Inside British Political Media’s Chaotic 24-Hours On The Campaign Trail
Inside British Political Media’s Chaotic 24-Hours On The Campaign Trail
Insights from the FT, Morten Morland and the Lobby
It took Morten Morland exactly 75 minutes to draw a new, emergency cover for The Spectator. The weekly magazine had already been put to bed and sent to the printers by the time Rishi Sunak addressed the nation at 5.40pm on Wednesday. Rumours of the Prime Minister calling a snap general election had swirled in Westminster since the late morning.
The Foreign Secretary David Cameron, who was on his way to Albania, and Defence Secretary Grant Shapps had been recalled to Number 10 on the pain of death for a Cabinet meeting. Either the King was dead, Sunak was quitting or the Conservative leader was going to pull the trigger on a surprise summer vote.
The media went into overdrive when Sunak refused to rule out a vote at Prime Minister’s Questions, held just after midday. Then the phones went dead. Political correspondents couldn’t get through to senior Cabinet ministers or the Prime Minister’s aides – the Conservative MPs who did respond to the journalists wanted to know what was going on with their own government.
By 3.30pm the big news was pretty much confirmed and the press and broadcasters descended on Downing Street. Then the heavens opened. It was tipping it down by the time Sunak took to his lonely wooden podium outside his famous front door around 5pm.
The Prime Minister’s slick hair stayed put, while his tight suit, fitted around his slender frame, took the brunt of the weather as he outlined to the British electorate why he wanted to call a vote on 4 July.
Sunak talked about his “plan” and his track-record, both as Prime Minister and Chancellor under Boris Johnson, and claimed that everything was improving under his watch – voting Labour would jeopardise a recovery, he argued.
The ‘optics’ were miserable. As Sunak battled through his speech, anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray blared D:Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better from his amplifiers parked outside of Downing Street. The New Labour anthem, once associated with optimism, was now recast as an ironic backing track.
The amps would eventually blow-up because of the rain, but by then the damage had been done. Morland’s frantically produced yet brilliant art, the first time The Spectator has published a separate digital-only cover to its print version, brutally captured the moment: Sunak was half-drowned and out of his depth, something his critics have been claiming for the past year.
Battle Stations
Summer was over for SW1. Holiday plans were scrapped as any dreams of a managed run-up to an October or November election evaporated. But even before the media could take a breath and properly digest the news, the UK had already entered Day Zero of the general election campaign.
By 5.30pm on Wednesday, just after Sunak’s speech, Conservative Party members had been invited to a campaign event in East London. The mysterious location later turned out to be the Excel Centre, a good 40 minutes from Downing Street where the umbrella-wielding media pack was located.
Once the Tory press office had issued an ‘operational note’ to journalists around 6pm, during London’s peak evening commuting time, the media had around an hour to get to the Excel before the campaign event kicked-off at 7pm.
As some journalists were dispatched via the Underground’s ‘Lizzie Line’ to East London, others kept their live blogs going, while ‘emergency podcasts’ hit the airwaves. The Daily T, The Telegraph’s newest podcast hosted by Camilla Tominey and Kamal Ahmed, was able to nab David Davis.
The former Brexit Secretary, much like every other backbench Conservative MP, had just learnt of the general election plan like the rest of the nation.
Goalhanger’s The Rest is Politics, hosted by New Labour comms and strategy chief Alastair Campbell and ex-Tory MP Rory Stewart, also went live. The team had planned to put on an ‘election tour’ across seven different cities in October.
Elsewhere, Iain Dale was furious. The LBC broadcaster, who had abandoned his ambitions of becoming a Conservative MP more than a decade ago, spoke for thousands of Tory activists, bag carriers and parliamentarians when he shared his thoughts on the situation an hour before he went on air: “I am about to f***ing explode,” he told his 270,000 followers.
Back at the Excel, the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, Shapps, Cameron and Chief Secretary to the Treasury Laura Trott had arrived alongside a hundred or so Tory activists. They looked just as dazed as everyone else as the Home Secretary James Cleverly took to the make-shift stage at 8pm to introduce Sunak.
Outside of the room there was more drama. Sky News’ Darren McCaffrey, who had re-joined the outlet after a brief stint at GB News, was getting manhandled.
A security guard ejected him from the hallway as McCaffrey attempted a live piece to camera. He later explained the situation to Sky News’ anchors as another security guard followed him outside, round the back of the Excel and off the premises.
‘Bizarre’ was the word of the day as night fell. But there was madness to come. After bumping into Reform UK’s dapper chief media handler, Gawain Towler, at The Red Lion pub, Christopher Hope broke news of a backbench Tory plot to unseat Sunak and call off the election before Parliament is dissolved on Thursday.
“One rebel Tory MP tells me he believes ‘several’ more letters of no confidence in Sunak have been submitted to 1922 chairman [the powerful backbench committee head] Sir Graham Brady,” he revealed.
