I’ve heard of some unfortunate scheduling conflicts in my time, but none as gasp-inducing as the discovery that manifesto week is in direct competition with National Be Nice to Nettles Week. For the wonks who’ve sat up late putting their policy offerings through more rewrites than an all-male Steel Magnolias reboot, my commiserations.
Next week the parties competing in Britain’s general election will unveil their manifestos for government, in a ritual equivalent to the talent round in Miss Universe. Which is to say, no one normal gives a toss because it’s all about the swimwear and evening wear. Or leadership and perceived economic competence, if you really want to parade around in the analogy. As an impinger on public consciousness, manifesto week ranks some way behind Big Band Week on The X Factor, and a long way behind the forthcoming IRA Memories Week (that Labour presumably knows is in the post).
Anyway: this time around, the manifestos are up against Be Nice to Nettles Week, which runs from 14 to 25 May (I haven’t delved fully into the obvious question, but I imagine there’s a lot to fit in, nettle-wise). We must do all we can to fight the awful/awfully hilarious suspicion that, were Be Nice To Nettles Week given the front-page PR and wall-to-wall coverage that manifesto week gets, people would end up caring more about nettles than the manifestos.
Probably the best-known aphorism of Jim Messina, the Obama strategist working for Theresa’s May’s campaign team, is that most voters only spend four minutes a week thinking about politics. If that seems so far removed from your personal experience as to be unthinkably bizarre, then I must break it to you: you and your friends are weird. Nothing wrong with that – I and most of my friends are weird too.
But for all the high! octane! drama! of manifesto week, this stuff is esoterica. Occasionally, the parties tacitly concede this by naming their manifesto something that can only have been chosen as a dare. The Tories’ 2010 effort was entitled Invitation to Join the Government of Britain. (You what?) In general, if you wanted to conceal the smoking-gun document that reveals Donald Trump’s ties to Vladimir Putin, or pictures of Princess Di alive and living anonymously in Panama, there would be no better place to do so than inside a party manifesto. Pop them in the environment section, and your secret will be safe for ever. Passing journalists will be so deliriously agog at the possibility of having uncovered some minor deviation from a leader’s previously stated line on polar bears that they will ignore them entirely.
Yet reading the coverage and the polling around Labour’s leaked manifesto, it’s easy to come over a bit Norma Desmond, and imagine that most voters – all those wonderful people out there in the dark – talk of little else but the detail of the various policy offerings. This delusion usually spells trouble, but with Labour in such deep trouble already, it is a temptation to be avoided more than ever.
All political parties lie, but some of the most damaging lies are the ones they tell themselves. The signs indicate that sections of the Labour party are soon to return to one of its most comforting whoppers – that it had all the great leads, but was hampered by a sub-par salesman in Jeremy Corbyn. When a significantly left-of-centre programme goes tits-up (as it has before, and as every poll indicates it will next month), this is a favourite place to which to retreat.
You can find lots of people explaining that Labour’s leaked manifesto policies are very popular with the electorate, vastly more so than things such as May’s support for hunting and so on. What they never mention – and possibly don’t even realise – is that lots of very rightwing policies always poll well too. Total immigration bans for limited periods, whole-life tariffs – all that jazz. Which won’t even be in the jazz section of the Tory manifesto.
Even so, come 9 June, many in Labour will be tempted to coalesce – again – around the idea that somewhere out there is the guy (it’ll be a guy) who can sell a significantly left-of-centre programme. The party already has the Glengarry leads – it just needs the right salesman to close them. This sort of thinking is a near relative of the conclusion admired here after last week’s local election horror show: that Britain has the wrong voters. Or to put it another way: bubble-dwelling voters needs to start listening to ordinary paid-up Labour members.
Only against this level of self-referential dysfunction can May’s campaign come across as an exercise in outreach. Visits such as Friday’s to the north-east make stadium rock tours look like exercises in getting out into the community. The prime minister has yet to walk on stage in Manchester and utter the deathless “Hello, Liverpool!”, but she might as well be green-screened in to the seats she “visits”, for all the local interaction that occurs.
To look at yet more tableaux vivants of placard-holding activists tightly encircling their speaking leader – the modern Tory election style – is to imagine party operatives positioned just out of the shot with cattle prods to ward off anyone who hasn’t been handpicked, screened and lanyarded. And yet, as we head into National Be Nice to Nettles Week, she’s not exactly suffering in the polls. For Labour, that has to sting.
