Rishi Sunak’s aides realised immediately that his interview with ITV’s Paul Brand on Thursday afternoon was going to be a problem hanging over them for the better part of a week. In a 25-minute grilling, to be broadcast on Wednesday, the prime minister endured a torrid time over his personal wealth, leading to “frank exchanges” with his interviewer.
“That was what they were worried about,” said a political source. “That he was beaten up over the money and being out of touch.” While they focused on the incoming shelling, no one seemed to notice that Sunak had already stepped on a landmine.
By returning home early from the D-Day commemorations that day, the prime minister made what may be the defining mistake of the campaign, a blunder that could detonate any chance of turning around Tory fortunes. It came after a week in which the Tories had been stunned by the entry into the race on Monday of Nigel Farage — but then heartened by a robust performance by Sunak in his first head-to-head debate with Sir Keir Starmer on Tuesday.
The real story of what happened around the D-Day debacle, in which Starmer was able to upstage the prime minister by meeting presidents Zelensky and Macron, reveals a Conservative campaign cracking under extreme pressure and a Labour operation becoming more adept at seizing opportunities.
The decision that Sunak would attend the British parts of the D-Day commemorations but dodge an international event later was made weeks ago.
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“The official advice was that the second bit was optional,” a senior political source said. “We were told Starmer wouldn’t be there.” At that point, it seemed like the second half would be little more than a social gathering for world leaders. “It was billed as a lunch and that even Biden wouldn’t be there,” a second source said. In the event, it was one of the most moving ceremonies of the two-day gathering, with Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, the foreign secretary, substituting for Sunak and standing alongside the American and French presidents.
However, civil servants are clear that it was a political decision to cut things short. One of Cameron’s closest allies also let it be known that they had advised Sunak to “do” the full schedule.
Another ally pointed out that in his 2014 party conference speech as leader, Cameron talked about how the then 70th anniversary of D-Day had been “the best moment of my year”, and that when he was prepping for the speech he told aides: “There’s a risk I may start crying here, because it gets me so emotional.”
A Whitehall source said Cameron was “apoplectic” about Sunak’s decision but, when asked why he had not “picked Sunak up by his lapels”, he said: “There is only so much I can do.”
There was also fury at Buckingham Palace, where courtiers pointed out that the King, who is being treated for cancer, was advised not to travel but was determined to do so, despite being in pain.
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While the Tories are this weekend engaged in a circular firing squad to identify who to blame, the truth is, as one insider put it, everyone’s hands are covered in blood. The issue of what to do was debated in the three-day look-ahead meeting in Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) at 1pm on Monday at which all Sunak’s key aides were present, including Isaac Levido, his campaign director, Liam Booth-Smith, the Downing Street chief of staff, and James Forsyth, his political secretary.
Sunak, who is due to see most of the same world leaders at the G7 summit in Italy this week, was keen to get home and carry on with the campaign.
The decision to stick to the plan was then confirmed in a 6.30am daily campaign meeting on Thursday. It is untrue that Sunak raced home to do the ITV event. The interview was slotted in because he was already coming back for a 6pm meeting on Thursday to sign off the Conservative election manifesto.
While the Tories were dropping the ball, Labour’s foreign affairs team was playing a blinder. David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, has spent months developing relations with the Macron administration, tweeting in French and writing essays for intellectual Parisian magazines. He became aware of diplomatic rumblings that the Élysée Palace was upset by Sunak’s decision to avoid the French-led part of the commemoration.
A diplomatic source, summarising the French view, said: “Doesn’t Sunak realise there is a war on and that Zelensky was attending? President Macron was going to use the occasion to make announcements about support for Ukraine. The idea of skipping something ceremonial like this is so alien to French culture.”
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Neither Lammy nor Starmer was originally invited to the international event. But Lammy used his contacts to get them both admitted and his connections with Zelensky’s team to ensure there would be a Starmer handshake and photograph with the Ukrainian president.
The French then played a double diplomatic game. One of Macron’s aides contacted Labour to say how pleased they were by the Macron-Starmer meeting, saying the French president “really liked” the Labour leader and was “fascinated by men like him who can suddenly achieve stunning results” . Another called a member of Sunak’s team to commiserate, telling them: “This is all completely confected nonsense. How can we help?”
However, the decision for the prime minister to abandon the D-Day commemoration, after the Tories made security and national service cornerstones of their campaign, left MPs incredulous. Cabinet ministers responded with impotent rage, criticising Sunak’s political judgment and appetite for the job. The prime minister has repeatedly complained privately that foreign affairs take up too much of his time and he has little interest in the ceremonial aspects of his job.
A Tory who is no fan of Boris Johnson said: “There is absolutely no way that if you presented this to Boris or indeed to Theresa [May], telling them it was a waste of time, that they would not have overruled that advice. This is the worst operation I have ever seen. From the prime minister down there is a combination of arrogance and sheer incompetence.”
The irony is that personal diplomacy has been one of the successes of Sunak’s premiership. His willingness to get in a room with his EU counterparts paved the way for the Windsor Framework on Brexit in February 2023. He signed the Aukus defence deal with the US and Australia and has kept Britain at the forefront of western support for Ukraine.
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In the 6.30am morning meeting on Friday, Levido insisted that Sunak make a public apology, and the now “despondent” prime minister agreed. Aides say he was particularly upset because he and his wife, Akshata Murty, give both time and money to veterans’ charities. Murty is a regular at the Royal Hospital Chelsea in London, where she works with veterans.
