‘The weather is sh*t’ - How Labour’s victory lap left many with dampened spirits
It was around two years ago that Rishi Sunak refused to go to the Conservative Party conference. At the time for the brief moment when Liz Truss was Prime Minister, those closest to Sunak briefed to the media that his refusal to attend was to let Truss “own” her party's descent into oblivion.
Sunak took delight from watching the conference (in 2022) go so horribly wrong, only for his (in 2023) to go roughly the same way.
When Sunak eventually became Prime Minister, he was met with the challenges of being Prime Minister immediately. He believed that the answer to solving the Rubik’s cube of public approval lay in ‘Comms’.
With the help of marketing bods from Australian PR-guru Lynton Crosby’s CT Group, and a slick social media strategy crafted by Clerkenwell Brothers’ alumni Cass Horowitz and Liam Booth-Smith, Sunak took to social media. Towards the end of every week, without fail, for months, Sunak posted a thread on X/Twitter outlining every positive thing he'd done over the week.
For critics of Sunak, it was both funny and extremely sad.
For every ‘Sunak achievement’, the response was almost universally negative from those keen to remind him of the contrasting problems that most Britons faced.
Sunak’s boundless, Disney levels of positivity and optimism not only rubbed most people up the wrong way, but it made him look out of touch and detached. The sadness emerged from that. He wasn’t being honest about it, essentially, and what he said felt like a distraction.
The perception in society was that the Prime Minister, with his jaunty graphics and memes, seemed blissfully unaware to the problems inherent in society. Worse still, nobody would believe him if he claimed to have the solution - not least because many considered him (and his party) to be the cause.
Adding to Sunak's challenges was the perception that he was often a victim of circumstance. His efforts to gain traction with his policies were frequently mocked on this page, as any positive impact was quickly overshadowed—sometimes within hours—by some scandal or another that dominated the headlines.
It was David Cameron in recent times who described the fact that politicians would have less problems if those working behind the scenes didn’t have a compulsive habit of, “snorting cocaine and sodomising each other.”
Labour are in a similar position now, although quite how much cocaine and sodomy is involved is unclear. For now.
What can be assumed, at least, is that Sunak - as he did with Truss - probably took great delight at the fact that the new government's inaugural group human centipede [or conference] was overshadowed by the ‘dodgy gifts, frock gate and salaries for SpAds’ stories dominating the news. The feverish reaction in the right-wing media purporting hyperbolic commentary pieces that discuss how quickly Labour have fallen apart was the same.
One of the worst culprits was veteran pundit Andrew Neil.