I genuinely didn't think a major party's campaign could be this bad at a technical level. I've covered a lot of campaigns that have bad ideas, but not 'we did a rally, basically on our YouTube, with our last election winner looking like a corpse, after the ten o'clock news'.
Their fundraising emails regularly include things that anyone who sends emails for a living will look at and go 'wow, that just nuked your open and delivery rate'! The audio of Sunak is often just really poor! I basically did not think a party's competence floor could get this low.
Do you have any sense of... why? Like, is it more a top-down "Sunak hired incompetent people" or a bottom-up "anybody talented saw the writing on the wall and didn't want this on their CV"? (My assumption is "both", obviously.)
It's a lot of things. I would probably put the start date at July 2020, when Isaac Levido leaves CCHQ to found Fleetwood Strategy, which took a lot of institutional memory with him that hasn't come back when CCHQ hired Levido/Fleetwood to do the campaign.
Johnson did not push out nearly all the moderates, and there was relatively little CCHQ turnover between 2017 and 2019. Many of the 21 whipless MPs came back, many were on the right of the party, like Philip Hammond.
So what happened between 2019 & now?
Back then you had a political machine that delivered an 80 seat majority to Johnson.
Today it looks like half the gears are missing, all the tyres are flat & most of the doors have fallen off.
They can't all have scarpered, can they?
Essentially, in 'peacetime', the staff of a HQ when the party is in government is basically 1) the field operations 2) stakeholder management, i.e. party selections, donor management etc. 3) a vestigial press operation.
All parties do this, but for rulebook reasons that need not detain us, the Tories do it much more, so their ability to regain institutional memory rests a lot on the prime minister and their choice of party chair.
And it takes time to get it all whirring back up to speed, calling in extra staff, printing all the literature, tapping the army of volunteers to do the foot slogging ...
The sort of thing you do *before* standing in the rain without an umbrella.
Yeah - one of the many mind-breaking things about this election is that Rishi Sunak managed to surprise the Cabinet and clearly did it too early, but also still ended up with the betting scandal.
Head Boy Rishi really has got the political instincts of week old roadkill, hasn't he?
I'm beginning to believe getting rained on was the highlight of his campaign.
One big factor in Johnson's favour was having the voter-repellant Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, who caused 1.4m voters to switch away from Labour.
That electoral benefit has been comprehensively removed by Starmer.
the engine blew up due to massively excessive partying; the driver, Blojob Johnson kept crashing it, as he was permanently pissed and off his face on charlie!
