I am CCHQ

It’s not Greg Hands’ fault. He’s just not helping.

Conservative Party Chairman Greg Hands is not responsible for his party’s dire position in the opinion polls. This, presumably, is why he has not taken responsibility for it, or for last week’s two by-election defeats - unlike his predecessor-but-three Oliver Dowden, who resigned in June 2022 following two different by-election defeats, saying someone “must take responsibility”. Oliver Dowden, of course, had a plan, which was to put pressure on then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson to stand down - which he did, a fortnight later. Greg Hands does not have a plan.

This fact is evident from the scattergun nature of the attacks on Labour emerging from Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ). “I am CCHQ”, Hands tweeted a few weeks ago, in response to a now-deleted complaint from a now-deleted Twitter user that he was retweeting everything CCHQ tweeted. To be fair to the irritated tweeter, Hands’ tweets were and are quite irritating. And to be fair to Hands, that’s his job.

If you’re party chairman, in charge of your side’s campaign organisation and attack operation, you have to front up and show confidence in the lines your team is using. That means being a major political spokesperson in the media, showing by example what lines you want other MPs and spokespeople to take. It means making clear what your party’s main message is, about itself and about its opponents. And in a social media age, it does mean tweeting and retweeting the lines and graphics being produced by the staff in your office, rather than undermining their work by distancing yourself from them. All of that is leadership. But leadership is also making sure those lines are any good in the first place.

Under Hands, CCHQ’s lines are not good. To be fair to him, as I wrote in February, they weren’t good before he started. But all the indications are that Hands’ own judgement about what attack lines work and what don’t work is not as acute as it might be. See for example his relentless tweeting of Liam Byrne’s “I’m afraid there is no money” letter, which he took on a national tour during the campaign for the 2023 local elections. The Tories’ loss of over 1,000 councillors, and Hands’ use of a 13-year-old prop, are both examples of the problem of diminishing returns.

More recently, Hands has attempted to popularise the term “Parent Tax” to describe Labour’s plan to impose VAT on private school fees - which if taken literally would make me and millions of other parents of state school children tax avoiders. He did this by highlighting a Telegraph article by a parent who claimed that she had to send her son to a £40,000 a year independent school on the grounds that “he has special needs, and the state system can’t support him… We met a lot of dead ends in state schools - teachers just don’t want to know”. That’s the Chairman of the Conservative Party approvingly sharing a claim that after 13 years of his party being in government, state education is not fit for children who have special needs and the only viable solution is for their parents to spend £40,000 a year on alternatives - a claim which might as well be a party political broadcast for the Labour Party.

The weakness of the CCHQ attack operation was very effectively demonstrated in their response to the Financial Times’ revelation that passages of shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ new book had been plagiarised from other sources including Wikipedia. Reeves’ response is about as good as it could be in the circumstances, but let’s not pretend this is anything other than a bad story. And it’s an open goal for Conservative attacks. 

So how are they doing? Extraordinarily, weirdly badly. I mean: what on earth is going on here?

How is this even an attack? Who is it aimed at? What does it mean? Is Wikipedia bad in itself? This is - it pains me to admit - a funny story, and yet they’ve managed to make it wholly unfunny and, even worse, wholly unpolitical. It doesn’t have a line, or a joke. It just repeats part of the news story.

The accompanying tweet claims that “Labour literally have no new plans for this country. As always Sir Keir and his Wikipedia Shadow Chancellor will take the easy way out every time.” And honestly, I’m baffled. Does having no new plans mean sticking with the current plans? Is that why they’re the easy way out? Aren’t those the Tory plans? Do the Tories think those plans are bad, but easy? Or do they mean they have old Labour plans which, I don’t know, Jeremy Corbyn proposed and which the Tories think are bad, but which just aren’t on any reasonable analysis “the easy way out”? You should not have to think this hard about what a political party is trying to say.

It’s hard to do effective rapid-response attack when you don’t know what your overarching attack message is or when your positive message doesn’t make sense. This is a problem which comes from higher up than Greg Hands, but he isn’t solving it.

It might seem strange that a Greg Hands-led operation has such a confusing message when Hands himself has a history of using crushingly literalistic visual metaphors, such as the time he waved a pair of Keir Starmer-branded flip-flops during his Conservative Party Conference speech to illustrate the claim that Keir Starmer is a flip-flopper, or the time he drove a steamroller to illustrate his support for a flat tax.

A flat tax is, of course, very much not the policy of today’s Conservative Party. Flip-flopper Greg Hands doesn’t support a flat tax any more. He is CCHQ.

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