When I’ve been subject to media training, the mantra ‘address, bridge, communicate’ is oft-repeated: ‘address’ the question you’re asked, ‘bridge’ to the wider point you want to make, and ‘communicate’ that point.

Rishi Sunak used this strategy in a pool clip last week after being criticised about leaving the D-Day anniversary events before their conclusion.

Address: ‘Having attended all the British events with British veterans I returned home before the international leaders’ event later in the day. On reflection, that was a mistake. And I apologise. I think it’s important though, given the enormity of the sacrifice made, the focus should rightly be on the veterans who gave so much.’

Bridge: ‘People can judge me by my actions when it comes to supporting the armed forces.’

Communicate: ‘In this campaign, it’s the Conservative Party led by me which is increasing the amount of investment that we’re putting into our Armed Forces to 2.5% of GDP. That’s not something that’s been matched by the Labour Party.’

The problem is, of course, that his bridge doesn’t connect the two statements. The message he wants to communicate is nothing to do with actions by which we can judge him, it’s a pledge about future intentions. It is counterproductive and strange to invite people to judge him by his actions when he is apologising for his actions.

The overall effect wasn’t enhanced by saying, moments after making his political comparison with the Labour Party, ‘I don’t think it’s right to be political in the midst of D-Day commemorations. The focus should rightly be on the veterans and their service and sacrifice for our country.’

So here is a conundrum. As far as I can make out, one of three desperately unlikely and seemingly implausible things must be true: Sunak walked into the pool interview without an agreed answer to the obvious question; an answer which literally asks voters to pay more attention to the error was agreed by his team; or Sunak forgot his prepared lines.

I look forward to Tim Shipman’s inevitable book revealing the answer in five years’ time.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

It feels strange to live through an election period where a change of Government is forecast with—by the sober analysis of The Economist—99% certainty. While it’s democratically essential, even going through the motions of the campaign feels a little disconnected from reality, even before one considers the specific promises made by candidates.

Tonight, Julie Etchingham will host the first televised debate of this election, ostensibly between the two candidates who could plausibly be Prime Minister on 5 July—though it’s hard not to wonder whether more people ought to be involved if a 1 in 100 chance is considered ‘plausible’. It feels like false equivalence—not that I have a better suggestion. It also feels narrowly composed: the recent experience of Prime Ministers leaving office between elections shows us that the candidates are asking us to place our confidence in the leader selection process for each of their parties as much as in them personally.

On Saturday, the always-excellent Stephen Bush had a brilliant article in the FT Weekend exploring how British politics has lost touch with reality. He points out that both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are guilty of promising things that they cannot plausibly deliver. It is this three-paragraph excoriation of Rishi Sunak’s failure to make even the simplest of changes that particularly stands out:

Remember, too, that Sunak has been unable to achieve some seemingly achievable policy challenges. Although it is early days, it is hard to see how any political party in the general election will manage a better argument as to why Sunak should not be re-elected than the one that came from the man himself. He described his failed attempt to ban future generations from buying cigarettes as evidence of “the type of prime minister I am”, and he was right. Rishi Sunak is the type of prime minister who, when he wants to do something, when it is backed by large majorities in both his own party and the Labour opposition . . . still can’t reliably deliver.

In this case, his attempt to bring about a “smoke-free generation” — the flagship not only of his attempt to rebrand himself as a “change candidate” last autumn but also one of his signature achievements in his speech calling the election — came unstuck because he couldn’t manage the simple trick of not expediting the legal change ahead of an election he didn’t need to hold.

Whether you agree with Sunak’s phased smoking ban or not, the difficult truth for the prime minister is that passing his ban into law was a public policy challenge with the difficulty turned all the way down to “casual”. Yet he could not manage it. Nor is it an isolated example. One of Sunak’s earliest initiatives was a push to teach all children in England a form of maths until 18. If, as looks likely, he leaves office in five weeks’ time, the country will be less equipped to teach maths to 18 than when he took office — because there are fewer maths teachers. There is no prospect that Sunak, a limited prime minister with few achievements to his name, is going to be able to keep the promises he is now making, any more than he could make the snow fall on Christmas Day and the sun shine in June and July.

