I have no strong views about Keir Starmer’s attack ad, in which he accuses Rishi Sunak of letting paedophiles walk free. I have managed to keep abreast of the objections, though. Some think he shouldn’t have personalised it, since Sunak has only been in parliament since 2015, and paedophiles have been walking free since, oh, ages before that. Others think that Starmer has opened the floodgates for the Conservatives to be extremely personal and vindictive against him. This is a rather quaint and sweet, and also stupid, view of the Tories, that they never say anything unfair until someone has hurt their feelings first.
The problem with personalised electioneering is not that it’s unfair – someone has to be held responsible for government decisions, and it may as well be the prime minister. No, it’s because it’s daft. Attack ads start off understood only by the four people in the room where they were devised. I bet even the graphic designer responsible for photoshopping Margaret Thatcher’s hair on to William Hague’s head in 2001 wasn’t completely sure what the point was – is he masquerading as Thatcher, but is actually different from her? Or is he pretending to be different, when he’s actually Thatcher 2.0? Or is it just better when prime ministers have hair? Never mind!
Eventually, the “Westminster bubble” starts to pretend to understand them, then ventriloquises an “average” or “real” person to explain why the message is effective. “Ah, yes, tiny Ed Miliband in Nicola Sturgeon’s pocket is chilling, you see, because we will all have to become Scottish if Labour wins, but also hilarious, because it recalls tiny Tony Blair on Helmut Kohl’s knee, in 1997, which everyone definitely remembers and most certainly understood at the time.”
The best thing about the 1997 election was that they could never quite decide which way to go with Blair: one minute he was Bambi, the next he had the red eyes of the devil. Does Bambi have anything more than the core capabilities necessary for a woodland creature? But also, is he a manifestation of pure evil?
The lesson history teaches us here is that, whatever happens before local elections, when the general election arrives, politics gets even sillier. We have to pace ourselves, save our hooting derision for when tiny Starmer is one of Caroline Lucas’s earrings.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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