Sunak has a tactic for helping the Conservatives win

In the race to win the 2024 election, the gloves are off. The only slight problem is that, having taken his gloves off, Rishi Sunak is now punching himself in the face. Both parties have now made it very clear indeed that they are going to fight as dirty as they possibly can, and on the evidence of Prime Minister’s Questions, it seems Sunak doesn’t especially care if fighting dirty is going to require extreme acts of self-mutilation. He clearly knew what was coming – that Keir Starmer would be continuing his current campaign, which is to try to get it to stick that the Conservative Party is soft on crime. It’s a commendable tactic.

On the economy, on public services, on absolutely every task of government, they have destroyed their reputation all on their own, requiring absolutely no assistance. All they’ve got left going for them is the suspicion that they’re heartless and cruel – two characteristics that a lot of British voters have always admired. So if you can show that they’re no good at that, either, then the game’s well and truly up. And that was why Starmer spent most of PMQs asking about a very minor criminal case, in which a man threw boiling water over a prison officer but didn’t get sent to prison for it because it took almost four years for anyone to get round to actually sentencing him.

It’s all very well wanting to lock up the bad guys and throw away the key, but if you can’t manage to do the basic admin involved, then it doesn’t add up to much.

Sunak had some pre-prepared answers of his own. He criticised Starmer’s record as director of public prosecutions, and claimed that the opposition leader had been in favour of shorter sentences for offenders, before proudly debuting his new insult – “Sir Softy”. The moment he did so, the Tory party chair, Greg Hands, pressed play on his little attack plan. The links were all ready to go on social media. Sir Softy did this. Sir Softy did that.

But there is one tiny flaw in the plan. Starmer was director of public prosecutions from 2008 to 2013. So if you’re going to go through the historical record and try to find ways to say that he was soft on crime, people are possibly going to notice that what you are in fact doing is saying that you were, yourself, soft on crime.

If you’re going to try and argue that criminals were allowed to get away with murder on Starmer’s watch, then people will be able to very clearly see – and it’s a really big problem, this – that it was actually on your own watch.

Sunak had another little tactic, too. For his final flourish, he waved about a statutory instrument from 2013, which really had gone on the statute book, regarding special pensions exemptions for the director of public prosecutions. This document really was called the “Pensions Increase (Pension Scheme for Keir Starmer QC) Regulations 2013”.

Obviously it’s quite awkward for Starmer, that kind of thing. Special laws for your own pension is a sort of suboptimal look. But is Sunak really not aware of who it was that was passing the laws in 2013? It wasn’t Starmer, even if his name does happen to be on them. If there are really quite dodgy-looking laws regarding pensions for senior public figures, then will he ever get to the bottom of the mystery of who passed them? Is this the shape of things to come? Has Sunak worked out that the public now hate the Tories so much that the way to win them round is for him to show how much he also hates them? Now that slagging off the government has become arguably the most popular national pastime, perhaps he’s calculated that he needs to get on it, too?