Things To Do In Richmond When You’re Dead

This week: Rishi Sunak’s election campaign is going swimmingly! Plus, some notes on the many Richmonds of the world, and a big scary wildcat.

I started Sunday’s bit about the Tories’ national service policy with a round-up of campaign gaffes thus far. It was meant to be a drop intro, a quick and accessible paragraph to ease us into a potentially wonkish story – but there were a lot of gaffes, and I started enjoying myself, and suddenly I had a lengthy bulleted list that took up a good chunk of the newsletter. And everyone else seemed to enjoy it too, so I’ve been vaguely thinking I might keep doing that, a couple of times a week until election day. 

There’s just one slight problem with this plan: they’ve continued messing stuff up at such a rate I’m no longer sure a couple of times a week will be enough. Really, look at everything that’s gone wrong¹ for the Tories in the last three days alone: 

• In the hours after the national service policy was unveiled, the Northern Ireland minister Steve Baker said that nobody had bothered to ask him whether reintroducing national service might possibly have any implications in Northern Ireland.

• Meanwhile,  the media had identified multiple public statements by defence ministers arguing that bringing back national service was a stupid idea, which they had made within the last week.

• In another sign of how well thought through the policy was, junior minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan went on TV and declined to rule out the possibility that parents could face punishment if their 18-year-old children declined to do it, even though that means punishing adults for the behaviour of other adults.

• The Prime Minister was reported to be considering requiring applicants for public sector jobs to have completed national service. This would a) mean British applicants would face a barrier foreign applicants would not, and b) inevitably worsen the already terrible public sector recruitment crisis to the point the whole country collapsed.

• All this went down so well with the President of the Birmingham Young Conservitives that he publicly quit and joined the LibDems.

• Even as the Tories were piling the pressure onto young people, they were reducing it on the old, with “triple lock plus”, or “the quadruple lock”: a promise that the public sector pension would never, ever be taxed. Some observers noticed, alas, that it was only facing tax in the first place because Tory Chancellors have repeatedly failed to raise tax thresholds in line with inflation.

Image: The Onion.

(Settle in lads, we’re barely getting started.)

• Rishi Sunak did an entire speech, on television, with his back to the cameras sent to cover it. (“That’s why he thinks the country is going in the right direction,” one friend quipped, “he’s facing the wrong way.”)

• The High Court ordered the government to demand that it explain exactly when the removal of asylum seekers to Rwanda would begin, on the grounds that the Prime Minister’s political statements had contradicted the government's legal arguments.

• Michael Gove, who was reported to have told Rishi Sunak “Who dares wins. You dared – you will win”, announced he would neither dare nor win, and wouldn’t be standing for MP for Surrey Heath again. (This is in some ways strange as it’s a seat that, even now, the Tories seem all but certain to keep.)

• Backbencher Lucy Allen did her betrayal in a rather less subtle way, and simply announced she was backing Reform. The Tory party has suspended her, but since she’s not standing again she probably doesn’t care.

• Liz Truss, meanwhile, is scheduled this afternoon to give an interview with Lotus Eaters, a hard right platform run by a man who once publicly debated whether he would rape Labour’s Jess Phillips.

• Greg Hands – probably the least impressive recent chair of the Conservative party, which is quite some accolade – upset everyone in the St Paul’s School parents WhatsApp group after using it to promote Tory attack lines on Labour’s plans to introduce VAT on private school fees.

• The aforementioned Steve Baker, perhaps not unnaturally under the circumstances, decided he wouldn’t cancel the holiday the Prime Minister’s earlier statements had assured him he was safe to take, and told journalists he was discharging his campaign responsibilities from the poolside in Greece.

• Someone at CCHQ accidentally forwarded an email, in which political advisors blamed Tory MPs for the poor start to the election campaign, to the MPs in question. It immediately, and inevitably, made its way to the Times.

• And finally, Rishi Sunak played football.

(Oh, and a Sky journalist was thrown out of a Tory event live on television, but that really should have been in the last list, sorry.)

It’s not quite true to say that everything is rosy on the Labour side. The Sun’s deeply embarrassing attempt to brand Starmer “Sir Sleepy”, on the grounds that he’s vanished from the campaign trail, can probably be discounted because:

1. he’s done no such thing, and 

2. copying Donald Trump’s attacks on Joe Biden may not help when Rishi Sunak next meets with the US president next week.

But Jeremy Corbyn is standing in Islington North as an independent, and could plausibly win. Meanwhile, the decision to bar Diane Abbott, the first black woman ever to make it to Parliament back in 1987, from standing again next door in Hackney smells suspiciously like someone in the leader’s office still cares more about factional grudges than they do about literally anything else. 

Nonetheless, while it’s not clear how many of the gaffes listed above will even be noticed by those who aren’t as terminally online as I, the cumulative effect surely will. The herd instinct in the media means that, once the press has decided on a narrative, it can be hard to shift it again. People are now looking for Tory gaffes to add to the list: Labour ones, in stark contrast to much of the last 14 years, are more likely to pass unnoticed.

There’s a point in a gig at which a comedian has so badly lost the audience they could tell the funniest joke in the world, and still be greeted by silence, while the heckler who shouts out “Wanker!” brings the house down. There’s a point in a football match² at which a team no longer thinks it can win, and thus makes losing inevitable. If the Tories hadn’t hit that point before, they’ve surely reached it now. Everything they’re doing suggests a panicked core vote strategy.

And it’s not clear it’ll succeed even at that. Sunak is said to have called the election because nothing else seemed to be shifting the polls. If YouGov is to be believed, they are finally moving – although not in the direction he was hoping.

We’ve got five more weeks of this. Or, at current rates: 150 more gaffes.

Book, etc

One of the big unanswered questions of this election campaign is how I will use it to keep promoting my new book, A History of the World in 47 Borders. The Independent’s John Rentoul has described it as “a sort of Horrible Histories for grown-ups” which is about the loveliest review I could ask for really. Also, a friend of a friend said this:

But nonetheless, I don’t know how to get people to remember it exists while we’re all looking at an election.

And so, I’m going to need your help. Buy it, please! You can do so from Amazon, Waterstones, Stanfords, Foyles – and Bert’s Books in Swindon, which does a fancy thing with a ribbon, and which I can highly recommend.

Some Richmonds

Rishi Sunak is MP for Richmond. If you’re British, or a fan of “well, it was good, once” Premier League sitcom Ted Lasso, the place that name is most likely to bring to mind is a plush riverside suburb eight miles south west of central London. The town of Richmond (not Richmond-upon-Thames: that’s the borough) was once in Surrey, and offers all sorts of sights, not least London’s biggest park and some very fine stretches of riverside, which make it one of the best bits of the capital to visit on a sunny afternoon

That, however, is not the place which Rishi Sunak is MP for. The Prime Minister instead represents the small market town of Richmond, North Yorkshire. The Surrey one is a fair bit bigger than the Yorkshire one (it contains a sizeable chunk of its borough’s population of around 200,000, compared to just 8,500 for the market town). Nonetheless, it lies not in the constituency of Richmond, but in Richmond Park, named for its most prominent feature.

So why does the tiny Yorkshire one get the name? Short answer, because it came first. Longer answer, with many, many other Richmonds in it, to follow.