The Conservatives are having problems with their socials again. Having claimed last month that London was “the crime capital of the world”, the party has now deleted another social media exhortation not to let “the doomsters and the naysayers” talk down Britain. The post on X claimed that Britain was the second most powerful country in the world, illustrated by pictures including a Canadian-owned Aston Martin, a US F-35 fighter jet and a Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft developed by a European consortium while the UK was in the EU.
But the image may have been deleted from social media because it included a picture of King Charles – a breach of protocol since parties are meant to avoid dragging the royal family into political debate. Buckingham Palace did not comment, but it is understood that the post had been noted by senior palace officials before it was deleted last Friday. It also included a picture of the England men’s football team lining up for their friendly against Brazil last month – a match in which they were very much second best. But sports teams, like the royals, are usually considered to be beyond politics. Political parties are free to make up any facts they like in political advertising, so long as they do not publish false statements about the character or conduct of a candidate. But despite using phrases plucked from Boris Johnson’s thesaurus, there was a hint of truth in the post – a report by BrandFinance had placed the UK second in its Global Soft Power Index. British soft power is more about a thriving cultural scene than fighter jets, though, and the film director Nick Murphy pointed out that the party was celebrating the arts with a picture of the Oscar winner Christopher Nolan weeks after cutting arts funding – something that campaigners have called a “national emergency” for artistic venues. The ill-judged post follows another blunder last month when Conservative central office issued a video attacking the Labour mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, with false claims about London’s ultra-low emission zone and footage of commuters fleeing an underground station that turned out to have been filmed at Penn station in New York in 2017.
Dragging the king and the England football team into politics was a bad idea, said Mark Borkowski, a PR consultant and author. “This says a lot about how no strategic thought goes into social media,” he said. “It is a medium for clickbait and dogwhistle politics. The mistake most political parties and MPs make is that they don’t think before they tweet. Now dragging the king into a political debate indicates how foolish and thoughtless this is.” Borkowski compared the move with the fact-free attacks made by Donald Trump during his presidential campaigns. “There’s a generation bewitched by this sort of attitude, a Trumpian way of using social media. People see this is as a sketchpad for ideas about propaganda, but these aren’t disappearing tweets. It just shows a lack of strategy. “It also indicates how bloody the battle is going to be running up to the election. We’re in a phony war situation now, but there is going to be full-on mudslinging and really dirty fighting on social media platforms. So if this is the team at Tory party central office being deployed at this stage, God help us for the future.” The Conservative party did not respond to requests for comment.