 June). “Back of the net!” (20 June). “What a comeback!” (30 June). The message: “I love my country, but right now I am rolling downhill into a bath of jelly while wearing a sumo suit. Let me know if anyone scores.”
Performance art
Look, it’s not been a great one for the Conservatives, has it? That’s not the pinko Guardianista viewpoint – just ask Bloomberg (“the worst election campaign in living memory”) or Huffpost (“Are the Tories running the worst election campaign of all time?) or the former prime ministerial aide who called it “political Dignitas”.
From the washout Downing Street launch to the Titanic-themed press conference, from asking the Welsh were they looking forward to England in the Euros to failing to feed sheep, from fleeing the D-day commemorations to losing his own campaigns director over alleged bets on the election date – Sunak has had an absolute shocker.
“If I woke up on the morning of 5 July to find out that it had been an elaborate performance art piece instead of a genuine campaign, I would not be surprised,” one senior Conservative told Huffpost. To which performance artists reply as one: Don’t blame us, guv.
As it happens, arguably the most famous of their number, Marina Abramović, was at Glastonbury at the weekend where, dressed as a giant couture peace sign, she led a vast Pyramid stage crowd in seven minutes of absolute silence.
She had been “terrified” before the performance, she told the Guardian. “I could completely fail … but I want to take the risk. Failing is also important, you learn from failing as well as succeeding.”
Just maybe there’s a lesson there for some people for the coming days.
