So sad to see the Conservative party talking down Britain in its new attack ad for the London mayoral elections, which – among other deliberate and unethical lies – included footage of commuters fleeing false reports of gunfire in New York’s Penn station in 2017. That bit has now been edited out, but what remains of the ad purports to be a 90-second portrait of life in the capital since London mayor Sadiq Khan “seized power”. Given that Khan has twice won the London mayoralty in free and fair votes, this feels somewhat punchy talk from a party led by an unelected man who himself “seized power” from the salad-vanquished political corpse of an unelected woman.
But look, what’s the worst that can happen if political parties tell blatant untruths to people, debase campaigning standards and conduct knowing assaults on trust? If only there were places in the world to which we could point in order to answer that question.
If you haven’t seen this advert, it’s a grainy black-and-white montage supposedly showing life in “a crime capital of the world” (London). Apart from all the obviously disprovable fakery and dishonest manipulations and misrepresentations that we’ll come to in a minute, the entire ad is inexplicably voiced by an actor doing a bad American accent. Why? He doesn’t even go here. And yes – I get that on the one hand, this opens me up to the possibility of the actor who voiced the ad identifying himself and crossly declaring himself to be an actual American, perhaps hailing from one of the regions where they have unconvincing American accents.
On the other hand, this course of action would involve him identifying himself as the person who voiced this embarrassing ad, so … I’m feeling relatively safe. Indeed, given I live in London I am feeling relatively safe anyway, what with the Crime Survey for England and Wales reporting that residents of the capital are less likely to be victims of crime than across the country as a whole.
Anyway: the ad. Suffice to say that every creative decision taken on the script seems to have been signed off by a beta version of ChatGPT or someone who has suffered a recent head trauma. Sample writing: “Gripped by the tendrils of rising crime, London’s citizens stay inside … the metropolis teetering on the brink of chaos.”
“In the depths of these narrow passageways,” growls the unconvincing American, “tread squads of Ulez enforcers, dressed in black, faces covered with masks, terrorising communities.” Mm. But do they?
Of similar concern is the decision to use a scare graph that, upon closer inspection, appears to resemble a graph showing crime in England and Wales significantly overtaking crime in London. But hey, it’s a graph, it looks the part, it’s got two lines crossing in a way that looks the right stripe of worrying.
The wider purpose of the ad is an attempt to cast London as a Gotham desperately in need of a Batman. Off the back of that statement, can I bring myself to type the words “Enter Susan Hall”? Yes I think I can, just for the mirthless laugh. Enter Susan Hall. If you’re not familiar with Susan, she’s the Conservative candidate running against Khan, and is arguably the final form in a long series of Tory mayoral hopefuls of whom the only question that can ever be asked is, “Oh wow – where on earth did they find that one?”
Where DID they find Susan? Possibly on account of her lurid social media history, she’s been described as a populist, and for much of her time since selection has come off as the best kind of populist – one who is not very popular. Having said that, the picture has distinctly shifted in recent months, and noises from the Labour campaign are increasingly strangulated. There is at least a small possibility that Hall could win – which would ironically be one of the most compelling arguments that London is having some form of existential crisis.
None of which is to suggest that Khan is the most exceptional of rivals. For my money he has been a very indifferent mayor, and anyone seeking a third term should be expected to be judged and attacked on their record. But the fact that he isn’t, in ads like this, does matter. It does matter if parties fake scenes of terror in a London Underground station that turns out to be in New York. It does matter if untruths are told because it’s easier than fighting truthfully. And – as discussed here previously – it matters when the other side do it too. It mattered when Keir Starmer decided to release an attack ad featuring a picture of a grinning Rishi Sunak and the slogan: “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t.”
All of these things matter and don’t result in anything good. We already know where assaults on truth lead, because we’ve seen them happen in other countries and in some cases our own, and people on all sides have spent a lot of the past decade lamenting it. The tragedy is that we all know it, and even the people who come up with the ads know it – but they’re still doing it because they think that it works in the very short term. Yet in the long term, it really, really doesn’t – which makes doing it anyway pretty criminal in itself.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
