Mud-wrestling
In politics, your opponents’ biggest weaknesses are your assets, but they are also your liabilities. Every criticism you make of an opponent’s mistakes - however justified - sets an implicit standard: this is how politicians should be judged, we are happy to be judged on this basis too, our opponents have fallen short, we won’t.
Sometimes these criticisms imply standards that are big: the economy crashed on their watch (and we will manage it better so it won’t on ours). The complexity of the economy means that plausible defences - the global economy faced problems, we weren’t the only country affected, it’s not reasonable to say that we are entirely responsible - will get more of a hearing from some people than from others. But the simplicity of the attack means that when you face your own economic headwinds it will be thrown back at you too, and the “look at the international context” defence will be exactly as successful, and unsuccessful.1
Sometimes they imply much more straightforward standards: easier to define, harder to wriggle out of. If your opponent acts slowly to deal with a problem, then when your side finds itself with a similar problem, the clock starts ticking.
In that respect, the Tories won a skirmish with Labour that they started when Keir Starmer did not immediately suspend Azhar Ali as the Labour candidate for Rochdale, after the Mail on Sunday revealed a recording of Ali expounding an antisemitic conspiracy theory at a private meeting. Labour did not withdraw support for Ali’s candidacy until the Tuesday, leaving them without a candidate in Rochdale at all. This was, according to the Tories, too slow.
A couple of weeks later, when Lee Anderson said that “Islamists” have “got control of Khan and they’ve got control of London and they’ve got control of Starmer as well… this stems with Khan, he’s actually given our capital city away to his mates”, the Conservatives withdrew the whip from him the following afternoon.
Rishi Sunak tried to draw a contrast between himself and Starmer over this at this week’s PMQs:
When I learnt of something that I did not agree with, I suspended one of my MPs straight away. When he learnt of vile antisemitic remarks made by a Labour candidate, what did he do? He instructed his team to defend him, he sent a shadow Cabinet Minister to campaign for him, and he personally backed him for days. That is the difference between us: I act on my principles; he has not got any.
By “days”, Sunak means “two days” and by “straight away” he means “the next day”.2 Depending on how high a standard you want to hold politicians to, these are both either pretty quick or disappointingly slow, but they’re pretty similar really. But, you know, fair enough, Sunak was quicker.
The difficulty for the Tories in retaining the moral high ground over “one of our people does something racist and we do something about it” is that the speed of the suspension decision is the only metric they are winning on. Lee Anderson is only a small part of the problem, and too many Tories are not willing or able to say what the problem is, or to accept that it is a problem at all.
After all, on Sunday, Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden refused to say that Anderson’s comments were Islamophobic or racist, merely that they could be “taken that way”. Sunak himself, and Transport Secretary Mark Harper, have similarly refused to describe Anderson’s comments as racist. Tory MPs from the 2019 intake have complained that suspending Anderson was a mistake, suggesting that the Tory leadership’s vagueness is a result of fear of what might happen if they were more condemnatory.
Anderson himself has refused to apologise and has written a long and incoherent piece in the Daily Express in which he neither apologises nor justifies his claim that Khan has given London away to his “mates”. All of which makes Tory MP and Anderson ally Brendan Clarke-Smith’s Telegraph article, (“Does he think Islamists are his ‘mates’? No, don’t be daft”) look a bit silly. Lee! If you don’t think it, just say you’re sorry you said it! It could all be over!
The upshot of all this is that Sunak’s attack-is-the-best-form-of-defence response to Keir Starmer’s criticisms of Anderson, and of Liz Truss’s recent appearance at CPAC in which she complained about the “deep state” and failed to challenge Steve Bannon’s description of Tommy Robinson as a “hero”, ends up going to places like this:
The right hon. and learned Gentleman wants to talk about values, but tomorrow in Rochdale the people will have a choice of three former Labour candidates, two of whom are antisemites. The truth is, his party is so mired in hate that despite three ex-Labour candidates standing, he cannot back a single one of them. We expel antisemites—he makes them Labour candidates.
This is an argument awesome in its incoherence. Starmer’s party is “so mired in hate” that it does not contain three people who used to be in it. It doesn’t work.
None of that is in any way to minimise the antisemitism problem in the Labour Party. It was a moral stain on the previous leadership and, as Azhar Ali, who is not a Corbynite, indicates, it isn’t purely a factional issue and it hasn’t gone away. But Labour has at least got to the point of recognising that it has a problem. That doesn’t give them the moral high ground to really go after the Tories on which party is more racist. But it does mean that when the argument does go there, the best the Tories can say is that they suspend their racists a tiny bit faster - and, by the way, that they’re probably not really racists even though their language could have been chosen more carefully. As attack lines go, it’s not great.
In the latest Election Tricycle podcast Emily, Rohan and I discussed the war in Gaza and its various ramifications for electoral politics in the USA, the UK and India. You can listen to it, and also subscribe and do all the other things you do with podcasts, here.
Am I talking about 2008 or 2022? Well, exactly.
By the way, I may be being slightly unfair here. Those of us who happened to be on Twitter at the time were aware of Anderson’s remarks, and able to judge that he would have to withdraw them entirely or be suspended, by about 7pm on Friday. But I am quite prepared to believe that Sunak was not made aware of them until much later than that, and possibly the following day: he may well have acted pretty much instantly, if you start the clock at the moment he actually knew. I don’t say this with any inside information about Sunak and this particular incident, just with general experience that political leaders, who have more to think about than most people, may be much slower to be informed of new developments than their subordinates are, and may not know about things that you’d expect to be at the forefront of their minds. One way to think about it is: if there was a front page newspaper story about you, you’d definitely know about it. If there were six front pages about you every day for five years, you might miss a couple.
On a similar topic, a recent POLITICO story quoted a Tory aide on last year’s controversial Labour attack ad suggesting that Sunak doesn’t think that adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison: “We were shocked that Labour would go that low and I can guarantee something that spicy would have been seen by Starmer first”. The idea that Keir Starmer is signing off Labour Twitter graphics is absolutely bananas, demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of how this stuff works, and the only interesting question here is whether the Tory aide knows that or not.