PR blunders need to stop if the Tories want to win the election
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The general election campaign officially starts today after parliament was dissolved in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Unfortunately for the Tories, their campaign started with a 6:30am tweet from Andrew Bridgen apologising for the extraordinarily foolish comments he made when trying to explain away the even more extraordinarily foolish comments Jacob Rees-Mogg made yesterday. The Tories simply cannot afford blunders like this and terrible publicity it creates.
The 2017 general election is remembered as a disaster for the Conservative Party because of the ineptitude of the campaign and the loss of Theresa May’s majority. Considering that the Tories increased their share of the vote to its highest since Margaret Thatcher’s victory of 1983, it’s interesting to consider what could have been if the Tory campaign hadn’t been littered with blunders, unforced errors and failures of communication.
Now Boris is running the same strategy as Theresa May in an attempt to gain a majority sizeable enough to get Brexit done and implement a domestic agenda. To succeed, he needs to reduce the Brexit Party vote, minimise unforced errors and start on the front foot. So far, not so good.
Boris is hoping to win over working-class voters who voted Leave and are turning away from Labour because of Brexit. In many cases these are people who wouldn’t ordinarily vote Tory and may have never done so before. Boris still appeals across Party lines and has a good chance of cutting right through Labour Leave seats. The last thing he needs is these voters to be reminded of the cliché image of the out-of-touch Tory toff who doesn’t understand or care about the poor.
Perhaps this should have been kept in mind before Jacob Rees-Mogg was put in the Cabinet, and especially before he was sent on media rounds to advance government policy. A lot of people seem to think Rees-Mogg is a highly intelligent man, but he was oblivious to the poor optics of launching his campaign in front of his ludicrously grand fireplace. Nor did he think it wise to adopt an air of caution when discussing a tragedy of 72 poor people dying in a dilapidated tower block.
His suggestion that the people who died in the Grenfell Tower lacked ‘common sense’ for not ignoring the fire brigade’s advice have got his Party’ campaign off to the worst possible start. The optics of a patrician Tory saying he would have left the building because it was the ‘common sense thing to do’ couldn’t get much worse.
Rees-Mogg has long played up to his public persona as the proud to be posh, honourable member of the 19th century. In many ways it has served him well, giving him a certain amusing appeal that can cross class lines. His comments pierced that image and reminded the public that Rees-Mogg is a modern-day aristocrat who has no understanding of how the other half lives. I’m more than happy to give him the benefit of the doubt, but that only means his comments were profoundly ill-considered, ignorant and stupid rather than malicious. This was terrible politics 101.
His sincere apology came quickly and how Conservative HQ must have hoped they could immediately draw a line under it. Then stepped in Andrew Bridgen to turn a bad day into a rolling PR disaster with an incredibly inept attempt at defending his colleague. He started well by calling the comments ‘clumsy’ and saying what Rees-Mogg ‘failed to realise is that in a life-threatening and stressful situation most people will defer to the advice of an authority figure’. Unfortunately, he then accidentally doubled down on the original blunder by saying Rees-Mogg would have escaped the inferno because he’s ‘clever’.
Well done Andrew, you’ve managed to prove that Jacob Rees-Mogg is indeed the idiot’s idea of what a clever person is like.
I agree with comments of our very own editor Daniel Johnson in his piece today, the media and especially the BBC did devote a disproportionate amount of time to reporting on Rees-Mogg’s comments. There is a tendency to focus too much on the latest social media storm and make it an even bigger story.
However, that’s just the reality of politics today, rightly or wrongly. The comments caused outrage which spread quickly and it became a big story. The Conservatives need to learn from this quickly and keep such PR errors to a minimum because they simply can’t afford to make too many mistakes. This election is unpredictable and we need only look back to 2017 to know that the Tory strategy is risky.
