There's no avoiding political gaffes - they are everywhere

Jacob Rees-Mogg has apologised for an election “gaffe.” He said on
LBC, of the Grenfell Tower fire: “The more one’s read over the weekend
about the report and about the chances of people surviving, if you
just ignore what you’re told and leave you are so much safer. And I
think if either of us were in a fire, whatever the fire brigade said,
we would leave the burning building. It just seems the common sense
thing to do. And it is such a tragedy that that didn’t happen.”

The attack on Rees-Mogg was that the comment was smug and uncaring.
That might be how it feels reading the words. But that was not the
tone when listening to the clip. His mistake was to say “common sense”
rather than “instinctive”. Sometimes an instinctive response can be
wrong. Of course, we know that in the case of the Grenfell Tower fire
it was right. Many residents followed their instincts and left the
building and survived. Sir Martin Moore-Bick, the inquiry judge, said
a decision to evacuate should have taken place once it was clear that
the fire had spread out of control. In his report, Moore-Bick says
this was, or should have been, “reasonably obvious” despite the risks
of evacuation.

Rees-Mogg “gaffe” was exercising empathy not in lacking it. He gave a
personal response. Had he robotically mouthed generalised official
platitudes he would have been fine. At least in terms of the media.
Voters have a habit of making their own decisions about the
acceptability of a particular utterance from our elected
representatives. Politicians who are entirely risk-averse or evasive
in their comments do not always flourish.

Boris Johnson has given us an abundance of “gaffes”. Entire books have
been written about them. To take one example. During the 2006
Conservative Party Conference, he criticised Jamie Oliver’s efforts
for healthy eating in schools. Boris declared: “I say let people eat
what they like. Why shouldn’t they push pies through the railings?” A
media frenzy ensued. The new Tory leader David Cameron was upstaged.
His efforts to give the Party a prim, goody goody persona were
sabotaged. Michael Howard knew the feeling. In 2004, within a year of
becoming Tory leader, Howard had sent Boris off to Liverpool to
apologise for a leader in the Spectator about the Hillsborough
disaster.

With this record, it is surely right for Boris to err on the side of
leniency. All the more so as a gaffe no longer has to be
current. Much political effort is now spent on “offence archaeology”.
Whenever a new candidate is announced by a political party the rivals
are busily engaged in scrolling down the Twitter feed in the hope of
spotting some crass comment made in 2015 – which they can then
announce they are very “concerned” to have discovered.

Often it will be something advocating killing people, or, at least,
suggesting their death would be a welcome occurrence. This is tricky
territory for those with ambitions to go into public life. “I’ll kill
you,” is often a statement uttered that is not meant to be taken
literally – to a relative, friend or work-related acquaintance. It
might reflect genuine exasperation or anger – or be an entirely
light-hearted response to a practical joke. In the age of social media
making such reference casually – perhaps late at night after a few
drinks can prove ill-judged.

In the interests of political balance, I will offer a couple of
examples from the last week from each of the main parties. Francesca
O’Brien, the Conservative candidate for Gower, was found to have made
the following comment in 2014 while Channel 4 programme Benefits
Street: “My blood is boiling, these people need putting down.” Then we
have Zarah Sultana, the Labour candidate for Coventry South. In
response to a post claiming nobody’s death should be celebrated she
tweeted, in 2015: “Try and stop me when the likes of Blair, Netanyahu
and Bush die.”

Both have apologised. Neither has withdrawn or been deselected (at the
time of writing). So the electors of Gower and Coventry South will
have to decide how forgiving to be.

Each case is different. But one rule that tends to emerge is that
going into hiding doesn’t work. You can defend a comment, apologise,
“clarify”. But dodging the media is probably a mistake. Oliver Letwin
was the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury during the 2001 General
Election. Conservative policy was to cut public spending by £8
billion. But he expressed an “aspiration” that savings of £20 billion
could be found. He went into hiding for the campaign which just made
it more of a story. How much better if he had taken to the airwaves
and said they certainly identified £8 billion of wasteful spending and
hoped to find £20 billion – allowing tax cuts without any harm to
public services. He could have reeled off plenty of examples until the
interviewers got bored and switched off the cameras.

Jeremy Corbyn’s survival as leader of the Labour Party puts the gaffe
assessment into perspective. He has given a long list of the most
outrageous statements. But they are consistent, ideologically coherent
and sincerely held. That is far more alarming than being caught out
for a slip of the tongue – like David Cameron at the 2015 general
election saying he supported West Ham, when his football team is Aston
Villa. Or Jeremy Hunt saying his wife is Japanese, when she is actually
Chinese. Corbyn’s expressions support for Venezuela, or the IRA or
Hamas are not “gaffes”. He really means it.

Then again in each incident, we have to consider whether such remarks
are merely an embarrassing lapse of revealing something deeper.
Margaret Thatcher tended to be careful about what she said – though
her reference to there being “no such thing as society” was a gift to
her enemies in seeking to caricature her philosophy. But after
Nicholas Ridley died she paid tribute to him saying: “He was often
pilloried for what the critics described as his ‘gaffes’. But one
man’s gaffe is another man’s home truth. Even pearls begin with grit.”

Anyway, expect plenty more over the next month. It is as if – as with
manifestos, election broadcasts and photo opportunities, there is a
quota to be filled. So whether the outrage is genuine or synthetic
there is bound to be fresh example every day or two. Some instances,
fairly or unfairly, will help the electorate to confirm their minds as
to what politicians “really think.” But I doubt they will actually
change the outcome of the election.