‘Isaac, this election victory. Is it in the room with you now?’ - Rwanda Week, the worst rebellion ever, and how Sunak still managed to lose... even though he won
So-called “elections guru” Isaac Levido is a fairly interesting character in political strategy circles; some attribute a significant portion of the Conservative Party's success in 2019, his penchant for crass memes and less is more approach to sloganeering, to Levido directly.
Yet despite his success, when Levido gave a speech to the 1922 Committee on Monday evening laying out the extent of the hill the Tories had to climb to achieve a general election victory, his words went largely ignored by MPs.
To a room full of Conservative MPs, Levido laid out an approach - one based around this idea that the Conservatives should, essentially, unite or die if they are to stand any chance of winning the future general election.
Previously, it was a message used by Rishi Sunak’s chief-of-staff Liam Booth-Smith after the government returned from Summer recess, and around the same time as Sunak’s Net Zero car crash.
‘What’s most dangerous in the run-up to election year is that most people have given up caring about what you say’ - what Sunak’s ‘Net Zero’ speech really meant, and its consequences
One of the greatest challenges facing Rishi Sunak right now is not necessarily climate change. Climate change and the broader issue of ‘the environment’ exists, but it is changing the perception among the general public that the government isn’t in a state of perma-chaos and therefore (often) too distracted from even tackling ‘the issue’.
Booth-Smith, at the time, was said to have told those present in a meeting that they should quit if they did not believe the Conservatives could win the next election. It resulted in the departure of Downing St’s Director of Communications Amber de Botton.
It was also said that he even went so far as to tell those who were honest enough to quit at that point that he’d personally help them find a new job.
Levido has reiterated this same message for months now, speaking of ‘narrow paths’ and highlighting how, with division, the path is becoming ‘narrower and steeper’: “it’s time to get serious” he told MPs on Monday evening following a YouGov MRP poll which indicated that Labour would achieve a 120-seat landslide at the next election.
There was nothing exceptional about the poll, however; the conclusion it came to was more or less the same as virtually every other poll conducted over the last 2 years.
Levido told MPs to ignore the poll, in fact.
“The people who organised this poll and analysed and timed the release of it”, he said, “seem to be intent on undermining this government and our party.”
Noting that the poll itself was suspiciously commissioned by an unknown Conservative think-tank led by Lord Frost and apparently other ‘Sunak sceptics’, Levido went on: “They seem to be throwing in the towel, and are more interested in what happens after the election rather than fighting it,” he said.
Despite this, however -