Several times over the past few days, I’ve tried to sit down and write something, convinced the Tory campaign has hit its lowest point. I’d think to myself “right, that really is the worst it can get”, only to be drenched again by the firehose of gibberish that has been coming out of Conservative Campaign HQ (CCHQ).

It’s a ceaseless torrent of new and inventive ways of making things worse for themselves, proving that maybe the barrel has no bottom. Just keep scraping hard enough and there is literally no limit to how dreadful a campaign you can run.

You wouldn’t be blamed for not knowing what’s going on, much less why. I certainly don’t. But I’m going to try and make sense of it, none the less.

To this end – thank god – things have calmed down slightly over the weekend. Not ‘stopped’, and most certainly not because they’ve got a grip on things. Unless those things are heavily lubricated, primed grenades. Either way, it has slowed to a point where I feel like I can summarise events since the first leaders’ debate.

Which is as good a place as any to start. Or bad a place. Perspective depending.

Nobody Likes a Liar

The debate itself was exceptionally uninteresting; an hour of two men being asked questions they weren’t allowed to answer. The moderation style was of what I believe is known as the “explosive dysentery” school; a doomed bid to hold back an inevitable torrent of biblical foulness that only makes the resultant mess bigger and more embarrassing.

Starmer was, being generous, underwhelming. Sunak was more disciplined and stayed on message. Unfortunately for the government, that message was to repeat a verifiable lie over and over again, with all the charisma and credibility of a bag of privately educated slugs. With leprosy.

As someone infinitely blessed with the station of parenthood, I felt myself biting back one of my stock Dad Retorts. That is:

“What you did was bad, but would have been forgivable. You’d have got a bollocking, but that’d have been it. But then you chose to lie about it and now I have to come down like the fist of an angry god.“

Sunak claimed the Institute for Fiscal Studies had provided independent figures that showed Labour’s plans – which, in the same breath, he claimed don’t exist – would mean raising everyone’s taxes by £2,000 a year. Delivered with the kind of huge, shit-eating grin that says he believes his audience too dumb to catch him out.

Somewhere above the atmosphere, divine digits clenched themselves and started hurtling toward Earth. The debate ended and immediate snap polls suggested Sunak had come out on top. Reportedly, the Tory spin room went bananas.

He’d done it. Despite all expectations, he’d landed the talking point and the public had bought it. Fawning texts were sent by his detractors. There’d be no fallout because Starmer had failed to successfully rebut the claim. The campaign was back on track.

The next morning, a letter from no less than the director of the IFS was published, calling out Sunak for his dishonesty. The letter was prior to the debate, as they’d foreseen exactly these kinds of shenanigans. The figures they had provided hadn’t shown anything of the sort. They weren’t based on known Labour policies. They wanted nothing to do with the claim.

Then the BBC sent a notification to seven million people alerting them to this information. Considerably more people saw this than had watched the debate. It filled the news cycle.

Farage Inc.

In an attempt to cheer up the much-harried buffoon currently running the country, Our Nige decided to pick the following day to make a big announcement. An Emergency Election Announcement, no less. In news that probably ruined every pair of underwear in CCHQ, Nargle Fargle gleefully announced he was taking over leadership of Reform UK and standing as a candidate in Clacton.

This was something that Tory campaign insiders had been referring to in (mostly) private as the worst case scenario, an “extinction event”, and all sorts of other celebratory monikers. Within 72 hours, polls were suggesting REFUK closing the gap between them and the Conservatives to just two points. Well within Margin of Error.

The government was now not only fighting a Labour landslide and well-coordinated Lib Dem seat-sniping, but also a flanking maneuver from the right. I fucking hate Nigel, but if I ever met him, I’d buy him two pints. One to thank him for giving me this moment of undiluted political joy, the other to throw in his face as I called him a piss-bloated shitetoad.

We’ll Leave Them on the Beaches

Meanwhile, Tory ministers – both notable and not – spent the next couple of days either distancing themselves from Sunak’s statements or doubling down on them. Which one being dictated by how desperate they each are for a peerage, I assume. They had to do this because Sunak himself was headed off to France for the 80th anniversary of D-Day.

