It never rains...(Free to Read)

Sunak's soaking is the image of the 2024 election, but the other party leaders are also up to their necks

It’s been a tough week for political leadership. Rishi Sunak left umbrella-less in the rain in Downing Street -  or should that be “Drowning Street”, boom boom! That is the image of the 2024 general election right there.  A shrunken man dripping wet and struggling to be heard. The Prime Minister’s words were drowned by the “Stop Brexit” man playing Labour’s 1997 theme tune “Things Can Only Get Better” at ear-splitting volume outside the gates. The police seemed quite happy to condone this disturbance of the civic peace, which tells you something about relations with the boys in blue.

Then a photocell under an “Exit” sign on a campaign plane journey and, to top it all, a photo call near the Belfast shipyard that built the Titanic. They must really hate him in the Number Ten press office. The producers of “The Thick Of It” would have rejected all this as implausible. The campaign is only three days old and already the Tories are  sinking beneath the waves. No wonder over 70 Tory MPs, including Michael Gove, have taken to the lifeboats. Other Tories were telling every journalist they could find that this snap election was “madness”.

What a gift to Sir Keir Starmer. Mind you he hasn’t had the most brilliant week himself. The Labour leader seems to think he can get elected solely on the basis of not being Rishi Sunak.  He may not be wrong about that, of course, but I’m not sure he can last six weeks playing the invisible man. His one campaign theme seems to be to bring “stability” after 14 years of Tory chaos.  I’m sure many voters would like to see that. But there is a problem with this message.  If you want stability why vote for a party that has always stood for radical change?  Labour is not a Conservative Party however much Sir Keir tries to emulate the grey man, John Major, from 1992.

In his first set-piece interview on BBC Today, Starmer spent 20 minutes saying what he wouldn’t do in office. These were mostly the things he promised he would do when he stood for the leadership of his party four years ago, like abolishing tuition fees. I’m not sure British voters really warm to someone who says one thing and does another. If he effectively lied to his party to get elected as Labour leader how can we trust what he says to get elected as Prime Minister? That Ming vase that everyone says he is carrying so delicately until polling day may just fall crashing to the floor if the media start interviewing some of the legion of unrepentantly-radical Labour MPs, like Zara Sultana and John McDonnell, who are keeping stumm right now.  They are assuredly already planning how to disrupt Starmer’s cosplaying conservatism after 4th July.

But when it comes to self-destructive campaign launches no one does it better than the SNP leader John Swinney.  “Honest” John opened his account by defending expenses fraud. OK: he didn’t exactly condone the former SNP minister, Michael Matheson’s, attempt to claim his £11,000 iPad data bill under parliamentary expenses when it had been actually been run up by his sons while watching football.  But the First Minister did refuse to back calls to sack the miscreant minister and even criticised the Holyrood standards committee in its surely rather lenient punishment of suspending Matheson without pay for a month. Mr Swinney should have said nothing at all except endorsing the committee’s report and saying Matheson had admitted his mistake.  Appearing to defend the indefensible is a crazy way to start an election campaign.

Swinney complained at First Minister’s Questions that Tory members of the ethical watchdog committee had “politicised” the affair, and made outspoken comments pre-judging the outcome. Well I’ve got news for Mr Swinney: Holyrood is a  parliament where everything is political - even fiddling expenses. Swinney insisted that the committee had been “prejudiced” by remarks made by Conservative members who had not given “my friend and colleague” Matheson a fair deal.  Even if that were the case, now is not the time to argue it. As every ordinary employee knows, fiddling expenses of a five figure sum would normally lead to instant dismissal, if not a report to the police. £11,000 is a lot of money to most of voters. And while Matheson agreed to pay it back, this doesn’t alter the fact that he attempted to defraud the taxpayers who pay for MSP’s expenses.

As if that wasn’t enough, almost as John Swinney rose to speak at the SNP campaign launch, Police Scotland announced that they’d sent their formal report to  the prosecution service charging the former SNP chief executive, Peter Murrell, with “embezzling party funds”.

Just imagine what image these two unrelated events paint in the mind of the average voter? Nicola Sturgeon’s husband charged with, effectively, stealing party funds while the John Swinney defends an SNP minister playing fast and loose with his expenses. It all sound like the early chapters of a John Rebus investigation. And there’s no prizes for guessing who dunnit.

For paid subscribers only, here’s some of my other observations on the week.