Rishi Sunak struggles to change the weather after unstable opening fortnight of campaign
Question. If a prime minister is heckled at a rally and there’s no backdrop scandal to imbue it with meaning, should it still end up on the news?
I ask because so often in election campaigns, individual and often innocuous events get sucked into the black hole of a political narrative and spat out as something very different and much more dangerous.
Exhibit A – the torrid two days Rishi Sunak has had after his early departure from the D-Day commemorations.
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Such was the scale of this saga that even a solitary road sign in rural Gloucestershire was transformed into a symbol of the hapless Tory campaign stumbling from one PR disaster to another – simply because it read “Veterans Way” and happened to be next to a school the prime minister was visiting.
A GP with gripes about the widening of access to medical care topped off the party’s hell day after she interrupted Mr Sunak at a rally in Wiltshire.
This was inevitably seen as another blow for the embattled campaign, despite the prime minister giving a fairly convincing defence of his policy.
You wonder how such a situation would have been received had it happened to Sir Keir Starmer – the drama potentially diluted by his huge lead in the polls and polished campaign machine.
None of this is to deny the importance of the D-Day story.
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As one pollster put it, the debacle seemed almost “laser guided” to inflict the maximum amount of damage on a leader leaking votes to the right and facing frequent accusations of being out of touch.
That was certainly evident in Bishop Auckland on Saturday.
The Tories took this seat for the first time ever in 2019, but metres from a Conservative campaign stop one former candidate for the party told Sky News he could “never vote for that man” after events of the past two days.
“He’s leading them off the cliff like rats following the Pied Piper,” he said.
So how can Rishi Sunak change the weather?
It starts with stemming the flow of screw ups and chalking up a couple of stable days.
Unfortunately for the press, that usually entails clamping down on access and limiting opportunities for mistakes.
And so it was, after a 300 mile trip from Wiltshire to County Durham – the travelling media pack’s only chance to question the prime minister was hastily withdrawn with the usual excuse of “time pressures” blamed.
But battening down the hatches only gets you so far.
Which brings us to tax.
We know – thanks to the ad nauseam arguments in the first two debates – that the Tories want to make tax a main dividing line.
What we also know from Friday night’s TV outing is further cuts to taxation will likely figure heavily in the party’s coming manifesto.
In terms of what they could be, campaign sources say reports that stamp duty could effectively be scrapped for most first-time buyers are accurate.
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That’s a rare offer for younger voters amid a raft of promises for pensioners.
The danger is that the poison created from an unstable opening fortnight may now be so strong that everything gets infected.
To pose another question – what’s the difference between a bold policy and a desperate policy?
As Rishi Sunak may be about to find out, the answer could be tied up with who is offering it.