How to wreck a brand
On politics, patriotism and porky pies
The sun was glinting on gold. I had never noticed before that there was gold. The stone looked golden, too. The sky was blue, with a dusting of lacy clouds. The trees were that sharp, zesty green that always makes me think of lime in a gin and tonic. My heart swelled at the sight of this palace bathed in evening light, this palace also known as Parliament.
It was Tuesday night and I was on my way to the LBC studio at Millbank to record their weekly political show “Cross Question”.
The show is hosted by Iain Dale, the broadcaster who stood down from his show to become the Tory candidate for Tunbridge Wells. He had to drop out when someone unearthed a podcast clip of him saying he wasn’t mad about Tunbridge Wells. I felt sorry for him when I heard this. Iain was extremely kind when I was savaged on Twitter some years ago. He pulled out of the contest immediately and nobody died.
Another member of the panel, however, nearly did. In 2010, Stephen Timms was hosting a constituency surgery in a library in East Ham when a young woman stabbed him with a six-inch knife. She had been watching online sermons by a leader of Al-Qaeda. She wanted to punish the Labour MP for voting in support of the war in Iraq. Sir Stephen (as he became in 2022) suffered life-threatening injuries. He was stabbed for his political views, just as Jo Cox was for hers. If anyone tells you that being an MP is a cushy job, ask them if they are prepared to die for theirs.
The other members of the panel were the pollster James Johnson and Sebastian Payne, who has stood as a Tory parliamentary candidate in a number of constituencies, most recently Surrey Heath. He did his first ever Sky News press preview with me, nine or ten years ago. He went on to become a political journalist and then to run a right-wing think-tank. Quite a few of the young men I’ve been asked to shepherd through first TV appearances now seem to be bastions of the establishment. Their confidence has been quite a thing to see.
And then there was me.
The others, it was clear, have been following every twist and turn of the election. I, to be honest, haven’t. Perhaps I should have watched every interview and every debate and every clip of Sunak sounding petulant and Starmer sounding stolid and Farage sounding – well, like the man with the gift of the gab who is never responsible for anything, ever. Perhaps I should have, but a) I have a life and b) I find it all rather depressing.
I can’t remember many of the questions now. I do remember forgetting what I was going to say, saying I’d now remembered it and then forgetting it again. Not ideal, but I just laughed. I’ve been doing this kind of thing long enough to be relaxed about it now. And no one was going to vote me out of a job as a result.
(I am not, by the way, relaxed about all public speaking. I had to give a 45-minute after-dinner speech at a literary festival at the weekend. I accepted because I thought it sounded like fun until it struck me that I was meant to be the fun. Your one job in an after-dinner speech is to be entertaining. No Powerpoint. No script. Just you and your words and, people hope, your wit. I don’t think I’ll be rushing to do it again.)
The question I do remember was about Rishi Sunak. Was the Tories’ looming disaster his fault? Yes, said James, he was hopeless. No, said I, who was, I gathered from the producer’s text, literally brought on to slag off Sunak and the Tories.
It was David Cameron’s fault, I said, for holding a referendum for entirely political reasons that split the nation and made us poorer. It was Theresa May’s fault for thinking she could square a circle that could never be squared. It was Boris Johnson’s fault for – well, where do we start? For offering golden unicorns, for lying about Brexit and about Northern Ireland, for having parties and lying about them, and about pretty much everything else. It was Liz Truss’s fault for – how do I put this? – being a maniac. And it was Rishi Sunak’s fault for being naïve about politics and useless at the game. But he was probably the one who should be blamed least.
I am, I realised as I said this, sick of it. I’m sick of it all. I’m glad we’ll have a new government in a couple of weeks. I think they’ll be better than the current lot. I think Keir Starmer is probably a decent man, though he appears to have changed his mind about an awful lot. He would probably say that this was what he had to do to get power, and without power you can’t do anything. That’s probably true, but he needs, to use the jargon, to have a better story to tell.
Anyway, it’s almost over. This horrible government will be finished in two weeks. The Tories are worried about what will happen to them. Will they survive, regroup, merge with Reform, die? I would love to shriek “good riddance!” and say it doesn’t matter. It does matter. The populist right is on the rise in Europe and there’s no reason they wouldn’t wait in the wings here. It does matter, but at least we get a bit of breathing space. If the polls are right, we may get 10 years.
What the Tories don’t seem to realise is that their legacy is a battered nation. Not just bruised, but brutalised by broken promises and lies. The behaviour we have seen in government – the corruption, the denials, the routine distortion of statistics, the assertions of facts that are not facts – has wrecked our public discourse and our international reputation. Most importantly, it has broken our trust.
Trust is something you can’t buy back. Once you have destroyed it, it’s gone. Political parties, like businesses, have a brand. The Tory band is trashed. And in trashing their brand they trashed the brand of the country.
There are individual Tories, like the ones in that LBC studio and the ones I’ve shared a studio with at Sky News, who I respect. I do think most people go into politics to change things in ways they believe will be better. Many work hard in a demanding job. But too many people have lied to the people they are meant to serve.
The Labour party is currently predicted to get its biggest ever majority. I’m glad, but I don’t see or sense much joy. What I sense, what I feel, is a howl of grief and rage that will be followed by a long, deep sigh of relief.
Spot on as usual, Christina!