None of us are getting any younger

This week: the Tory gaffe machine really kicks into gear; some people on TV who are not the age you think; and some rare good news, as South Wales launches its metro.

You know, on Tuesday lunchtime, as I stared at a couple of examples of the Tory party chairman making a tit of himself and an otherwise blank Google document, I was beginning to wonder whether I might have made a mistake with this whole “launch each edition with a list of Tory gaffes” format thing. By breakfast time on Wednesday, though, it had already become clear this wasn’t going to be a problem. Delightful.

This week’s edition is, I’m going to admit up front, a bit list-ier than normal – for reasons I’m not going to spell out, this is a difficult week for me personally; I hope to be able to start thinking in paragraphs rather than sentences again soon. For the moment, though, that doesn’t seem to matter too much, because look at this lot:

• Firstly, the aforementioned ritual humiliation of party chair Richard Holden. He’s faced accusations that his candidacy for Basildon & Billericay was a stitch up (with just hours to go until the deadline, no other candidate was put forward by the party). This pool clip of the man repeatedly refusing to deny it, and insisting on answering with a non-sequiturs about the Labour party until Sky’s Jon Craig snaps and shouts “This is ridiculous” is amazing.

• Not as amazing as the party’s written response to questions about it, though.

• Holden later tried again, tweeting a letter from the Cabinet Secretary which he said “confirmed” the costings for Labour policies which fed into that dodgy “£2,000 tax increase for each household” claim had come from the civil service. Alas, he seemed not to have noticed the bit where it said the figures were “produced on assumptions provided by special advisers on behalf of ministers”.

(Incidentally, Electoral Calculus gives Holden a 42% of holding the Essex seat he’s been parachuted into. That seems about right to me – Billericay is as Tory as it comes, but Basildon is a new town, and tends to be a bellwether – but it will nonetheless be hilarious if CCHQ stitched up a local selection to make sure the party chair gets a seat, and he then goes on to lose it anyway.)

• The Tory campaign poster which attempts to terrify voters with the thought that Angela Rayner will have influence in Keir Starmer’s government is baffling enough – as many have already pointed out, it’s reminiscent of the 2005 “Vote Blair, get Brown” posters, which were withdrawn when it became clear quite a lot of swing voters actually quite liked that idea. But the really incredible thing is this social media post, which implies that someone in the party is under the impression that glove puppets have strings.

• Hey, remember how Rishi Sunak got in trouble for leaving D-Day early to do an interview with ITV News? The broadcaster has released another clip, in which he says he understood hardship because he grew up without Sky TV. Again: he left D-Day to do this interview.

• The FT’s Alan Beattie notes, incidentally, that Sky didn’t launch until Sunak was 9 – by which time he was at private school.

• In a mark of quite how quickly power has drained away from the current incumbent of Downing Street, that ITV broadcaster has released the awkward pre-chat (“It all just ran over, was incredible, but it ran over”). 

• In the same way, when Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen introduced Rishi Sunak at the manifesto launch with the words “he doesn’t stop half way”, Adam Boulton, formerly of Sky News, quipped, “HS2 does”.

• The launch took place at Silverstone motor racing track in Northamptonshire, thus facilitating an untold number of car crash analogies. One friend noted Sunak’s claim his government had “turned a corner” was perhaps undermined by the fact that race tracks don’t actually have corners, and actually just take you back to where you started; also, that dragging a bunch of journalists on a four hour round trip, just to put them in the kind of room they could have been in anywhere, and then not feeding them, was perhaps not a recipe for good coverage. Another friend – a Tory – tweeted: “May as well launch from a Boeing factory”.

• The same friend noted that this appeared when you clicked on the part of the party’s website marked “achievements”:

• Unnamed Cabinet ministers responded to early drafts of the Tory manifesto by briefing Bloomberg’s Alex Wickham that it was shit. Their issue seems to be that it contained nothing which would “be a game-changer”, which... well, no, it wouldn’t, would it?

• In a transparent attempt to get this newsletter to stop being so mean towards the Tories, though, the manifesto did pledge to abolish National Insurance for the self-employed. Pensions secretary Mel Stride was unnervingly unable to explain what this would do to their – our – pension entitlements.