In 2024, comparisons are inevitably drawn with the 1997 election. In the exit poll for that election, 57% of the respondents felt that John Major could be trusted, versus 56% for Tony Blair. At the start of the 2024 election campaign, 21% of respondents considered Rishi Sunak to be trustworthy, and 28% considered Keir Starmer to be trustworthy. Those figures portend poorly for Sunak, but perhaps worse for the population, representing as they do a complete collapse of trust in politicians.

We can debate how much of that collapse is attributable to a failure to keep simple promises, and how much to the criminal behaviour of some politicians. But it seems unlikely that the continued disconnect between political rhetoric and reality will repair trust—or that a fantastical television debate will do anything but further damage trust in our politicians.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Today, the UK’s parliament is due to be dissolved, meaning that we cease to have members of parliament (MPs), because there’s nothing for them to be a member of. But when, exactly, does this happen? It’s taken more reading up than seems sensible, but I think I now know.

If the Prime Minister had decided to just let the parliament expire, it would have been automatically dissolved ‘at the beginning of the day that is the fifth anniversary of the day on which it first met.’

I’m not completely sure of the meaning in law of ‘the beginning of the day’—I assume it’s effectively midnight, but perhaps the intention is the beginning of the parliamentary day? In which case, I’m not sure whether that would mean immediately after the close of the previous day’s session (which could run past midnight), or the morning after. But we needn’t detain ourselves on this point, as the Prime Minister asked the King to dissolve parliament early, which is done through royal proclamation.

You might think that a royal proclamation would come into force at the moment it is signed by the monarch, or perhaps the moment the seal is affixed, or perhaps some moment when it’s read out in parliament, but you’d be wrong.

Under the Crown Office Act 1877, a royal proclamation takes effect from the moment it is published in The Gazette. In recent years, there seems to have been a convention that proclamations are published online at midday, so it seems likely that we’ll have no MPs from this afternoon.

In 2015, along with over 1,000 other people from over 100 countries, I attended an international conference of health professionals in Geneva. One delegate gave a fascinating presentation on their country’s response to the 2014 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa.

Early in her presentation, she spoke self-deprecatingly about how her country previously hadn’t needed to develop public health guidance for high consequence infectious diseases. Instead, her agency simply looked at the guidance on the USA’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website, looked at the guidance on the UK’s Health Protection Agency website, and split the difference.

“There was one problem with that approach this time,” she said.

After a dramatic pause, she flashed up a screenshot of the gov.uk homepage, quipping “Good luck finding anything useful on there!”

It was a joke that brought the house down. The UK was a laughingstock; gov.uk was the punchline.

My friend James O’Malley wrote an excellent Substack post a few days ago, in which he called gov.uk “genius” and “the best thing the Tories did in office”. As always, he makes brilliant points. He knows more about technology and the web than I could ever hope to. His post is much better informed than mine and is definitely worth more of your time. Yet, my perspective differs a little from his.

I agree with many of James’s arguments: renewing a passport is miraculously easy; the site’s layout is brilliantly clear; the design principles and style guide are first-rate (though too rarely followed in practice).

But there are problems—or, if we want to be optimistic, opportunities for future development. These were evident when the service was being designed, but making passport renewal easier and putting bunting on the bank holiday page were, it seems, greater strategic priorities.

The first issue was the decision to sweep away many professional-facing websites and to collect everything on one giant gov.uk system. James links to some other people who have issues with this, but it has been a particular concern in the health field.

One major problem is that specialist-facing content is very difficult to find. I don’t see the advantage to a primarily public-facing website hosting, say, the request form that microbiology labs must use to refer gastrointestinal bacterial isolates to the national reference lab. What member of the public needs to see the form to request intrathecal antibody testing for Hepatitis C?

I know from frequent complaints that people often find it difficult to find that sort of thing on the site, even all these years after it launched. The problem is compounded where animal and human health cross: hosting content about testing birds and testing humans for influenza on a single platform is a recipe for confusion. This wasn’t true when the content was hosted on a previous website targeted quite narrowly at health professionals.

The mixing of public- and professional-facing information and the resulting unnavigability of the site became a particular problem during the COVID-19 pandemic, as already cited in evidence given to the COVID-19 enquiry. It is quite likely that professionals were, at times, taking the wrong action because they couldn’t find the right guidance among the morass of COVID-19 content that was being published daily. That’s a pretty major failing.

There are also two other significant effects of this approach.

