Is this just the clutching at straws at the last minute? Pearls and straws. Yeah. Also there I've seen some of the latest ads and at the end of a campaign you can go positive or you can go negative. Oh my word. I mean we can just play a little bit of the latest Tory ad where you can get a sense in that choice between positive and negative which way they've gone.

Energy cut off. Our special economic correspondent, William Rifation.

bad dream and wakes up from it and it's all gone to hell.

But again this goes back to that point around ineffective framing and strategy, right? So the other framing they've been coming out with, it's always been coming out with in the last couple of days, is this idea around there's an ad which said, Labour will tax everything, you know, whatever you have. And they're going around the studio is basically asking, saying to interviewers, well Labour haven't ruled out x -tax or y -tax. Well no, of course, I mean, you know, basically they're like, well, Labour haven't ruled out tax on shoes, have they? They haven't ruled out the shoe tax and, you know, just doing this sort of time and time again. I mean,

the wags answer to Labour will tax everything was the sub tweet that said, your wife. Above the Richie Sune outline.

Yeah. Yeah. So if we're talking about bunking off early, you know, at six o 'clock, who left D -Day a little bit early to come back to London? We sometimes

talk about the enthusiasm deficit with Starma, which I think, you know, most people would say is real. There is not necessarily great affection for him in the country. But the whole point is, and I think what has discombobulated the Tories, particularly in this campaign, there is a benefit to there being an enthusiasm gap. Because what it probably means is you're not exciting anyone in either direction. No one really fears Keir Starmer either. And people always forget that, you know, Labour of strategies will say, yes, people talk about the idea of wanting us to excite people like Jeremy Corbyn did. With politics like everything else, there's an equal and opposite reaction to everything, right? Yes, Jeremy Corbyn excited a lot of people, we forget that sometimes. And of course he repelled a lot of people as well. Starmer doesn't do that in either direction, so building him up as some kind of apocalyptic threat to Britain, either through its security or economy or whatever, seems incredible as a political attack. And that's one thing, any sound, any effective political attack, has to be grounded at least to some extent

in reality, it has to have a serious kind of truth. And these aren't there, so they're not working. So what should Sunak have done with this campaign? Was there a way of making it better than he has? Or was it always doomed from the start? And did that doom kick in several prime ministers earlier? I'll be back with Lee Kane, Director of Comms at Downing Street under Johnson in just a moment. This is

the news agents. So

joining us now Lee Kane, former director of comms at number 10 under Boris Johnson, two days out from the election. What is the Sunect strategy saying to you? What is it looking like to you? So I think

throughout the campaign we've seen some pretty bumpy rides, some of the tactics haven't worked out, but I think the problem is with the overall strategy, which has basically been a sort of status quo campaign in a change election. You can see I've done a huge amount of focus groups polling and all through this period. And you can see throughout, and it's been prominent for a long time, the public crying out for change. And to have gone into this election asking for more of the same when people are in such a different place was always an impossible ask. So the initial strategy always meant that there was never really any chance within this campaign but I think strategies at CCHQ knew that and I think this campaign was designed to try and save as many seats as possible. It looks unlikely at the polling that that's going to be a tactic that succeeded.

Yeah I mean you've used the Labour campaign slogan three times in that answer, right, talk about change. Sunak in the last 48 hours have tried to tell voters that Putin wants Stalmer, they've called him on the defence spending, that Stalmer would have clocked off in the case of a national emergency by finishing work to spend an hour with his family at six o 'clock on a Friday and that he would rig the system of voting forever more. That stuff sounds desperate to most people does it to you?

I think it is and you can tell look at the polls I think it's quite clear that they are quite desperate within all campaigns you know the campaigns that you know have been part of it are forced to three tenants it's about prioritization simplification and repetition you the research, you understand the messages that are going to work and the overall narrative that you're trying to tell the country. What is our moral story of why people should vote for us? You then break that down into a way that's easy for people to understand and then you're out and you're repeating that because it's really hard to get that kind of cut through to you keep with the same message and you keep punching the bruise, trusting your research, knowing that the moral story you're telling is more powerful than your opponent's. And I think throughout this, we've seen the Tory message moving and bouncing around because I just don't think they're very comfortable on any of the pitch because they'll be looking at the research every night, they'll be reviewing the focus groups, they'll be looking at the polling and they'll see they're not making any traction. So inevitably you get into sort of doom loop and you start to panic and that sort of facilitates further decline and I think that's kind of where they are.

So was there anything that they could have done that would put him in a different position, do you think? What if you had been advising him, what would have been the strategy? The very, you know, as you said, spell it out, the simple strategy. So

I think from the start, in fairness to the sort of strategists who are overseeing the actual campaign, I don't think there's a huge amount they could have done at that point. At the start of the actual election campaign to win the election or to have, you know, because again, the overall framing was wrong. There was a moment when Rishi soon walked through the door of number 10, where his numbers were pretty good, you know, they were, the people were willing to give him a chance, they had a look at him, thought you were a good chancellor, we'll see if you have what it takes to be a good prime minister. And he fundamentally did all the wrong things. And this is a view which we've seen failing from multiple now, conservative prime ministers. This assessment that there isn't really anything too wrong with the state. There's not a lot that needs fixing. And it's almost, you know, we can just tick along as we are. And if you look at what Rishi did and the things he prioritised, the way out of kilter with public opinion, or he lifted the sort of salience of issues that he wasn't going to fix because the policies he were enacting were totally nonsensical. Rwanda, for example, you're raising the salience of border controls and immigration and small boats, but it was never going to get off the ground, literally and figuratively.