This was a fantastic opportunity to look statesmanlike, with photo opportunities with the likes of Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It’d be a chance to key into a the British sense of pride in – and reverence for – our part in such a pivotal, historic event. It would help hammer home the (possibly sole) Tory policy success, which is our steadfast support for Ukraine. Something the country largely agrees has been entirely good.

Not only that, but having banged on about National Service even when the audience laughed at him, it offered Sunak a chance to spend time with the few surviving veterans. “Look what a sense of national pride can achieve!” it would say. He could stand alongside the king, who attended against medical advice and in significant pain from his ongoing cancer treatment. Wavering REFUK voters could be swayed back to the Tory fold. Labour would look Weak On Defense. I could believe a less useless campaign might have timed the election entirely because of the opportunity this offered.

At least, that’s what a more feeble mind might conclude. Not Rishi Sunak, though. He saw a far greater prize and by god he was going to seize it. Instead of hanging around for all that guff, he buggered off early, so he could fly back to the UK and pre-record an interview for the following week. The purpose of the interview? To wriggle out of being caught lying about Labour tax rises during the debate. A level of genius only further enhanced by the fact it’d bog Starmer down having to do all those photo opportunities with world leaders. See how he liked looking all statesmanlike and patriotic.

The media went psychotic, as did the general public. If there is one thing everyone in the UK seems to broadly agree on, it’s that you don’t disrespect those who gave their lives fighting against the Nazis. People may disagree on how to best show your respect, but they’re pretty much unanimous in agreeing that being disrespectful isn’t acceptable.

The fallout from the lies turned into fallout from skipping out early from the D-Day ceremonies. It started to snowball, with Penny Mordaunt even going as far as to say it was unacceptable while taking part in the second televised debate.

Which is why, for the past two days, Sunak has gone to ground. He’s refusing any media access, keeping as low a profile as possible, presumably in the hopes things would improve before Monday. Or maybe CCHQ have decided that a campaign without the Prime Minister is a better prospect than one with him. I mean… bloody hell. Imagine being so shit at your job that it is better served going undone. You’d be fired. Right?

Narrator: Things Didn’t Improve Before Monday

The problem with disappearing from the public eye during an election campaign is you’re unable to do anything to improve your situation. When said situation is 20% behind in the polls, expecting to lose even more ground to a new threat from an unexpected direction, and peeking out from behind the bedroom curtain to check for signs of flaming torches and/or pitchforks, that’s a really big problem. When many of your so-called allies are self-serving opportunists whose loyalty to you is matched only by their skill at facing the media, it’s a really, really big problem.

Saturday was quiet. About the worst it got was the new candidate for Gove’s old seat pretending he was moving to the constituency. Following Dear Leader, he tried to lie his way out of it, only for the Lib Dems to spoil it by pointing out the property was an AirBnB and he’d listed himself on his candidate nomination papers as resident somewhere else.

With only moderately dire news like this to go with, the media started to focus on something else: rumours that Sunak may stand down or be given the boot before polling day. These are… questionable. Not definitely false, as there are some credible sources reporting it. But they definitely seem a bit nebulous at the moment. However, this is exactly the sort of damaging story that will fill the void when someone as important as the Prime Minister vanishes from his own election campaign for two days.

Sunday was mostly filled with more of this speculation, but looked like it might pass without any major fuck-ups. Mel Stride did exactly as well as anyone familiar with Mel Stride – other than Mel Stride himself – would expect when asked, on the morning media rounds, whether the Prime Minister was going to quit halfway through his own election campaign. No. Absolutely not. Never. That’d be mad.

So… maybe?

Somehow, news of this lull in gaffes made its way through the protective slime that fills Richard Holden’s rejuvenation chamber. With a gelatinous schlooorp-thwuck, he pulled himself free and declared to the world “NOT. ON. MY. WATCH.” Wiped down and zipped into a fresh Human Suit, he headed to the nearest press pool for an interview.