On The Trains
The dust had settled by Thursday morning and the general election campaign picture started to become clearer. Some of the political press pack had decided to follow Sunak around the country on Britain's relatively costly and unreliable rail system for the next 48 hours as the Prime Minister visits all four nations of the UK.
But before Sunak posed for his photo opportunity some major media and political news hit. Nigel Farage, the President of Reform UK and a GB News host, had decided not to run for a seat at the general election.
Farage, a long-standing Donald Trump supporter, published a letter around 9am explaining that he would concentrate his efforts on the US elections, a much more lucrative exercise.
The development was a small win for Sunak and it was announced just before Reform, which is polling around 10%, hosted its first press conference of the campaign (we can only presume that Towler had left The Red Lion by then).
The Telegraph had also gifted the Conservatives some momentum by publishing an early editorial endorsement of Sunak’s campaign. Meanwhile, in newsrooms across the country, there was planning to be done.
Politics Home’s Adam Payne was meant to transition gradually to editor heading into Autumn, with Laura Silver moving to The Sunday Times as deputy news editor. Events had exploded that plan and Payne, as he half-jokingly put it, was “thrown into the deep end”.
The i Paper is still looking to recruit a political live blogger, Andrew Neil was planning to join NewsCorp’s TimesRadio in September and other hacks are facing down their first general election.
Back on the campaign trail, the media were able to record Sunak’s first gaffe of the election. The Prime Minister, a big-time cricket fan, had asked Welsh voters if they were looking forward to watching the Euros in the summer. The nation’s football team, unlike England and Scotland, had failed to qualify for the tournament.
But by around 2.30pm the Conservative’s strategy was coming into view. As Bloomberg’s Alex Wickham pointed out, the government wants to make the Rwanda deportation plan a key dividing line with Labour, by making much of their very recent economic recession.
Hunt is vying for a one-on-one TV debate with Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves, while Sunak has made it clear that he’s willing to debate Keir Starmer every week of the campaign. BBC sources say they won’t make their plans clear until next week.
It also looks like Labour will try to pace itself. With 20 points ahead of the Tories, the party has so far released a stream of flashy videos from Starmer, with the leader starting his election tour at Gillingham Football Club. The Kent constituency has a Tory majority of more than 15,000. Either Labour are truly caught off guard or they are expecting a landslide at the polls.
By Friday the Sunday papers will have got a better steer on what’s going on. Expect some policies to be unveiled and sit down interviews of key Labour and Tory spokespeople to be published over the weekend. The Sunday political TV shows, including Laura Kuenssberg and Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips, will also be jam-packed election updates.
Before that The FT’s Political Fix team, hosted by Lucy Fisher, will have sat down by then to record their latest podcast, which will go live on Friday. The show, featuring Robert Shrimsely, Stephen Bush, Miranda Green and George Parker, is recorded on Thursdays.
The publication has disclosed some of its data journalism plans.
Martin Stabe, data editor of the FT, revealed:
FT's Visual & Data Journalism team has been working on a data-rich presentation of the UK general election for some time. Work led by our editorial data scientist Oliver Hawkins, political data scientist Jonathan Vincent, and data journalist Ella Hollowood has allowed us to completely overhaul both the technology and statistical methods we use to aggregate polling data. An additional set of interactive features, built on top of the polling data we have been gathering, is due to be released in the next few days.
The experience of past elections suggests FT readers appreciate a sophisticated, data-informed understanding of the likely range of possible outcomes based on this type of analysis. We expect traffic to the FT general election poll tracker and related pages to climb sharply now that the campaign has started in earnest, probably peaking on election day itself.
Beyond this, we are finalising an extensive live-updating visual presentation of the election results on the night of July 4 to July 5. This work is being led by Debie Loizou, who joined us this year specifically to lead design work on elections, and data journalism developer Eade Hemingway. On election night, we will use several new features of our website that have been under development by our product and tech teams in anticipation of the many major election nights this year.
The data analysis underlying all of these projects will also feed into our regular reporting, helping direct reporters to the right parts of the country for case studies and enabling rapid analysis of the election result once we have it.
The Endurance Game
Despite a chaotic and scrambling start, it’s a long road yet to 4 July. The TV debates are yet to be decided, the Media Bill may not pass into law and the BBC will have to appoint a new chief host to guide its election coverage — Clive Myrie is a favourite.
Plenty of sleepless nights, WhatsApp messages and drinks (coffee, alcohol and everything between) will be in store for hacks as they travel across the country. Also expect shares in Wetherspoons and PizzaExpress to rise as they journalists go hunting for free Wifi and a familiar place to eat.
🎙️ Podcast
The latest Political Press Box episodes, including Rob Ford, Robert Colvile and Catherine Neilan, can be found here.
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📧 Contact
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