The Downing Street grid for this week – the Government’s media plan of the initiatives it wants to focus the public’s attention on – is supposed to be about showcasing the things it is doing to make voters’ lives easier.
Tax cuts, free childcare, and a higher minimum wage are all the sort of thing you’d expect some thanks for, and Rishi Sunak is still hopeful some of it will cut through.
The problem is that every week, the Downing Street grid is supposed to be about one thing, and as the days go by, it becomes painfully clear that the news agenda is about something else altogether.
Sometimes it’s something out of the blue, like Tory donor Frank Hester’s comments about Diane Abbott. Often, it is the water torture-style drip-drip of bad polls predicting Tory wipeout at the next general election. Even handing out free ponies wouldn’t distract from these sorts of stories.
But even when the policies Sunak wants people to focus on are making the news, the problem is that they get the wrong kind of attention: that is, whether they’re actually going to work.
The free childcare policy didn’t even sound that good on paper. As soon as it was announced, the early years sector made abundantly clear that it was already suffering from severe staffing shortages and financial pressures that were leading nurseries to close abruptly.
This is no secret to the parents in England who stand to benefit from their two-year-olds getting 15 free hours a week: they will already be painfully aware of the long waiting lists in their area and of friends who thought they’d balanced childcare and work, only to find their child’s nursery had closed all of a sudden because the financial situation was untenable.
Adding demand to an already struggling sector seemed an improbable plan from the outset: the University of Leeds suggests nurseries now need more than 11,000 new staff to deal with this expansion.
Ministers have been hugely frustrated that the run-up to the launch has also been dominated by technical problems over whether parents can even get the funding, as initially there were issues with the application system. A scheme which ministers really think will largely work very well has become something they are constantly defending.
This is the crux of the problem: voters (and many MPs) just don’t believe what the Government is saying any more. It used to be the case that Tory MPs would express hope that voters would give their party a hearing for the tax cuts and other benefits they were giving them. Now, they accept that people aren’t really listening – and that if they are, they don’t believe what they hear.
They don’t believe that the tax cuts they’re getting on Saturday – a 2p cut in national insurance – are actually going to save them money in the long run because they fear they’ll have to pay for them one way or another after the election. They don’t believe the childcare policy stacks up because, well, it doesn’t.
This lack of faith isn’t just confined to the electorate, though. It is notable how guarded ministers are about defending many of their own Government’s policies because they too simply don’t believe that the line will hold.
Just look at how Kevin Hollinrake, not normally a trouble-making minister by any stretch of the imagination, refused to defend the rough sleeping legislation at all in broadcast interviews. Asked whether he would support a bill which criminalises “nuisance rough sleeping”, Hollinrake came out with a bizarre formulation of words: “Those things are not within my auspices. I will be interested to see the legislation as it goes through and what the Prime Minister has planned.” In political-ese, this is a long way of saying: “This policy is not going to last long enough for me to bother defending it”.
Hollinrake will have been well aware of the way a number of his colleagues including Mel Stride and Graham Stuart had to slog their way through broadcast rounds when Hester’s comments came to light, both refusing to accept that what he had said about Diane Abbott was “racist” – only for Downing Street to U-turn later in the day and use that word officially after all.
No-one likes being humiliated in public, and if it happens too often to even loyal ministers, they stop bothering to defend unpopular policies. In other words, they too stop believing.
The current polling position for the party means you would have to have blind faith to believe that the Conservatives are going to win the next election, but until recently, most Tory MPs at least believed Sunak was the man to stem the losses for them.
Now, with catastrophic numbers coming through on a near daily basis, even writing a media planning grid of good stories for the week feels like an act of faith against all rational evidence.
Rishi Sunak’s reset week is a media disaster
8
0
01.04.2024
The Downing Street grid for this week – the Government’s media plan of the initiatives it wants to focus the public’s attention on – is supposed to be about showcasing the things it is doing to make voters’ lives easier.
Tax cuts, free childcare, and a higher minimum wage are all the sort of thing you’d expect some thanks for, and Rishi Sunak is still hopeful some of it will cut through.
The problem is that every week, the Downing Street grid is supposed to be about one thing, and as the days go by, it becomes painfully clear that the news agenda is about something else altogether.
Sometimes it’s something out of the blue, like Tory donor Frank Hester’s comments about Diane Abbott. Often, it is the water torture-style drip-drip of bad polls predicting Tory wipeout at the next general election. Even handing out free ponies wouldn’t distract from these sorts of stories.
But even when the policies Sunak wants people to focus on are making the news, the problem is that they get the wrong kind of attention: that is, whether they’re actually going to work.
The free childcare policy didn’t even sound that good on paper. As soon as it was........
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