Who on earth is advising Sunak and why is he listening to them?
Rishi Sunak’s diminishing band of apologists must be tearing out what is left of their rapidly greying hair. It’s been a bad fortnight for our (outgoing) prime minister since the heavens opened in Downing Street but leaving Normandy early was simply unforgivable.
He has apologised, citing a date with ITV for an interview scheduled for next week as if that might take precedent over paying tribute to the 4,400 Allied dead on D-Day. To make matters worse, the apology sounded very scripted and was repeated almost word for word when asked follow-up questions. It was Speaking Clock stuff.
Which raises two questions: Who on earth is advising Sunak and why the hell is he listening to them? CCHQ and all government departments are full of very young special advisors straight from university who have zero real-world experience. They should be ignored at all costs and their only function is to fetch the coffee.
I know something of this first hand thanks to a short sojourn at Tory Central Office after my halcyon days on the Express. To explain: In the run-up to the May 1997 general election I was commissioned to produce a full-colour tabloid extolling the (fast fading) merits of the Conservatives and Jolly John Major. And for good measure, to ghost newspaper articles for Major to appear in the regional dailies. So subjects included the future of shipbuilding in Newcastle and Glasgow, motor manufacturing in the Midlands and so on. As it turns out there was no future.
A briefing note was compiled by these nerdy Spads, a confection of party lines, statistics, dreadful grammar and rotten spelling and off I went. It was all very boring but thankfully well rewarded. I was on safer ground producing the tabloid and in due course it dropped through the letterboxes of every household in England, Scotland and Wales. And we all know how effective it was...
Central Office was not short of talent; Charles Lewington, former political editor of the Express and the brilliant Danny Finkelstein, now star columnist for The Times. As for most of the others, I wouldn’t have trusted them to tie their own shoe laces. One, who shall remain nameless, told me that Norma Major, the most private of women, had agreed to be interviewed for the first time. ‘Do you think a newspaper would be interested?’ Yes really! The Express and the Mail fought over it and in the end she gave an hour to each.
I suspect the quality of Spads is even worse these days but surely they are not advising Sunak. That is left to the grown-ups, yes? Probably not. But whoever it is they cannot be telling a prime minister what to do and when. Sunak is Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury and he should be telling them to piss off and make up his own mind.
Apologising after the event is all very well but the crass decision to leave the D-Day commemoration, certainly the last one that those who survived will have attended, was pitiful. Biden, undoubtedly frail, managed to stay the course after the long Atlantic flight and then followed up with a state visit to France. And he managed a great and forceful speech.
The awful truth is Sunak follows Truss, who would have seen Normandy as a great photo op and a way of opening up new pork markets, and Johnson who would have found novel ways of further demeaning this country. Worse, nobody at CCHQ thought it might be a good idea to brief MPs who were on the roster to defend anything Tory on the airwaves. Even at the moment that Sunak’s apology was being issued.
It was a bit of a shambles in 1997. Today it’s worse than shambolic. It is terrible, just pathetic and the sooner it’s over the better. Tony Blair’s stonking majority in 1997 might yet look like small fry come the morning of July 5.
For the record, I took the Tory shilling in ’97 and voted for Blair. So blame me for all that followed.
ALAN FRAME
8 June 2024