• In other news, the economy flatlined in April, a new story which might also be said to undermine the government’s case that things have turned the corner.

• Chancellor Jeremy Hunt admitted his seat (2015 majority: 30,000) was now on a knife edge – even as he claimed, based on very little, that the YouGov poll claiming he’d lose it was too pessimistic.

• Meanwhile, defence secretary Grant Shapps made subtext text by telling Times Radio that the best reason to vote Tory was to prevent a Labour “supermajority”.

• In Tunbridge Wells, you may recall, the Tories’ first candidate had been broadcaster Iain Dale, who had immediately stood down after a clip emerged of him saying he “never liked” the town and would “quite happily live somewhere else”. (“I instantly recognised the problems with that,” Dale had said, which, fair.) They’ve replaced him with Neil Mahapatra, who instead of attacking the town is attacking his party, telling the Telegraph it had “poor policies” and had been “disappointing since 2019”. This might, to be fair, be effective.

• In Leeds South West & Morley, Andrea Jenkyns has put Nigel Farage’s face on her leaflets.

• A YouGov poll showed Labour falling three points to 38 and the Tories falling one to 18, with the LibDems surging four to 15. Great news for the Tories, yes? No. Because they’re now only one point ahead of Reform (up one on 17), because the LibDem rise might suggest tactical voting rather than a move away from Labour, and because when Politics Home’s Alan White fed it into the FT’s seat projection tool he got this:

(It’s worth nothing that, the more extreme results get, the less predictive such tools become, but nonetheless: yes, that does show the LibDems as the official opposition. Also, in the name of completism: Greens up one on 8%.)

• Perhaps this is why another Tory attack ad showed them in third place behind the LibDems.

• There is some good news, though: another YouGov poll showed that 55% of voters still don’t think the Tories are running the worst campaign. This is, alas, down from 66% a week earlier.

• And finally, menswear writer Derek Guy chimed in on the question of whether individuals were better at spending their money than the government.

There are still, somehow, 22 days of this to go. If you think you’re tired, just imagine how Rishi Sunak feels. 

La sezione in cui promuovo il mio libro

The Italian translation of 47 Borders has arrived, and man, books seem so much cooler in Italian:

More excitingly, though, I got a review in the Times Literary Supplement, and will be adding “He is genuinely funny” to all bios for speaking engagements/social media accounts/dating apps from here on in. 

You can buy the book, as ever, from Amazon, Waterstones, Stanfords, Foyles, Bert’s Books and all good bookshops

Some strange ages

I’ve never seen Bridgerton – shocking, I know – but I’ve occasionally read the Wikipedia page to help me understand some meme or another. From this, I gather that the lead of the season is a sort of wallflower character, played by former Derry Girl and upcoming Doctor Who guest star Nicola Coughlan.

This seems odd to me, because I know the series is about the regency marriage market and thus, I’m assuming, Coughlan’s character is probably not yet 20. The actress who plays her, though, is 37. This is striking enough in itself – but then I remembered something else, and had a look to see if it could possibly be right, and yes: Anne Bancroft, who played Mrs Robinson in The Graduate was born in 1931. The film came out in 1967.

Nicola Coughlan is playing someone barely out of her teens, while older than Anne Bancroft was at the time she played the iconic example of the sultry older woman.

One can, I’m sure, over-interpret this piece of information. Bancroft was clearly playing someone older than herself – she was only nine years older than Katharine Ross, the actress playing her daughter, and only six years older than her inappropriately-youthful lover Dustin Hoffman. Coughlan, meanwhile, is still probably best known for playing a teenage girl, a role she began playing at 30. It’s possible this comparison tells us something about how our perceptions of age have changed – how the crash and the housing crisis and the internet and a bunch of other things have left millennials, the eldest of whom are now in their 40s, trapped in a sort of permalescence. More likely, though, what it tells us is that working with actual teenagers is a pain in the arse because they’re in school, while the people making The Graduate had limited faith in the ability of their audience to perceive a woman who was actually aged 45 as sexy.

Anyway, I love stuff like this, so here are some other strange or surprising ages of people on TV: