D-Day for Sunak
His campaign has done for election strategy what Suez did for military intervention.
We've surely never seen a man fuck up this badly. We've never seen someone fuck up so regularly, at such a high level. We've never witnessed someone manage it with this degree of sustained commitment: a morning-to-sundown performance, across the full range of political activities, at every point in the qualitative spectrum, with due consideration for both superficial blunder and substantive misjudgement. No matter what the issue, Rishi Sunak will find a way to cock it up. It's who he is. It's what he does. And woe-betide anyone who stands in his way.
There must have been someone there who tried to stop him. There must have been at least one voice in his office with the mental presence to raise a rather obvious problem with his schedule. The problem was that he was going to leave the D-Day anniversary event in the afternoon to do an ITV interview. No wait, that's actually too generous. It's somehow even stupider than that. He was going to leave the D-Day anniversary event to do a pre-record for an ITV interview, which would anyway only go out next week.
Ignore for a moment the idea that he should have been there to pay his respect to those who fought for liberty. Let’s not aim at that kind of moral height. Let’s restrict ourselves to the most basic form of party-political calculation, which is plainly where his mind operates. Even on that level - especially at that level - it was unprecedentedly foolish.
The commemoration would have allowed Sunak to appear in photographs alongside the leaders of France, the US, Canada and Germany, playing the role of global statesman. It wouldn’t even be a summit defined by G20-style squabbling, but a moment of profound international memory, concerning an event in which Britain played a decisive role. Any election strategist would see the benefits, even if they could not understand the historic importance.
The decision would have been a bad one for any prime minister, but it becomes comically nonsensical when you consider that he's running as a hard-right traditional-values Conservative in order to bring back Reform voters to the fold. A little while back he was talking about bringing back national service. I mean, in the name of God. Just take that in for a moment. He's asking young people to do national service but can't even be bothered to commemorate those who have done so in the past.
That combination is so staggeringly inept that language simply melts away. There is no way to fully summarise how stupid it is. It cannot be done with human words. It requires a retreat into mathematics. Perhaps there is an equation out there, some perfect abstract encapsulation of the Platonic form of shitness, which demonstrates without caveat or amendment all that is most mangled in the human mind. If so, it should be deployed here. Finally, we have found a point in the human experience that can live up to its awesome power.
A couple of polls yesterday showed Reform within touching distance of the Conservatives. Those voters are older, right-wing and extremely nostalgic for this period in British history. Honestly, it's often not even clear that they know British history exists before 1939. That's Sunak's target group. They're the people he's directed everything to: every policy, every speech, ever soundbite. It's as if he saw those polls and thought that he needed to help the Reform performance a little bit, just make absolutely 100% sure that he would be overtaken by the party which poses the greatest threat to him.
It's now more likely than not that Reform will outperform the Tories next week, an event which will drive many Conservatives into a state of mental and emotional meltdown. And if that happens, Sunak will be directly to blame. Still though, he got to pre-record an ITV interview.
Back in Normandy, Keir Starmer could be seen shaking hands with Volodymyr Zelenskyy., looking increasingly like a man who can't believe his luck. When the Ukrainian leader put out a video about the event, it showed Starmer instead of Sunak greeting him - as if it were taking place a few weeks into the future with the new prime minister already in place.
Ukraine is certainly the Conservatives' greatest foreign policy success - admittedly a low bar, but a genuine achievement regardless. Britain stands perhaps as the strongest and most unyielding supporter of Ukraine on the world stage. And Sunak just… let Starmer secure the photo op. Just like that. In the end you're reduced to just staring at the video, your mouth opening and closing like a dying fish in mute incomprehension. There's no political analysis to be deployed here. There's nothing interesting to say really. It's so dumb that it makes commentary redundant.
The one clip from the ITV interview released so far shows the prime minister insisting he's not a liar. He is of course, but that’s not the most interesting thing about it. It’s that it reveals the underlying reason why he made the D-Day mistake in the first place. It shows the truth of the matter. He jetted back to London to clean up the mess of his previous mistake earlier in the week, when he misled voters during the leaders' debate.
And why had he committed that mistake? So he could distract from the other errors he’d made before that, not least his various half-arsed policy ideas, all of which fell apart upon contact with reality. And why had he been putting out these policy ideas? Because his campaign had been derailed by his previous gaffs and cock-ups, including the near-Biblical stupidity of announcing it in the rain without an umbrella while telling everyone had a plan.
And why was he making that announcement? Because he decided to hold an election early when he was 20-points down in the polls, without any clearly articulable reason why. And why was he 20-points down in the polls? Because of all the other mistakes he made during his time in power - asking people to judge him on pledges he could not achieve and failed to accomplish, setting himself up as a change candidate before changing his mind again a few days later, and generally exhibiting the charisma and political judgement of a dirty puddle by a suburban petrol station.
Still though. It's alright. He's got a plan.
What is the plan? Dunno. Couldn't tell you. Something about trans people in toilets. But he's got a plan. Trust him.
What a campaign. What a generous contribution to the history books, to provide a perfect example of how not to do an election. In the decades to come, they will use it as a shorthand for ineptitude at the highest possibilities of the political imagination. It will do for election strategy what Suez did for military intervention. On timing, tactics, messaging, presentation and policy, he has provided a masterclass in amateurism.
He's surely peaked. He surely can't manage anything stupider than this.
Or perhaps he can. There are 27 days to go.
I remember the Tories who came through the War. Often raised on working country estates they took in other people's lives. In whatever setting the numbers of employees was larger then and communities around workplaces stable. Not the work silo of corporate finance. Despite assumed entitlement they had a sense of duty, integrity towards those less privileged. The Conservative Party has become dominated by exceedingly narrowing wealth and life experience. Fanatical extremist ideology, populism and managerialism replacing a sense of duty and public service. I wonder if it has had its day as a serious democratic force while Labour, always a broader church, has survived to have a relevant future.
I think you’re being far too generous to the people around Sunak. After all, the Tory response to him leaving was that it was fine because he’ll have a chance to chat with other world leaders soon anyway. As if that was the sole reason to be at the D-Day event. I mean, for some Tories it probably was. So for me this doesn’t just say bad things about Sunak – it highlights the lack of respect for societal and social norms from his party as a whole, and how totally and completely out of touch so many Tories are from basic human values.