It… well, look. As someone who likes to sometimes pretend to themselves that they’re a writer, it pains me to admit this, but there is no combination of words I can arrange appropriately to convey how much of a fucking train-wreck this interview was. I’ll give it a go, out of a sense of duty, but it won’t get close:

It was like the morning after the leavers’ ball at circus school, when everyone is still over the limit and tries to leave the car park at the same time, causing a huge pileup of tiny cars haplessly plowing into one another. Sad squirts of water from novelty flowers try in vain to put out the flames as the air fills with terrified honking, gigantic polyester trousers burning like a forest fire in the feywild.

That’s the best I’ve got. And it doesn’t come close. Just watch it.

That’s the chairman of the Conservative Party, dear reader. The man nominally in charge of the election campaign. Someone who fled their at-risk seat for a (until this morning) safe seat that immediately tried to deselect him on the basis he’d been parachuted in as the sole candidate up for nomination.

Elsewhere, in a futile attempt to stand out against this backdrop of weaponised fecklessness, Esther McVey managed to get the entire room to laugh at her:

Esther McVey "The Conservative Party always gets the country back on its feet."

*Roaring laughter*

But it's not really funny is it, just another sick lie.pic.twitter.com/g7wCyo7k1Z

— BladeoftheSun (@BladeoftheS) June 9, 2024

This is the current state of the Conservative campaign. Just… what the fuck? It simultaneously defies belief, whilst at the same time explaining a lot about the last few years. Can it get better? I don’t know. Can it get worse? I don’t know that, either. But I suspect someone at CCHQ, hearing me type that, has just uttered the words “hold my beer.”

I have doubtless missed something important in all that. Probably several things. It has been an epochal mega-eruption of political madness; a pyroclastic flow of unforced errors, the imbecilic lava spurting through the skies screaming in inarticulate panic, and steaming gouts of sulphur dioxlied rising in grim plumes from the growing cracks around CCHQ.

Given this unprecedented display of primal devastation, it’s easy to see why, to the simple minds of the Conservative Party, it might look like the End Times.

The opening leg of the campaigns has been fairly unequal, in terms of content and pace. There are clearly some very different strategies at play here, each of which will doubtless shift gears in the weeks to come. Election campaigns are like a dance, in that sense, moving around each other as they ebb and flow.

If you’re thinking waltz or tango, guess again.

So, what’s what on day 12?

Conservatives

The Tories, taking bold action, went on what a charm offensive looks like if you’ve got NPD and untreated tertiary syphilis. They started strong, with National Service, which polled exactly how you’d expect it to. That is to say, deeply unpopular with anyone young enough to either have or be planning to have children, but warmly welcomed by the older demographics. Especially the weird subgroup of Boomers that didn’t fight in the war or do national service themselves, but have somehow convinced themselves otherwise.

Then there was the extra lock for pensions, which didn’t help mitigate the “fuck anyone under 50” vibe. Based on just these two announcements, I’m assuming they’re keeping the repeal of stamp duty and bringing back hanging for nearer polling day, for maximum impact.

These are, obviously, stupid policies. If the election weren’t already lost, I doubt they’d dare so much as mention them. They certainly aren’t to be implemented. Although, from a party that seems loathe to pass any legislation whatsoever if it can possibly help it, maybe that’s a given.

What’s more interesting, to my mind, is the stuff they’ve spoken about since. The stuff which is clearly intended to be a bit more down to Earth. To deliver this important message, they got Michael Gove – who had just announced his retirement – to Do A TikToks that felt a lot like something by Larry David.

In it, he outlined three key policies:

1. People caught fly-tipping will get points on their driving license, in addition to a fine.
2. It’ll be easier for landlords to evict tenants accused of persistent anti-social behaviour.
3. Private firms contracted to repair pavements will be fined if they don’t do a good job.

That mess and noise and those shitty pavements, right? And people say the Conservative Party are out of touch? Bah! What’s more relatable than mess and noise and shitty pavements? Next policy prediction: the quality of in-flight meals.

Unfortunately, there’s a few awkward questions that immediately come to mind, in response to these highly innovative pieces of revolutionary policy. These are:

1. How did these problems become so rife over the past decade?
2. Why are the prisons and probation services so overwhelmed these crimes can’t be dealt with properly?
3. Where will these now homeless hooligans and scrubs all go?
4. What sort of hopelessly corrupt, disinterested cretins have been paying private firms millions of pounds to do a bad job and then doing nothing about it?

