Encouraging news for anyone who fears the next election might be some fight for the moral high ground, as Labour releases a new attack ad. Have you seen this one? If not, do try to catch it before they take it down and tacitly blame someone nameless. It depicts a smiling Rishi Sunak next to the inquiry: “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t.” Oh dear. In case that grim message was too opaque for you, Sunak’s famous signature is added, above the explainer: “Under the Tories, 4,500 adults convicted of assaulting children under 16 served no prison time. Labour will lock up dangerous child abusers.”
Labour is the party of law and order. pic.twitter.com/EP6VXToK9z
— The Labour Party (@UKLabour) April 6, 2023
Righto. Attempts to cast this ad as a “dog whistle” seem misplaced, affording its stunning crassness a kind of subtlety that it simply can’t carry off. I think that when everyone can hear the dog whistle, it’s just a whistle? If you can’t discern the shrill sound of something telling you Rishi Sunak doesn’t want nonces to go to prison, do consider booking a hearing test at your very earliest convenience.
The ad has drawn condemnation from across the political spectrum, so we merely await some genius turning up – off the record, of course – to explain that this was exactly what they were going for. The thing about political attack ads is that there will always be people, usually the ones who came up with them, who’ll sweep in to explain loftily that actually, the ad in question was a dark form of magic. “Hey, it’s not pretty, but politics is a bloodsport,” will be the position of some boring little inadequate whose other positions include banning bloodsports and having a number of views about where to get the best flat white in SW1.
One of the big impressions you keep hearing about Keir Starmer from the focus groups is that he doesn’t say what he really thinks. So perhaps this ad was an attempt to address this, a really confident and clear way of saying “Rishi Sunak is the paedo’s friend”. And yet, the irony of this particular ad is that Starmer doesn’t really think that Rishi Sunak thinks this – and consequently hasn’t even said what he thinks here.
The one thing you would hope the career lawyer would be across is that Sunak – who wasn’t even an MP for five years of the period gestured towards in the ad – was not responsible for sentencing or sentencing guidelines. The fact that Starmer was himself a member of the sentencing council for some of that period is another factor that places the ad firmly in the “audacious” category.
Primarily, though, this seems to be about decorum in politics, a beloved subject of the Labour leader. It was only a year or so ago that Boris Johnson was shamefully and bizarrely attempting to counter Partygate stories by telling the House of Commons that Starmer had failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile when he was director of public prosecutions, a gambit that also drew cross-spectrum political condemnation and at least one angry mob towards Starmer. At the time, the Labour leader drew himself up to his full height and said that he had never before been called a “paedophile protector”. It was “a deliberate slur without any basis in fact,” Starmer told the Times. “The PM knew exactly what he was doing … It’s not about me, it’s about the way we conduct our politics. I don’t want to see us go down the route that this potentially takes us down.” Of the anti-vax crowd who had chanted paedo-protecting slurs at him, he reasoned: “That happened yesterday for the first time in my life. If others want to argue that this is unconnected with precisely what the PM said one week before, then let them make that case. But they’ll never persuade me that there is no link.”
Mm. But will Starmer be able to persuade himself that calling a political leader a paedophile protector is good and right when he does it, and somehow nothing to do with “the way we conduct our politics”? If the sole tenor of your current brand is that the Tories are morally degenerate and iniquitous and that decency and truth-telling matter, there are those nutters among us who would argue that sinking to the same level is not a brilliant 4D chess move, but simply … sinking to the same level. Hypocrisy is arguably the hardest sell in politics, as Boris Johnson’s calamitous standards committee appearance recently showed, and it is certainly an area the self-sainted Starmer might sensibly be advised to avoid. Is this the sole occasion on which anyone could reasonably describe Starmer’s actions as “bold”? That in itself feels something of a problem.
At time of writing, the ad remained up, with the leadership of the Labour party apparently standing behind it. A glimpse of the excruciating contortions into which they are going to get themselves to defend it came courtesy of the shadow culture secretary, Lucy Powell, who emerged for a coach-crash interview with BBC Breakfast in which she flounderingly acknowledged that she could see it might not be “to everybody’s taste”. “But you know,” she ruminated, “that is the sort of cut-and-thrust nature of politics.” Something for the ad-makers of the Conservative party to bear in mind, no doubt.
As for Starmer himself, he had only just given a tough-talking interview to the Mirror to round off a distinctly unedifying “crime week” for both Labour and the Tories. Quite how soon the Labour leader will wish to emerge again after this ad is unclear – as is quite how much he will wish to bang on about decency for a bit. Perhaps we’ll see him out and about with “real people” in the days ahead. At least the advent of spring means his handlers can finally get him out of the knee-length black coat he favours on outside visits. Coupled with his perma-pained expression, this garment always makes Starmer look like a funeral director. You never quite know if he’s going to say something about manufacturing jobs or murmur that the horse-drawn carriage is now ready to leave.
Staying with matters equine, perhaps after this unpleasant episode the deceased in question is Starmer’s favourite hobby-horse: civility in politics. It’s pretty hard to see that particular one being given a run-out in the near future, which will leave the Labour leader reliant on showing people what else he has back there in the stable other than taking the moral high ground and making holier-than-thou pronouncements. He hasn’t been about that at all over the past 24 hours – so he must be about something else, something different, something more. Mustn’t he … ?
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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