It’s a day ending in ‘y’, so it must be time for Mel Stride to make one of his appearances on the broadcast round. Stride is one of the few ministers who have been prepared to go out and about for the Tories during this campaign, alongside Grant Shapps. They seem to perform slightly different functions. Shapps will walk into the studios with a striking warning about how badly the election is going for the Tories, while Stride is the genial character who tries to mollify everyone and exit the interview without creating any news.
This morning, Stride’s job was to try to move on from the gambling row. He expressed Rishi Sunak’s ‘anger’ about the allegations that some candidates used inside information to bet on the election date, and told Times Radio:
I know he has been thoroughly angered by the whole situation. Because as I say, this is taking up now a lot of airtime. We’re discussing at length. I know there’s interest in this and there should be. But there should equally be a lot of interest in whether we’re going to have a Conservative government that’s going to get taxes down or a Labour government.
Stride is right that much of this campaign has been dominated by a debate about behaviour rather than the policies – though it would be much easier to discuss tax policy, for instance, if either of the main parties was prepared to be honest about what they’d do after the election and the difficult choices facing the country.
But at least he is going out to bat for the government. Few others are. CCHQ has been struggling to find Tories who’ll do the broadcast rounds and staff the spin rooms after debates. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that many prominent ministers, such as Jeremy Hunt, are in the fights of their lives for their own seats and they don’t want to travel across the country to do a spin room. Another is that many of them don’t want their local campaigns to have much to do with the national campaign, and they don’t want to adopt the Steve Baker strategy of agreeing to do broadcast and then being highly critical of the campaign.
Others just don’t want to be associated with this campaign so that they are relatively clean once the election is over. This is the strategy that Theresa May adopted in the 2016 referendum. But that vote was a choice between two options which split the Conservative Party. May was trying to stay quiet so that she wasn’t associated with either side of that split. In this election, all Conservatives want voters to choose just the one option: their party. It might be that after the election, those remaining blame colleagues who didn’t take one for the team – like Boris Johnson, who has been very pointedly on holiday for almost the entire campaign. By that point, the question ‘Where are the ministers?’ won’t relate to how many of them are doing broadcast, but how many have held their seats.
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