Suffice to say, these are not questions the Tories really want answered. I can’t help but wonder why, then, they prompted anyone to ask them.

Labour

Would it even be an election if Labour didn’t break out in a bad case of spontaneous tankies? I’d argue not. Thankfully, this time round, most people don’t care.

That hasn’t stopped the national press trying to make them care, mind, so we’ve been treated to a whole week of headlines about whether Diane Abbott has been forced out and whether Faiza Shaheen’s constant need for attention can ever be sated. Laura Kuenssberg has been in a state of high agitation, naturally, running her own solo Conservative election campaign with inversely proportionate amounts of gusto and integrity.

To be fair, the internal conflict isn’t a great look and was somewhat avoidable, so a demerit to the Starmer campaign office on that. But it really isn’t a big deal and I doubt the majority of people will even register what is, essentially, the cosmic microwave background of Labour bickering. Abbott is 70, so hardly had a long future with the party anyway, even if she hadn’t spent the last however long suspended.

Anyway; the hard left of the party – notably, the SCG – have had a rough run of things and Starmer seems keen to ensure that streak remains unbroken. If the remains of the Corbyn clique want to line up and finish themselves off in the name of Ideological Purity, nobody in the grown-up wing of the party is going to stop them.

This is partly because the centrists faction have only recently wrestled the party away from the hard left, but mostly because an election campaign requires a high degree of discipline. The left of the party are pathologically incapable of that, regularly putting their personal crusades and/or screaming victim complexes before any sense of unity or – apparently – desire to actually win an election. The Abbott affair seems to have blown over for everyone but the click-hungry press, but I imagine Shaheen will keep flogging tickets to the Me Me Me Circus for as long as the Grift Gods allow it. She can be safely ignored.

This leaves only one other real piece of news from the past week, on the Labour side: the Great British Energy project. This is an underrated plan to launch a nationalised clean energy company, presumably fronted by Mel & Sue. The goal is to stabilise our energy security, introduce greater price competition in the energy market, and actually do something to stop us cooking ourselves to death.

Unfortunately, due to being underrated, it probably won’t move the polls much. I’m assuming they picked it first because 1) it is quite hard to criticise and 2) they’re saving the stuff that’ll garner more attention for nearer election day.

Lib Dems

Simply amazing. Not the policies themselves which, as I’ve said elsewhere, are all Pretty Fine, but sweet baby Jesus the campaign. It turns out that Ed Davey – or, at least, his campaign team – possess bona fide marketing genius. While the Tories have been busy trying to scare everyone about Labour, and Labour have been busy trying to scare everyone about Labour, the Liberal Democrats have managed to bring levity, humility, and actual engagement to the table.

Do people care what they have to say on river pollution? No at all. But they do care about seeing Ed Davey careen at high speed down a hill whilst riding a bike. Do you they want to know what Sir Ed has to say about children’s mental health? No, because the very fact it needs saying means most of the country don’t care about children’s mental health (yes, I know). But they 100% do want to see him hurtling down an inflatable water slide.

What the Lib Dems have recognised, I think, is twofold.

First, as you’d expect, there’s a ton of noise from all the parties at the moment. If you want to cut through that to get people’s attention, you need to make them want to give you their attention. It’s a basic marketing principle and I think the Davey campaign is doing an excellent job of leveraging it. People will listen to your boring policies if you’re saying them while you do something insane.

Second, the Liberal Democrats absolutely stuffed themselves in 2019. They took themselves far too seriously, thinking they could turn anti-Brexit sentiment into a parliamentary majority. It was never, ever going to happen and it smacked of a rather off-putting lack of self-awareness. This year, what we’re seeing is far more of a “look, we know we won’t be in government, but this stuff is important and we want you to know there’s a party that supports it” message. And I think that’s good.

