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The centrepiece of the Conservative election campaign is a flimsy dossier hastily assembled by party staffers• Theo Bertram is a former adviser to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown
Something is wrong with the Tory campaign. It will not have helped that Jacob Rees-Mogg and Andrew Bridgen were supremely callous about Grenfell, or that a cabinet minister resigned after becoming embroiled in rape trial allegations – but it’s not these individual errors that suggest the Tory strategy is misfiring. Even the best strategists cannot stop these things from happening during election campaigns. All you can do is close them down fast and move on.
But there are signs that all is not well at the very heart of the campaign. Last week, someone in the Tory team briefed journalists that they would publish their economic attack on Labour, based upon Treasury costings of Labour’s spending promises. What happened instead was that Mark Sedwill, the most senior Treasury mandarin, refused to provide those costings, and Tory staffers had to hurriedly scramble together a dossier that was late and flimsy. Continue reading...