The D-Day fiasco stopped dead what had been a relatively encouraging 48 hours for the Conservatives, in which Sunak successfully shaped the agenda of the campaign with his combative performance against Starmer in Tuesday’s ITV debate in Manchester. The prime minister seemed markedly better prepared than Starmer as he sought to pin on Labour the claim that a black hole in their finances would cost every household £2,000.
In the past few months, Sunak’s aides have privately voiced the fear that, just as they lost to Liz Truss in 2022, they are on course to lose to another opponent whom they think has the wrong solutions but has largely escaped media scrutiny.
In a bid to change that, Sunak sharpened his act in a debate camp last Sunday at a studio in Soho led by Brett O’Donnell, an American who prepared Johnson for his debates during the EU referendum campaign in 2016 and the 2019 leadership election. O’Donnell also helped Tom Tugendhat emerge victorious from the first leader’s debate in 2022. He was assisted by senior figures including Adam Atashzai, a former Cameron aide and veteran of 15 debates since 2010. Sunak had two more, shorter, sessions in Manchester, honing the tax attack. As he left for the studio, the prime minister said: “Well at least Keir Starmer’s got to answer questions now and it’s not like PMQs.”
Starmer, who had his own debate camp but spent the afternoon before the show alone in his hotel room, took 45 minutes to even rebut the £2,000 claim and left the stage dissatisfied with his performance. Sunak returned to the Tory green room unsure how he had performed. There he was greeted with applause from his aides. They showed him a message from a usually hostile MP telling an aide: “Can you give Rishi a big hug from me, that was excellent.”
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In Labour HQ the next morning, with the papers running with the £2,000 tax claim, Starmer’s chief strategist Morgan McSweeney smelled a trap. He knew that to engage with the tax argument would elevate it further, just as the row over Vote Leave’s claim that Brexit would lead to £350 million a week for the NHS put that issue at the top of the agenda. For an hour he thought it best to sit things out. Then he changed his mind, deciding to play into another Labour narrative, that Sunak was peddling “Tory lies”.
While the £2,000 claim remains slightly ahead in terms of salience, the pollsters More in Common found that by a margin of 42 per cent to 29 per cent, voters say they believe Labour, not the Tories.
Sunak’s team was also left reeling by Farage’s decision to take over the leadership of Reform, which is eating into Tory support, and announce that he will stand in Clacton, in Essex, where he is tipped to finally become an MP at the eighth attempt. Farage had previously said he would not run. One of the few rationales that Tory MPs accepted for calling a snap election was that it had caught Reform by surprise.
Farage had been contemplating lucrative offers from US broadcasters and one friend even suggested he would take a job working for Donald Trump if he becomes the president again after November’s election.
Farage’s entry into the race led to Reform closing to within two points of the Tories, putting them on course to win fewer than 100 seats on July 4 — their worst performance in two centuries. Sunak’s team is now resigned to a “crossover poll” which puts Reform ahead, but is hopeful that raising further questions about Labour will persuade voters not to grant Starmer a huge majority.
In a second debate on BBC1 on Friday evening, Tory chiefs urged Penny Mordaunt to take the fight to a subdued Angela Rayner and “not engage” with Farage.
Rayner had been told by Labour’s debate prep team under Matthew Doyle, the director of communications, to remain statesmanlike rather than let rip. Mordaunt, who represented a naval seat in Portsmouth, slid the knife into Sunak’s ribs, declaring his decision to return early from D-Day “very wrong”.
Cabinet ministers are now privately demanding that Sunak takes a step back to allow other senior Tories to become faces of the campaign.
There are other problems, too. On Friday it was announced that the Conservatives were suspending social media campaigning. “There is no money,” a senior source said. Tory grandees have been asked to help with fundraising but are struggling. Morale is also at rock bottom. CCHQ was said to be largely deserted on Friday, with senior aides laid low with illness. Half of Tory ministerial aides have refused to join the campaign despite being ordered to do so.
Farage is now the focus of Tory leadership manoeuvring, which is already under way. Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, has told colleagues that if she becomes leader, she will not admit Farage to the party. Badenoch did the morning broadcast round on Monday before appearing on Politics Live on BBC2 to debate Wes Streeting. She was unable to join Sunak on a campaign event in Henley, Oxfordshire.
Dame Priti Patel, the former home secretary, has made clear that she would admit Farage to the party — a view shared by others on the right such as Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, who predicted that Farage might even become Tory leader. “I’m a huge admirer of Nigel’s and I think he should hold high office within the Conservative Party,” Rees-Mogg said. “I’m sure that if the ball would come out of the scrum, Nigel would be more than willing to catch it.”
He added: “Nigel is a Tory. He’s a charismatic politician, and we’ve seen that charismatic politicians do very well for the Conservative Party. He says things that resonate with voters. I think the Tory party has too often been trying to appeal to the liberal and green vote that isn’t coming to us anyway.”
Sunak will try to boost support with a manifesto launch on Tuesday at somewhere “symbolic of boldness and speed” — understood to be a Formula One location. The manifesto will not include a plan to scrap inheritance tax or an explicit pledge to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, but there will be language that “goes further” than before in saying a Tory government would ignore the European courts if they try to block expulsions of asylum seekers to Rwanda —unlikely to go far enough for the right.
Labour, which is expected to unveil its plan on Thursday, will have no new tax rises in its manifesto but will focus, at McSweeney’s insistence, on reform of the public services. “Labour used to make the argument that the pie ought to be more equitably distributed. But the Tories have eaten all of the pie and burned down the kitchen.”
The problem for Sunak is that a large number of Tories now share that view.
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