Rishi Sunak made a mistake over D-Day but it’s the superficiality of so much modern political campaigning that’s really letting people down, says James Price
At the risk of sounding like Squealer – the oleaginous propagandist pig in Animal Farm, whose primary function is the promotion and defence of the regime – I think that the opprobrium heaped on the Prime Minister for his handling of the 80th Anniversary of D-Day has gone too far.
With the nomination period closed, you can rest assured that I am not writing this in an effort to get a safe seat, and I have no particular warmth towards Rishi Sunak in general. But the attacks on his patriotism from the right demean an otherwise good and necessary critique of the Conservatives’ record, and are downright hypocritical from the left given their recent flirtations with disarmament.
First, the obvious caveats; this was a catastrophic error of political and perhaps moral judgement from someone in the top team. The hapless Party Chairman was too busy trying to save his own skin to notice and the pressures of the campaign clearly had an impact on the sense of those around him. Voters will rightly weigh such errors when deciding who to vote for.
But to attack the PM directly and personally for this is to misunderstand how these campaigns operate. Candidates are whisked hither and thither from a room of journalists to a room of voters to a photo op in a dizzying march that leaves little time for them to get their bearings. Too much time for reflection can be deadly to the smooth running of a visit.
The real problem here is the superficiality and artificiality of much of modern campaigning. I should know – I ran one of the operations teams for Boris Johnson during the previous general election in 2019. Spurred by the media’s insatiable hunger for new copy and new images of the campaign trail, candidates become little more than mannequins with rosettes stuck on being moved from diorama to diorama.
A trip to a schools to be photographed playing with a Bunsen burner shows that the candidate cares about education. Popping to Grimsby Fish market at 5am and posing with a giant cod (pre-selected by your humble author for its photogenic qualities) indicates you care about our fishing industry. French philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes would have had a field day.
And when the circus rolls out of town and onto the next contrived stunt, the subjects of the event have had maybe 10 minutes to hear about policy plus an unsettling insight into how the modern media sausage is made. Even the TV debates are heavily stage-managed for soundbites for social media and to provoke controversial encounters rather than illuminate differences of policy or priority.
In this furore, both veterans and active servicemen have been forgotten and used as ‘talking points’. Why could we not have a three-hour debate between the Defence Secretary and his shadow to get to the bottom of what each side will actually do to ensure we never demand a sacrifice on the scale of D-Day again? Is it because too many politicians recognise, in their more honest moments, that the stage-managed campaign event is a more comforting straitjacket than a long, inquisitive, conversation to get to the heart of issues?
In Singapore, the Prime Minister hosts an annual speech on the state of the country, complete with a Powerpoint presentation, that covers economics, health, education and more. There are statistics, maps, images of infrastructure projects, and even art on display. Engaging with the public in this way might allow politicians to speak at length without being challenged by facile ‘gotcha’ questions, but it forces them to think deeper than the soundbite or, God help us, the Tiktok video. Next time we should demand better.
James Price is a former government advisor