People say manufacturing has declined under the Conservatives, but the sheer volume of outrage manufactured by Rishi Sunak’s national service wingnuttery at the weekend was last night compounded by his decision to unveil a quadruple lock to the state pension. Truly the seven-blade razor of advanced pensions technology. It’s so innovative it might even spin off and manufacture another deranged Loose Women segment. I am still howling at the moment on the show a couple of weeks ago when Janet Street-Porter demanded of Sunak: “Why do you hate pensioners? WHY DO YOU HATE PENSIONERS? That is the only conclusion I can come to.” State of the art lunacy, made end-to-end in the UK. Let’s face it: this is what you call a joined-up manufacturing industry.
But look, for whatever reason, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves preferred to spend their afternoon at a facility where they manufacture something other than abstract nouns: Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage. A lot of election campaign visits are to places connected with jobs the politician probably wanted to do when they were little. Digger driver. Train driver. Biscuit factory worker. Today’s broadly fell into the category “spaceman”. Airbus are serious manufacturers in aerospace and defence, and recently won a new contract to maintain the Skynet military satellite system (although, I obviously massively misunderstood the movies because I hadn’t realised we were supposed to think calling things Skynet was cool?).
Anyway: the event. There wasn’t a speech, which was a plus. I’m not saying that if you wanted to hide the nuclear codes, inside a Keir Starmer speech would be the best place to do it. But it wouldn’t be the worst.
Instead it was to be a Q&A with a throng of Airbus staff, surely some of our best and brightest – albeit kept from their workstations for an extra hour as Starmer was running late. As they waited for him to bound in – don’t call him Sleepy! – there was a chap saying: “If I could just ask people to crowd around, to come even closer to the stage.” For some time now, the fashionable look for political events is that one which happens in high school movies when people clear a tight circle around the two best dancers and watch them do their dance.
And so to the two best dancers and their dance. It may not be electrifying – Airbus probably makes machinery less robotic than Rachel Reeves – but the Starmer/Reeves shtick is incredibly practised. Nothing can derail its choreography, not even the question from one guy which opened with the statement: “I’m currently working on lunar mission planning …” Even so mate, you WILL get an answer containing the keywords “stability” and “respect” and “grown up”.
But by now you already know the nine or 10 nouns – abstract and otherwise – that characterise the parties’ preferred election discourse. Chaos. Plan. Toybox. Toolmaker. You may already never want to hear these words again. But the key thing to remember if you’re a vaguely politically engaged sort of a person is that election campaigns are not for you. General elections are covered by a bunch of jaded weirdos given to rolling their eyes and going: “Settle an argument for me: was his dad a toolmaker?!” And they are aimed at people who, only in five weeks’ time and only in tiny percentages and only if you’re extremely lucky, will be going: “Hang on, his dad was a toolmaker? I thought he was born a sir. I guess you learn something new every election.”
So this is partly why for many, the election feels like it’s happening on different rhythms. On the one hand, you’ve got parties trying to do normal traditional campaign events: in the case of Labour, something like this Airbus thing; in the case of the Lib Dems, falling off kayaks. (That is pure heritage for them – I think I once went to Go Ape with Nick Clegg.)
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On the other hand … the Conservatives. Is this traditional? Even government ministers have gone on holiday. Steve Baker, the Northern Ireland minister, has jetted off to Greece on what he himself has defensively described as a “much-needed break”, even though he’s about to get really quite a lot of time off from early July.
The prime minister seems so palpably convinced he can’t win that he’s at the stage of promising any old mad thing. In fact, in terms of a specific snapshot of where we are, just shy of a week into the election he called … it’s like that scene at the end of Of Mice and Men [spoiler alert, kids], where Rishi Sunak knows the Conservative party has accidentally killed something. (Curley’s wife? The economy? Dignity in politics?) And he is now sitting down next to the Conservative party, and is telling it a lovely story about all the lovely things they are going to do, right before he shoots it in the head like a good pal. Anyhow: the campaign continues.