Should he not have called the election? I think he

loses now or he loses in November. And I think the margins are still huge because the overall strategy is wrong. So, you know, maybe Manajar Faraj is off the table because he's over in America. Maybe, maybe not. But either way, it felt a bit of a desperate I think one of the things about the snap election call was they seemed to surprise themselves more than the Labour Party which again you wonder how much that's been thought through and is it just a snap judgement of maybe this is as good as it's going to get. But overall I don't think it matters.

The phrase people use is that Rishi Sunak was dealt a bad hand because much of this predates Rishi doesn't it? I mean, if you look at what happened under Johnson's campaign, that strategy was a morality -free zone. So,

Rishi did get dealt a bad hand, that is undoubtedly true. You know, you had the second part, I would say particularly at Boris's tenure, was pretty disastrous for a variety of reasons. The Liz Truss premiership, you know, she basically took some of the really difficult financial challenges we had post COVID and put a Tory Rosette on the financial crisis. So Rishi was walking into something, it was very difficult, but he's played a bad hand badly. And I think that's why we're now seeing almost existential numbers for the Conservative Party as they walk into this.

just never fought an election. Let's go back to the last election, which was Boris Johnson. Twenty nineteen. You were in charge then he dressed up Tory propaganda as facts on that fact check UK Twitter stream. He waved. I remember a smoked kipper, falsely claiming that EU regulations required it to be packaged with ice. That was not true. That was the UK imposed, not the EU. He promised 40 new hospitals that were never going to happen and haven't. You have to take some responsibility for setting that campaign of absolute immorality in terms of a message that was never going to be delivered, that wasn't truly. So

I would, there are certainly failings over, you know, the last five, the last 14 years and the electorate will punish the Conservative Party for that and rightly so. However, when we're looking at what's going wrong, the idea that it's Boris waving some fish that's somehow degenerating trust in politics is not true. Where we're in a situation where there is a declining trust in politics, particularly within, I think, the Conservative Party, is because things are not delivered. So you mentioned the hospitals, I think that's an entirely credible argument I think, but we look all the way through and whether it's immigration, we've spoken about for years, 2010, back tens of thousands, these are things that there was no intention of delivering I would argue, but politicians keep raising the salience of issues and not fixing things because they struggle to make the hard choices.

But it's not just waving fish, it's lying. That's the point that you sort of skated over this lack of trust. When the public starts deciding that the things they're hearing from our leaders are never going to happen, are never going to come true, or that we're blaming Brussels for stuff that actually we control already. Those are lies. That's what starts eroding public trust. Boris

does have a colourful turn of phrase. He lies. I think there are certainly things, I'm not here to defend Boris. He has grown up enough to come in and defend himself. So it's for him to defend the things that he has said. It's not for me to do so. Yeah, but you enabled that. You were part of that campaign league, right? But the campaign itself, the messaging on the campaign, the get Brexit done, the manifesto promises that we made, they were made as manifesto promises are with the right intentions. This is what we plan to deliver. There was a moment. I think within 2020 where Boris did not want to go down that path and I think his successive conservative prime ministers have concluded that broadly Things are kind of okay as they are and we don't need them out of change that I think the electorate was looking for

Wait, wait, wait, just just on that it's really interesting, it's really important I think, because Boris Johnson stood in the manifesto on a promise to create 40 new hospitals. You must all have known it was not possible to create 40 new hospitals in five years.

So I think the big question is, why is it not possible to do these things? And I think what we had as a plan in 2019 is you need to look at things that there needs to be, seriously, I think to have tax reform, planning reform, that you know we need to have a big push in R &D's and skills, transform productivity in this country. Huge massive push on NHS and trying to tackle some of the real difficult reforms within Whitehall itself there needs to be rapid change, there needs to be some overhauls. We have a situation where we were looking for example to have instead of within the civil service often it's a sort of quite closed recruitment having that as an open recruitment set to try and get the best and the brightest. These are the core things that actually matter that no one really talks about that allow you to go and build 50 new hospitals in that sort of timeframe. But with all these things in politics and when you're in number 10, there is political pain for enacting them. It's really difficult. But what happens is politicians, Boris is the case in point of care is going to have the same problem. You walk into number 10 with a huge majority. That gives you a significant amount of political capital. Now, good operations will go in and they will spend that political capital early on big ticket things that will hopefully reap rewards three, four, five years down the line. So you go back to the electorate and you say, this is our... Look what I've done. Okay. Stick with the plan. But the problem is often that, you know, politicians have a habit, they will hoard the sort of political capital, but it drips away over time anyway from nonsense and scandals and all these sorts of things. And you get left at the end with having delivered nothing. And that delivery issue, that lack of delivery on these things. And we should remember, this isn't, we look at where we are, isn't a British problem. I think in 2016, the country, one of the reasons the country voted for Brexit is because they were fundamentally fed up and it was a very British protest of we want change. They pulled

all the levers.