One of the more depressing political lessons from the Brexit campaign was that it doesn’t necessarily matter if nobody believes the NHS will get an extra £350m a week, just as long as they are talking about it. And it seems to be one taken to heart by the Conservatives. The reaction of many in Westminster to the Tories’ swiftly notorious attack advert against the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, was initially almost baffled amusement: was this thing actually meant to be taken seriously? The curiosities were many, not just the ludicrously dramatic American voiceover, halfway between a B-movie trailer and a 1950s Batman episode, but with the UK capital painted as a modern day Gotham City, only one without a superhero, just a villain. Londoners, viewers were informed, were terrified to leave their homes, and if they did it was mainly to buy drugs. Forced out of their cars, they would “stay inside or go underground”, the latter presumably a reference to the generally popular and safe tube network. In a detail that could equally have been caused by incompetence or a machiavellian bid for even more coverage, an initial version of the film was deleted after it was pointed out that one scene showed chaos in New York, not London. Whatever the reasons, the statistics speak for themselves. The one-minute 40-second video has now been viewed nearly 6m times on X. An official video from Hall’s campaign released about the same time, in which she also talks about crime and the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez), but in a more traditional – and factual – way, has in contrast amassed fewer than 200,000 views on YouTube.
All this very clearly dismays some Conservative MPs, who worry that a party facing near-certain electoral defeat can nonetheless cause significant damage on the way down if it adopts a full-Trumpian palette of division and lies. Those in Conservative headquarters, some of whom are privately scathing about Hall’s candidacy and are working on the assumption she will lose to Khan, just see the video as good business. They can also argue, with some legitimacy, that this is not new to UK politics – or unique to the Conservatives. Some Tory MPs have previously complained about the more freewheeling elements of the party’s social media feed, for example a tweet from December that showed a BBC presenter caught on camera jokingly raising her middle finger, accompanied by the caption: “Labour when you ask for their plans to tackle illegal migration.” It is worth stressing, however, that such off-piste and sometimes downright unpleasant tactics are by no means new, even if Brexit arguably took them to a new level. When Sadiq Khan first stood to be London mayor in 2016, his opponent, Zac Goldsmith, now a Tory peer, fought what has been described as the most openly racist election campaign in the UK in decades, falsely labelling his Muslim opponent a friend of Islamist terrorists. The mastermind of that campaign, the strategist Mark Fullbrook, subsequently headed Boris Johnson’s campaign to become Conservative leader, and later, if briefly, served as Liz Truss’s Downing Street chief of staff. What has perhaps changed most since 2016 is the continued ascendence of social media as a campaigning tool, and the way its quick-hit narrative can allow parties to drum up rapid interest in a subject even by outrage. Labour has indulged, too, even arguably Khan, who has likened Hall to Donald Trump. Last year, the national Labour party faced a backlash from some MPs and shadow ministers after running an online poster that read: “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t.” Rather than back down, Labour went on to run a series of similar attack ads. And that is maybe the clearest lesson of all: as the general election approaches, voters should brace themselves for much more of the same.