But their emails

The general election means the inbox of every journalist in Britain is bursting at the seams.

The party of labour is doing rather well at accumulating capital. Figures published by the Electoral Commission yesterday and reported by the Evening Standard, among others, showed that the party on course to form Britain’s next government had raised £8.6m in the first three weeks of the general election campaign. The Tories, by contrast, had raised only £1.2m. By the same point in 2019, they’d raised £12.2m, around ten times that.

The difference in party fundraising efforts can be credited to a number of things. Major donors tend to follow power; it’s also harder to persuade people to fund a campaign which they know you’re going to lose. But I wonder if American politics, and the rise of the plaintive fundraising email, has played a role too. Because since the election was called, the emails from the Labour party simply haven’t stopped.¹

The first email landed in my inbox at 1820hrs on 22 May, roughly an hour after the Prime Minister stopped standing in the pouring rain without an umbrella to tell us that he had a plan. It came from Keir Starmer, and it had the subject line (I’m going to bold these up, for reasons of clarity) “Change.” That full stop feels important if you’re trying to get your Obama on. 

Since then, the party has been emailing with a frequency that makes the Next Door notifications I keep meaning to switch off seem hinged. I’m not going to list them all, that would be madness. But to give you a flavour:

• 22 May, 2117 hrs (presumably aiming at the pub crowd), from UK Labour HQ: Please contribute £3 to become a Day One Donor

• 23 May, from Labour.org.uk: Every contribution counts

• 24 May, from Team Labour: £1

• 26 May, from David Evans, General Secretary of the Labour Party: We’re humbled. (Please do not mistake this humility for not wanting any more money.) 

• 28 May, from “Oliver Ryan, Labour Candidate for Burnley” (never been there in my life): I hate to ask, but it’s important. (I don’t think you mean that, Oliver.)

• 29 May, from “Team Labour”: WOW, followed by some emojis. That one was followed the very next day by another email from “Team Labour” headed “Humbly asking”, which makes me wonder if those two were intended to go out the other way around.

• 30 May, from “Ed’s iPhone”: a very short note. (The Ed in question is Miliband; the lack of capital letters is a nice touch.)

And so it’s gone on: these emails have come every day, often twice. On 8 June, from UK Labour HQ: We are asking respectfully. Later the same day, from Team Labour: ridiculous (something to do with the Tories changing funding limits, which is the exact thing the Labour party is making the most of by sending that very email). On 16 June, from Team Labour: “Can we hit this goal in 60 minutes?” The next day, from an ungrateful UK Labour HQ: “We’re doubling our goal, Jonn”. On 20 June, from David Evans: “I do not make this ask lightly”. On 21 June, UK Labour HQ: “Lettuce explain”, with an emoji of, well, you get the point.

This week, though, panic seems, irrationally, to have kicked in, and the party is stepping up the guilt. Labour’s Rapid Response Team, 22 June: “Please, Jonn”. David Evans, 23 June: “I have some budget decisions to make”. UK Labour HQ, 24 June: “Not the news we wanted to share”. The news in question is the Tories have a “massive campaign pot that they intend to spend in the final days of the campaign”. Citation, I fear, needed.

My personal favourite came, on Tuesday, from Imelda Staunton, the Queen herself (or, if you prefer, Professor Umbridge): “A personal request”. And would you believe that her personal request involves a donation to the Labour party?

Two days ago, David Evans emailed again, to say, “We need a surge of donations today. I say this to be transparent, not to alarm you”. Rest assured, David, I remain entirely un-alarmed.

I’ve had substantially fewer emails from the Conservative Party – I’m presumably on their list because I’ve attended Tory conference, but I can’t definitively say that they’re not absolutely bombarding those with whom they’ve had a rather deeper relationship.

The first email of the election campaign from the Tories did not actually arrive until a whole 24 hours after Rishi Sunak had stopped speaking, which feels a telling comment on the party’s level of election readiness. It came from the party chair, Richard Holden, who is currently facing an unexpectedly difficult fight for Basildon & Billericay, where the local party didn’t want him. And its terrifying subject line was “Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer”. 

Other highlights have included:

• 24 May, from The Conservative Party: “If you liked Corbyn, you’ll love this Jonn” (Keir Starmer comes in multiple colours like a doll, apparently; no I am not including the photoshops).

• 28 May, from Mel Stride: “++++++++”. (This is about “the triple lock plus”, although where they’ve found a whole four other locks from I have no idea.)

• 1 June, from Alan Mabbutt OBE (he’s the party treasurer, and yes, they really do put “OBE” in the “from” box): “Disappointing”. It’s about how online donations have slowed.

• 4 June, from Tony’s iPhone: “Tick Tock”. What this means, beyond “the debate is about to start” – i.e. the time at which a thing is meant to happen is getting closer, which is literally always true – is entirely unclear. It’s also entertaining that the Tony in question is Tony Lee, director of campaigning, who was probably not enough of a household name to justify that “from” tag until right up until the point the Gambling Commission began investigating him and thus as a side effect told us all who he was.

• More emails that same day came from Rishi Sunak (“Here’s what we just saw”) and Richard Holden (“[JUST IN] Rishi Sunak wins debate”; sure, why not).

• 13 June, from James Cleverly: “Clock”, with the words “Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock” visible afterwards, as if the Home Secretary has been driven off his rocker by the stress of the election campaign and now believes himself to be a clock.

• The same day from Rishi Sunak: “Clear Plan vs Complete Waffle”. With more sodding emojis.

Oh, and then the absolute worst one, the point at which the party which has governed Britain for 32 of the last 14 years decided that, hey, at this point there was really no reason not to torch the last lingering shreds of any reputation it ever had as the natural party of government: 

Yesterday, the party called itself “Tax Check UK”, a name its press office had briefly adopted on Twitter during Wednesday’s debate, and sent out the following:

This is an email from a political party that is doing its best to pretend, momentarily, that it isn’t just that at all. That really doesn’t feel okay.

All in all, it makes the rather old-fashioned missives from the Liberal Democrats (“All aboard!”, “The Edward I know”, “Lib Dems now on TikTok!”) seem almost sweet.

Anyway, to sum up: the Americanisation of British politics has a lot to answer for. 

Some other things

1. “I do not recall this concern with quaint concepts like effective opposition or loser’s consent being a feature of Hannan’s views in the months I was writing a column about them every week.” Anger, denial, bargaining… Today’s New Statesman column is on how the right-wing press is rapidly cycling through the stages of grief.

2. Is Milton Keynes the answer to Britain’s housing crisis? Me in the FT on new towns, green belt, Copenhagen’s “five fingers” and the vexed question of where to build. 

3. I’ve got a big – literally big, it’s well over 2,000 words – comment piece going up with the Guardian on, I think, Monday, which just lists things this government has screwed up over the last 14 years. I suspect, when my editor asked me for it, he was expecting something light-hearted and jokey. But as it turns out, the knowledge that every single sentence contains thousands of ruined lives did not make me feel very funny.

4. And finally, if you’re wondering what to watch on Thursday night as the results come on, the team from Paper Cuts and Oh God, What Now? will be livestreaming on YouTube from the Podmasters studios all night, so you can see us get increasingly hysterical on your phones, while watching the results on your TV. For fun!

Oh, and lastly, you should buy my book:

The window at Foyles, whose manager was kind enough to tweet me that it was “selling well”.

You can buy it from Amazon, Waterstones, Stanfords, Foyles, and Bert’s Books.

1.  Full disclosure: I have, at times, been a member of the Labour party, which is almost certainly affecting which emails I actually get. Please do not confuse this with particularly liking them.