But, yes, it is plausible they’ll try to milk this too much and end up looking not serious. I hope that doesn’t happen, but it could. Down that road lays things like Count Binface becoming their candidate for Mayor of London, which fall into the category of things I’d love to see for all the wrong reasons.

More likely, though, is they’ll perform slightly better than predicted in polls and pick up a tidy clutch of additional seats. And, if that happens, I’ll be happy to have seen it as an outcome for a so-far wholly up-beat, positive campaign, because I’d forgotten those could happen.

The Rest

There’s not really been much from the others.

Reform are likely waiting until nearer polling day to announce their policy – Still Being Mad At Europe – because that’s what Uncle Nige dictates. I also assume they’ll try and fend of Tory attempts to woo their base via the usual awfulness one-upmanship that is the lingua franca of the far right, but so far they’ve done roughly nothing. It might be tempting to hope it stays that way, but I’d urge you to resist; that way, disappointment lies.

The Greens are aiming for the biggest ever loss of candidate deposits. They’re standing in nearly every single constituency, despite the fact they’ve got slim-at-best prospects of ending up with more than one seat. As their vote is therefore very localised, this means the polls suggest extremely low Green vote counts in all the others. Ergo, loss of deposits. I’ve seen figures around £250,000 of losses doing the rounds, which feels about right. Not sure how I’d feel if I were a party donor, but then I don’t really understand the Green Party mindset in general.

Probably the biggest news from the And The Rest category is the SNP. In the last few days, it has come to light that they left £450 million of EU funds unspent for so long that they’ve now expired and must be returned to Brussels. Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum – but especially if you’re part of the pro-independence movement – this is a fucking disgrace. It makes the party look like it has been so busy hot-boxing its own farts for the past six years that it hasn’t been doing the parts of its job that actually benefit the people who vote for it.

If this doesn’t get reflected at the polling booth, I’ll be amazed.

And, Now, The Polls

Oh lord. We’ve had a few. Here’s the highlights, but the headline view is this: Labour landslide, no sudden blue wave, I’ve booked the 5th off work in anticipation of how hard I’m going to be celebrating.

This is very gratifying for two reasons. One, I want to see the complete obliteration of the Tory Party down to the atomic level, preferably further. Two, I’ve been saying for a while that I think the narrowing of the polls has already largely taken place.

I won’t cover all of them, but here’s a few of the bigger ones.

YouGov did suggest a bit of a narrowing very early on (only the first two days), but they’ve been one of the outliers in terms of how huge a Labour lead they’ve been showing. Even then, the changes are within the Margin of Error (MoE – get used to seeing it) so are probably best understood as “no change.”

Then there was a big one – 12,000 people – from Redfield & Wilton. This covered the middle of the week and showed Labour’s lead growing, albeit still within MoE. But definitely no meaningful narrowing in response to the Tory blitz of Big and Brilliant Policies (For Ages 65+).

Then there was one which I find hard to interpret as anything other than a desperate bit of propaganda by the Tory-owned JL Partners. Thankfully, it was quickly picked apart once they released their assumptions – anyone who said “don’t know” really meant “Conservative” – meaning any interruption to the Rivers of Salt at CCHQ was brief at best. I’m not linking to it, because the only sources are Xitter and the podcast they’re trying to promote, neither of which I want to drive traffic towards. In summary: it showed a 3% narrowing in favour of the Conservatives.

Finally, there was the double-whammy of polls over this weekend.

Friday was the Electoral Calculus / FindOutNow poll – deliciously, commissioned by the Daily Mail. This was devastating for the Conservatives, predicting them winning a paltry 66 seats. That’s 410 fewer than it predicts for Labour. This was an MRP poll covering most of last week, so high quality and indicative of how people have reacted to the campaigns so far.

The following day, Opinium dropped their own updated poll. This covered up until Friday (31st), so is the most up-to-date snapshot we have. It was teased by one of Opinium’s analysts with a tweet saying “Jesus wept”, which presumably means they think he was a Tory. They’re another pollster who has been giving a far smaller lead to Labour, which only makes the 4% swing in their favour all the more incredible.

There are 32 days left until polls close. At this rate, there may not be a Conservative Party left on day 33.

Here’s how you can help that happen.