Election? What election? It’s hard to overstate just how weird this campaign has become. Normally with nine days to go, every party is desperate for every bit of attention they can get. Sending out a couple of operational notes every day detailing opportunities for the media. Anything to get their message out.
It’s very different this time around. As though the Tories and Labour are terrified of the voters and have gone into hiding. Coming out only to do the barest of bare minimums. Burble a few bland platitudes and then go scurrying back into the darkness. You can see why. The Tories don’t have a track record to defend and Labour don’t want to do anything to rock the boat. Let the opinion polls do the talking. But God it’s been dispiriting. Hope appears to be in short supply. The country wants change but the options don’t seem thrilling.
Even the Lib Dems seem to have given up a bit. Maybe the lethargy is contagious. Ed Davey started the campaign with a stunt a day but now he appears also to have gone undercover. The only leader unafraid of the public is Nigel Farage. Never a man to pass up a political vacuum.
Farage’s narcissism is now completely unchecked, his speeches just a mad ramble of all his grudges. He has even declared he is employing the services of Carter-Ruck to sue … it’s not that clear who he wants to sue. Volodymyr Zelenskiy? Good luck with that. Dicky Tice will be anxiously eyeing up the hit to his credit cards. But the people come to listen to Farage because there is no prejudice or insecurity he won’t indulge. And because no one else is bothering to talk to them.
It’s too much to expect Rishi Sunak to show his face. Every time he does, he seems to make things worse. As I’ve said before, his campaign only has a coherent internal logic if you assume he set out to lose. On Tuesday, he was at it again with the state visit of the Japanese emperor, Naruhito. Sunak was there with David Cameron and it was Lord Big Dave acting as if he were the prime minister. Rish!’s body language was that of a beaten beta male. And Dave didn’t even notice because he naturally expects everyone to defer to him. The English class system at work.
But that was just the latest of Sunak’s problems. First there was the rain, then scarpering away from the D-day commemorations. And Rish! was far from done with the self-inflicted damage. There are no lengths to which he will not go to demonstrate his uselessness.
Take the gambling saga. He could have distanced himself from Craig Williams and Laura Saunders long ago. Instead, he chose to do nothing other than belatedly declare he was “incredibly angry”. So angry, he was reduced to incompetence. It would not be right to suspend them because the Gambling Commission was doing its own investigation, he said. Yet the Metropolitan police had already suspended an officer for allegedly placing a bet on the timing of the election.
So for the last two weeks, Rish! and those unfortunates sent out to defend the government have had to defend the line that Sunak has done all he could. It was a matter of trust. Boom! Because on Tuesday, a Downing Street spokesperson suddenly did a reverse ferret. Williams and Saunders were having the support of the Tory party withdrawn after all. Two weeks of grief for nothing. If Sunak had done that right away he might have got out with minimal damage. A three-day scandal. Instead, he preferred to let it rumble on until he was almost on his knees. Presumably the Gambling Commission will be looking closely at any bets placed on when the suspensions would be imposed. Or maybe Williams and Saunders reckoned they stood a better chance of getting elected without the Tories’ endorsement.
That’s the power of Rish!. All that damage inflicted on himself and his party on a Tuesday, without him having said a word to the media. That takes a level of slapstick genius. Even Liz Truss – remember her? No one in her Norfolk constituency has seen her for days – would struggle to be that crap. It’s performance shiteness explored through mime. No wonder he’s so reluctant to do much public speaking. He can trash his poll ratings perfectly well by saving his breath.
Still, it all points to a breakdown in government. Everyone in Downing Street has run for the hills, the Tory candidates have been left to their own devices and the only people still defending Sunak’s record are former Tory MPs who have wisely chosen not to stand for re-election because they can’t bear the shame of losing. It’s chaos inside and outside No 10. No one is talking to one another. There is no one even left to let out Larry the cat.
So spare a thought for James Cleverly, who was asked about the betting scandal by Nick Ferrari shortly before 10am on LBC. Jimmy Dimly dutifully trotted out the party line that he couldn’t comment because of the ongoing investigation, unaware that within 30 minutes he would be contradicted by the prime minister’s spokesperson. Talk about hanging your home secretary out to dry.
There again, Dimly never really needs much help in making himself look foolish, and the immigration debate with Yvette Cooper during the previous hour on LBC had been a case in point. Not that we learned anything new as the arguments are well known to everyone by now. The only way that Jimmy D can now cope is to pretend that every day is ground zero. That the last 14 years haven’t happened. He – and possibly the prime minister – are the last two people left alive who think the Rwanda plan is working. That anything is working. Yvette may not have all the answers but at least she can spot a dud.
For the most part, the debate was fairly good-natured. Cleverly sounded subdued, as if he was aware that something bad was about to happen but couldn’t put his finger on what exactly it was. He will find out on 4 July. The format turned out to be quite predictable. Jimmy would say something idiotic like “the migrants in Calais are all waiting for a Labour landslide” – they’re really not: record numbers have arrived this year – and Yvette would quietly point out that he was misinformed.
“Why does Yvette always get the last word?” sighed Dimly plaintively towards the end. Er … because she’s much brighter than you. That, believe it or not, was the high point. Everyone else was sleeping in the sun. Waiting for the England game later in the evening.
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