One is that government agencies increasingly publish resources outside of gov.uk, usually partnering with non-governmental bodies to host content that would not be allowed—or be easily added to—gov.uk. I’m not going to point to specific examples for obvious reasons—if you know, you know.

Another is that a lot of content is simply not published any more, as it was deemed inappropriate to sit on a public-facing website—much of this sort of thing is no longer published online, and is therefore inaccessible to professionals and the public alike. The decision to sweep away professional-facing websites has had a chilling effect on government transparency—even while people celebrate gov.uk as a transparency success.

In 2010, when the gov.uk strategy was being developed, it was entirely foreseeable—and foreseen—that the spread of unreliable information would be an ever greater challenge.

Perhaps the single most baffling decision for gov.uk has been the choice to seemingly ignore that. This presents itself in three ways.

First: When government agencies need to give emergency messages—“there’s a big fire so close your doors and windows”, for example—these are routinely distributed via social media. If there were ever messages you’d want to present first on a stable, reliable, verified site and then syndicate elsewhere, those about public safety would seem to be at the top of the list. Instead, presumably because the gov.uk strategy didn’t account for this “user need”, the government has de facto outsourced low-level emergency messaging to Twitter. This sort of thing used to be routinely published, but doesn’t appear on gov.uk—we don’t give the public the opportunity to check facts they’ve seen on social media.

To take a really minor example: instead of this quote being published on a government domain, as it would have been before the launch of gov.uk, it’s now on a Twitter account that could have been set up by anyone. Without gov.uk, it’s likely that the quote would have been on a verifiable departmental website and linked from Twitter.

Second: Accuracy doesn’t seem to be prioritised. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a page about public transport on gov.uk that gave blatantly incorrect advice, suggesting that COVID-19 persisted longer on surfaces than human hands. This resulted in a deluge of questions for hospital infection specialists—and despite a chorus of complaints, the page wasn’t corrected for—literally—weeks. There is a guidance document on another topic live on gov.uk now with a persistent error in it—years after the error was first reported. If the information on gov.uk can’t be trusted to be reliable, then it undermines the whole endeavour.

Third: gov.uk doesn’t follow its own advice. In his Substack post, James celebrates the success of gov.uk Notify—a service which is routinely used to send unsolicited messages to members of the public exhorting them to click embedded links. This is not a shining example of thought-through technological prowess—it’s a tool that trains people to fall victim to scams. And, just as James says, this vision of insecurity is actively pushed across all government departments—because a failure to think in a cyber-secure way isn’t limited to a single area of government but is automatically propagated to all.

In his post, James says

To give you a sense of where it was starting from back when GDS was created, the government didn’t know how many websites it had.

In that narrow sense, I think the situation is now worse: I don’t think the government knows how many sites it ‘officially’ posts on. We’ve gone from a situation where official government content is spread over an uncountable number of accountable government websites, to one where it’s spread across countless websites which aren’t even in the government’s control. Many of them aren’t even based in the UK, and there’s no mechanism for professionals or the public to verify that the content is genuine.

Some professional content on the ‘official’ website is so difficult to find that it is likely to have caused people to come to physical harm. Factual errors in content persist for years, meaning that it’s difficult to trust the content that is on there. And some things are just not published any more, making government less transparent than it used to be.

The bits of gov.uk that work are, as James says, brilliant. But some of the strategic and cultural change that has happened around the introduction of gov.uk, partly driven by the limitations of the system, has been damaging in ways that are under-recognised. If you ask me—and there’s no reason why you should—it all needs a bit of a rethink.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

In this election, Keir Starmer is keen to tell us that it’s time to ‘turn the page’ after the past fourteen years.

In The Sellout, Paul Beatty writes:

That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.

To improve the standard of government in Britain would be wonderful. But even if that’s achieved, the trauma inflicted by the last fourteen years—the emotions, the song, the things that stay with us—feels like it might take far longer to heal.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

I was out of bed early yesterday morning.

I walked down to the Metro station, where I waited longer than I used to for the train: so many of the 43-year-old trains have fallen apart that the timetable had to be altered some time ago to remove some services.

I alighted at Newcastle station, intending to travel to a hospital for a meeting. The train was badly delayed, and eventually terminated early, before my stop. I took a taxi the rest of the way, arriving about 45 minutes later than planned.

