by Matthew Paul
To win the election on December 12, the Conservative Party just need to hold onto the supporters they have, and keep a lid on the horrid Brexit Party splitters. Boris needs to run a tight ship of a campaign, repeating a solid message about investment in public services and how everyone wants to GET BREXIT DONE. Easy, right? And it’s been working, to the extent that Nigel Farage himself is running scared from the electorate and won’t be contesting a seat.
Labour don’t have it so easy. They need to replicate the party’s Lazarus performance of 2017 and zoom up something like twelve points in the opinion polls over the next six weeks. And even when impressionable idiots were going about chanting “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” without black irony, it still wasn’t enough to actually win an election.
The Liberal Democrats need a different electoral system and can’t have one, so we needn’t worry much about them. At this election the Liberals will be back in their traditional and useful role as centre-left splitters; the more effective given their partial rehabilitation under Jo Swinson.
Plaid need this election like they need a hole in the head. In recent Welsh polling, The Party of Wales is festering in fourth place behind the Brexit gang. Ben Lake is under pressure in Ceredigion, and Plaid are unlikely to extend their reach into Brexity places in the valleys they once hoped to sweep clean of Labour MPs. Staring down this rabbit hole, Plaid Cecru are reverting to type and distracting themselves with an almighty internecine punch-up about whether or not to stand down in favour of the Liberal candidate in Montgomeryshire.
Things aren’t going swimmingly for any of the opposition parties. So why, on Wednesday, did the Conservative election campaign launch descend into an appalling shambles?
This time, at least it wasn’t fox hunting. We haven’t had that one yet; where some interviewer asks Boris Johnson if the Conservatives are going to bring back the unfairly reviled field sport, he says “yes, I like fox hunting, what” and Labour gleefully spend the election campaign talking about nothing else.
Boris can probably be trusted not to say he likes fox hunting, not least because his current partner Carrie Symonds hates fox hunting and if he says anything nice about it she will blow her top and make the red wine on white sofa business look like a mild difference of opinion. No British Prime Minister has yet conducted a successful General Election campaign from a Premier Inn or a mate’s spare room.
Unfortunately for Boris, it was what Harold Macmillan termed “Events, dear boy, events” that conspired to overshadow the launch. The tight ship was already taking on water before Boris got up to speak.
First, one of the great modern-day rituals around election time –the trawl through some neophyte candidate’s troublesome social media history– struck gold in the Gower when Conservative candidate Francesca O’Brien was found to have called, obviously in jest, for the humane extermination of the inhabitants of Channel 4’s Benefits Street.
A glorious typhoon of confected outrage at O’Brien’s ‘hatred of the poor’ ensued; led by humbug Labour candidate Tonia Antoniazzi, whose own social media pages are full of the kind of delicately nuanced political observation that would make a Russian submariner ashamed if his mother saw them.
The Tories were just putting this silly nonsense to bed when up pops Boris’s 2019 Lewes Bonfire co-Guy, Jacob Rees-Mogg, on a phone-in radio show.
O’Brien has been in front-line politics for about five minutes and won’t be the last person to have an iffy Facebook comment waved in her face. For Rees-Mogg there are no excuses. If you make it your personal shtick to go about looking unapologetically –pretentiously, even– rich and old-fashioned, there are certain things you need to be a bit careful about. Otherwise people might stop finding you an amusing, ‘authentic’ curiosity and get genuinely quite fed up with you.
High on the list of those things is Grenfell Tower. In a softball interview on Tuesday with a fawning Nick Ferrari, Rees-Mogg was asked if the tragedy in the tower had anything to do with the race or class of the people who lived there.
“No,” said the man in the room next door into Jacob’s earpiece. “It was the fault of the people who decided to clad a tower block in flammable material, and I hope they are brought swiftly to terrible justice”.
“No,” said Master Jacob. “I mean, you or I would have got out of that building if it was on fire. It’s just common sense.” If any one single thing loses the Conservatives the election, this –the idea that Tories see the poor as benighted Morlocks too stupid to run out of their own house when it’s on fire– will be it. Expect Master Jacob to be locked in the nursery for the rest of the campaign.
As if the fall-out from this Gaffusaurus Rex wasn’t enough, another previously dormant liability, overpromoted Welsh Secretary Alun Cairns, chose his moment to go fizz puff phut BANG and explode in Boris’ face like a defective Catherine wheel, after it appeared he hadn’t been entirely frank about what he did or didn’t know, concerning what his then aide Ross England did or didn’t do in collapsing a rape trial.
Cairns’ departure from the Cabinet was no great loss to statesmanship or to Wales, but that wasn’t the final gaffe of the day, in respect of which the honours went to a stupid doctored campaign video which made it look as though Kier Starmer couldn’t answer a question about his own Brexit policy.
Boris Johnson won’t lose this election by making the same mistakes Theresa May made in 2017. But this was a poor start to the campaign. Events never lose their power to surprise and derail. It isn’t in the bag.
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