There’s an expression used in football to describe an approach to the game that discounts the virtues of elegance, style, beauty, originality and daring, and — concentrates on blocking, frustrating and grinding down. It’s called ‘winning ugly’. While degrading the game, it often works.
But having won a match, a football team does not have to govern the country for five years. It does not need our love, our patience or our intellectual respect. The Conservative party attempted to win the general election by winning ugly, and in doing so, they have lost some of our love and our respect. That, I reflect, is what, without direction from the top, ‘professional’ modern campaigning risks achieving.
Could the Tories have had a more self-destructive campaign if they had simply blocked their ears to advice from the high priests of polling and political communications? It’s hard to think how.
Who would have thought that after a general election called in the confident hope of cementing a government’s and a party leader’s authority, we should end it with May losing her majority? At Westminster Theresa May’s colleagues, new and old, will now have seen her openly mocked by allies as well as enemies, her name jeered at by audiences who (contrary to CCHQ’s complaints) were picked for balance, but themselves caught the national mood of irritation with the Conservative campaign.
Like virginity, a reputation for acuity, if it takes a tumble, has gone.
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