As the taxi pulled in to the hospital, it passed a picket line of striking healthcare assistants.

After my meeting, as I huddled with patients in the small station shelter waiting for the delayed return train, they talked amongst themselves about how they couldn’t afford train tickets. The trick, they said, is to buy a ticket for a single stop, and to get off at the nearest station to your destination that has no ticket barriers. The hospital always talks about people not turning up for appointments, they observed, but who can afford to travel to hospital in a cost-of-living crisis?

Back in Newcastle, I trudged in the pouring rain from the station to the office, asked three times by homeless people for money. The broken paving splashed muddy water up my legs over and again, and I witnessed one nasty fall on poorly repaired, uneven surface.

As I walked past boarded-up shops, I reminisced about the times Wendy and I used to pop into them.

I cut through Eldon Square and M&S, where a ‘store protection’ staff member chased a member of the public out into the rain.

Once I’d restarted my work laptop a couple of times, I sat and listened to another online meeting about another reorganisation of a government body. I wondered about the point of it all, and pondered who would possibly think that this was the best use of my time.

As I trudged home in the rain, I listened to the radio. A bloke standing in the street outside his house in the pouring rain, having failed to equip himself with an umbrella, complained about another bloke’s inability to plan.

The Prime Minister told us that he’d spend the ‘next few weeks’ earning our trust. He made the same promise in the same location in October 2022, but has perhaps made less progress than he’d hoped—polling suggests his trustworthiness has fallen over that period.

The man who once promised to ‘to put your needs above politics’ chose not to stick around long enough to see through the smoking ban he claimed would ‘save thousands of lives and billions of pounds’—because politics got in the way.

As he talked about how his plan is working, I couldn’t help but reflect on the day and wonder: Which plan? What’s working?

And just as the Prime Minister reached the end of a particularly rambling 53-word sentence, the broadcast cut to John Pienaar.

“We may… we may have lost the sound there… oh no… no… I think that’s it. Yes, the Prime Minster has turned his back. He’s finished.”

It’s hard to disagree.

Last year, I reflected a little on Civil Servants being encouraged to bring their ‘whole self’ to work. I wouldn’t have guessed that the very next year, under the same political leadership, the same workforce would be told to ensure that ‘your beliefs remain at the front door’ (because heaven forfend that someone should wear a non-standard lanyard).

Yesterday, I was interested to read Zoë Schiffer’s piece on Platformer about a similar—but altogether more thoughtful—change in the culture of technology firms.

It’s intriguing to watch the pendulum swing.

In The Times last week, Matt Chorley wrote about a focus group’s reaction to the Government’s oft-repeated plea:

In the meantime, Sunak presses on, vowing to listen to voters while refusing to change. “Stick with the plan that’s working.” On our most recent Times Radio focus group of swing voters, we asked about that slogan. “Which plan’s that?” scoffed one. “And what’s working?” said another, before they all descended into guffaws.

This was still ratting around my mind when I saw this laminated sign above a hospital bed—not in deepest mid-winter, but on a glorious spring afternoon:

This isn’t a one-off: it has become the norm in many NHS hospitals these days. It’s this graph of the relative collapse capital spending in the NHS made photographic:

‘Which plan? What’s working?’ might be the most apposite piece of political commentary in years.

Two weeks ago, the Conservative Prime Minister delivered a ‘major speech’ decrying Britain’s ‘sick note culture’ and promising punitive reforms to get people back to work. He expressed his profound disappointment that sick notes had become a ‘lifestyle choice’ for some.

Yesterday, the Conservatives had their first election victory in Newcastle in more than three decades, securing a single council seat. The newly installed Conservative councillor is a former GP, once suspended for falsifying a sick note to cover the holiday of an undercover Sunday Times journalist.

It’s a funny old world.

In an article published on the Financial Times website yesterday, with the fantastic headline ‘Sex and dogs and heads will roll’, Simon Kuper observes that:

One in 20 MPs elected in 2019 had left parliament, been suspended or had the party whip removed after misconduct allegations by December 2023.

It’s a jaw-dropping statistic which gives context to Kuper’s discussion of how scandals have changed over the years. Thanks to the unprecedented pace of social change, things which were resigning matters in the 1990s are not today—and vice versa. It’s astonishing to remember how recently homosexual relationships were considered scandalous, while overt racism was not.