After a day of dead cats, Johnson gets his bounce back among the Conservative faithful
Boris Johnson ended the evening engulfed by young Tory fans all chanting his name. It must have felt like a relief, after the day he’d had, with a pretty rocky start to his general election campaign.
Still, look on the bright side. Perhaps there’s a simple explanation.
Whenever a political party is in trouble, Sir Lynton Crosby – Australian campaigns guru and long-term ally of Mr Johnson – offers a simple piece of advice. It is: “Chuck a dead cat on the table, mate.” In other words: do something so shocking, it makes everyone forget what you were in trouble for. Personally, I like to think this explains the somewhat disconcerting start to the Tories’ election campaign.
Yes, to the untrained eye it may have looked like a cavalcade of howlers and own goals. But perhaps, on the contrary, it’s been a political masterclass: a carefully co-ordinated sequence of deliberate dead cats, each more ingenious than the last. Think about it. All right, so yesterday a
Cabinet minister resigned an hour before the Prime Minister’s first campaign speech. But perhaps that was just a dead cat, to distract from the humiliation of Tory chairman James Cleverly on Sky News.
Which itself was a dead cat to distract from a disastrous interview on Radio 4 by Andrew Bridgen. Which in turn was a dead cat to distract from a disastrous interview about Grenfell by Jacob Rees-mogg. Which in turn was a dead cat to distract from the Government’s failure to build any of the starter homes it promised. Which in turn was a dead cat to distract from the Government’s refusal to publish the report on electoral interference by Russia. Which in turn .…
Anyway. You get the gist. The point is: everything’s under control, and there’s absolutely no need to worry.
Shortly after accepting the resignation of Alun Cairns as Welsh secretary, the Prime Minister made a statement outside No10. The aim was to jump-start the Tory campaign, but Mr Johnson’s manner somehow seemed less Tiggerish than usual. In fact, he both looked and sounded as if he’d just got back from a five-mile run: dishevelled, short of breath, and vaguely discombobulated. At one point, bemusingly, he suggested that voting for Labour would lead to more
bullying in schools. Perhaps that was just another dead cat.
In the evening, however, he was in Birmingham for his campaign’s first rally – and now he seemed more in the mood.
The bounce was back. The vim and the pep. Less Mr Johnson, more Boris.
In many ways, it didn’t feel like a traditional Conservative rally. It felt, somehow, American. Flashy.
The colours and fonts: brash and loud. As at a Trump rally, there was a raised platform, surrounded tightly on all sides by chanting fans. His speech was short but fizzy.
Parliament was “a bendy bus jackknifed on a yellow box junction”. His tech revolution would give you “gigabit broadband sprouting from every orifice”. As for his Brexit deal, “just whack it in the microwave, at, er, gas mark 4? I’m not very good at cooking ….”
That was more like it. Things are picking up. The nation’s cats can breathe a sigh of relief.
‘As at a Trump rally, a raised platform, surrounded tightly ... by chanting fans’