Election 2019: The many losers, and occasional winners, of the campaign
The winter election has finally come – but was the campaign as bad as we thought? Here we round up the many losers, and occasional winners, of 2019…
Tory rebel David Gauke might be about to lose his South West Hertfordshire seat to his Conservative replacement Gagan Mohindra, but the founding member of the Gaukward Squad has certainly been the social media winner of 2019. Impressions of Ken Clarke, cameos from his dad and a scarf-removing Rory Stewart, and the one Love, Actually parody that raised a smile: Gauke’s videos proved that politicians can be a lot more fun when they step out of the vortex.
Even before the campaign kicked off the People’s Vote team started to implode, ultimately leading to Roland Rudd having to resign amid vicious infighting. With it, the group’s hope of stopping Brexit seems to have ebbed away. It doesn’t help that Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson has failed to capture the country’s imagination, regardless of how many times she was positioned as the next PM.
After suggesting Grenfell residents should have ignored expert advice and left the tower block, frontbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg has been curiously absent from the campaign. The Scarlet Pimpernell of Somerset was named one of GQ’s worst dressed men of the year — but it wasn’t all bad, as sister Annunziata renounced her Brexit Party links to urge voters to back her big bro’s party.
BBC attack dog Andrew Neil cemented his reputation as a terrier so terrifying Boris Johnson backed out of his interview. After seeing his evisceration of Jeremy Corbyn — where he floundered on antisemitism, the basics of taxation and the economy as a whole — it’s not hard to see why.
With the Tory party machine very much focused on winning Labour Leave seats in the rest of the countries, London Conservatives were left to their own devices. No one has felt that more keenly than Zac Goldsmith, who looks certain to lose to the Lib Dem’s Sarah Olney in Richmond Park. It’s perhaps a cruel twist of fate that this has happened under a Heathrow-hating environment-loving PM. Although after Johnson’s repeated flights on the trail suggests he has a relaxed approach to these things.
Shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth will almost certainly be sitting on the naughty step after a recording of him laying into Jeremy Corbyn surfaced, just at the point where Labour had finally got the upper hand. Having been touring the studios, he suddenly went very quiet.
Another man caught mis-speaking was the PM’s press secretary Rob Oxley, who was filmed dropping the f-bomb on the last day of campaigning while his boss hid in a fridge. Truly, the metaphor of our times.
Being a working mum is hard at the best of times, but pounding the pavements from morning until night whatever the weather with a newborn must be rotten — particularly in the face of so much misogynistic abuse. So, from one new mum to another, pats on the backs of Stella Creasy, Luciana Berger, Tulip Siddiq and all the rest.
Regardless of which side of the debate you sit, truth has had a shocking campaign, even by normal political standards. High profile journalists and politicians got dragged into a ‘debate’ about whether a picture of the four-year old boy sleeping on a hospital floor was staged (it wasn’t) or whether a government aide had been punched in the face (er, he wasn’t). And that’s before we get into the ‘credibility’ of the party manifestos.
Main image: Getty