But is it art? Could that explain Rishi Sunak’s campaign – that it is, in fact, a piece of daring, innovative performance art in which the prime minister deliberately conducts himself so haplessly and with such a tin ear that it prompts us to reflect on the state of the nation? Is his future not, as most predict, wearing a zip-up fleece and making squillions in Silicon Valley, but rather as a groundbreaking conceptual artist, one who invites his audience to see 4 July less as an election day and more as the unveiling of his boldest ever installation?
It’s as good an explanation as any. Otherwise it’s near-impossible to comprehend his decision to make an early exit from the memorial ceremonies marking the 80th anniversary of D-day, subbing in his foreign secretary to stand alongside the leaders of France, the US and Germany as they remembered those who died to free Europe from fascism. We shall fight them on the beaches, said Churchill. We shall leave them on the beaches, said Sunak.
It turns out that Sunak returned home to do an interview with ITV – which will not be broadcast until next Wednesday. So the opposite of urgent. What’s more, Downing Street volunteered that time slot to ITV. Sunak was not compelled to desert his post in Normandy: he chose to do it. No wonder even his fellow Conservatives are accusing him of political malpractice. They’re right, but it’s more than that. It’s an offence against history.
I don’t mean “history” in the grand sense – though it’s clear the prime minister does not grasp the hallowed place 6 June 1944 occupies in the island story of this nation – but in a much narrower way. Sunak is clearly oblivious to very recent political history, including history he himself witnessed close-up. And, if the current campaign is anything to go by, he is not the only one.
Recall that Sunak was in the House of Commons when Jeremy Corbyn was pilloried for failing to sing the national anthem at a ceremony marking the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. It happened in 2015, but you’d still hear it raised in focus groups four years later. Nor do you have to be a student of ancient history to know that Michael Foot paid a similarly enduring price for wearing a supposed donkey jacket – it wasn’t – at the Cenotaph back in 1981. In other words, if you’re on nodding terms with the recent political past, you know that Britons take this stuff extremely seriously.
Which is why it’s truly baffling that Sunak could have made such a basic error – one that might have been even worse: this morning Sunak was forced to deny reports that he’d originally planned to skip the entire thing. Given the fate of Corbyn and Foot, it’s astonishing that loud alarm bells did not go off in Sunak’s circle, if not in his own head. Not least because his offence was so much worse than theirs.
For this was not just any memorial event. The D-day anniversary is the big one, summoning the Allies to stand together once more. King Charles knew that, which is why he insisted his doctors organise his continuing cancer treatment around the commemorations. What’s more, everyone knows this was almost certainly the last time the D-day veterans could be honoured in person. Yesterday was to be the final act of thanks to the generation that saved Europe, a last farewell. It was beyond obvious that a British prime minister had to be there.
But forget the duty. Think of the politics. Sunak faces a challenge from Reform UK and its freshly installed leader, Nigel Farage, especially among older voters and those swayed by appeals to patriotism. Why hand him such a free hit? Meanwhile, Sunak likes to suggest Keir Starmer is weak on national security, citing Labour’s refusal to match Tory spending commitments on defence. If that’s your argument, how do you even consider an early out, leaving the Labour leader to stay on in northern France, shaking hands and looking all the more like your inevitable successor?
This is the biggest puzzle of the lot. Sunak wanted to rush back to the campaign trail, failing to realise that he was already on it – gifted the greatest of all campaign photo-ops. Incumbency has its advantages, and one of them is that you get to play the world leader, rubbing shoulders with presidents and princes as their equal – while your opponent looks on from the domestic sidelines. Instead of seeing 6 June as a distraction from the campaign grid, Team Sunak should have realised it was the best thing in it. That they didn’t confirms their political instincts are either defective or missing altogether.
The funny thing is, they face in Starmer a challenger for whom politics is also not a first language and who seems to suffer from a similarly shaky political memory. Note how slow he was to rebut Sunak’s claim in Tuesday’s ITV debate that Labour plans a £2,000 tax rise on every household. He let the PM say it again and again, before finally insisting – rightly – that the figure was “garbage”.
Afterwards, the £2,000 claim was rubbished from all quarters, while the top mandarin at the Treasury disavowed it, despite Sunak’s insistence that it had come from the civil service. And yet, for the best part of 48 hours, voters couldn’t move for talk of “£2,000”. Starmer should have been gripped by an instant sense of deja vu. The £350m that was on the side of the Vote Leave bus in 2016 was also roundly denied and denounced – but that only lodged it more firmly in the public mind. The pedlar of post-truth knows that denial is just another form of amplification. If Starmer had had recent history in his mind, he’d have feared that “£2,000” was about to become the new £350m – and moved to kill it off as soon as it was uttered.
Similarly, a memory of the past might have helped him navigate the assorted Labour rows over candidate selections. Tony Blair had his own battles with the left, watching as his favoured picks were defeated by the likes of Ken Livingstone in London or Dennis Canavan in Falkirk. Blair collided first with the belief among previously Labour-supporting voters that the party’s political position was so strong, there was little risk attached to backing the odd maverick or independent; and, second, with a desire to thwart the leader’s control-freakery. There’s not much Starmer can do about the first one – he’s a victim of his own success – but he could have avoided the second. Instead, Labour’s treatment of Diane Abbott and Faiza Shaheen has cast him, like late-1990s Blair, as someone who puts control over fairness, and that might just prompt enough voters – in, say, Islington North – to use their ballot next month to stick two fingers up to the man they already see as the PM-in-waiting.
There is, however, one party leader who is all too alive to recent history. Nigel Farage remembers the wipeout of Canada’s Conservatives in 1993, which saw that party supplanted and eventually taken over by a more rightwing outfit called Reform, and wants to repeat the trick with his new vehicle. “Why do you think I called it Reform?” he asked the Sunday Times, all but licking his lips.
For now, that spells catastrophe for Sunak and an even bigger Commons majority for Starmer. But the prospect of Farage as the dominant non-Labour figure in British politics should be a cause for alarm across the spectrum. If you doubt it, remember your history.
• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
