Blue movies: our film critic reviews the Tory leader campaign videos so far

From Rishi Sunak’s use of a Max Bygraves catchphrase to the weirdly robotic Penny Mordaunt and the fantastically self-satisfied Liz Truss, the first crop of Conservative leadership campaign videos are very odd indeed

Penny Mordaunt

Here is the most purely bizarre campaign video, from Penny Mordaunt, culminating in the gobsmacking slogan: “Our leadership needs to become a little less about the leader and lot more about the ship.” Huh? This sentence, evidently rendered via Google Translate into something approximating English from a voice inside Mordaunt’s head, would appear to be a reference to her status as a Royal Navy reservist.

But, bafflingly, there is nothing about this bit of her CV in the actual film itself. It’s like hearing Jean-Luc Picard campaign for the top job with: “Our starship needs to be less about the star and more about the ship.” This is a nightmare of patriotic stock footage, showing everything from the Houses of Parliament to Stonehenge, with a pleasant-sounding chap doing the voiceover about the need to regain our core values, and all to the accompaniment of Holst’s I Vow to Thee, My Country – exactly similar, as many have gleefully pointed out, to the emergency post-nuclear “optimist” broadcast on Armando Iannucci’s 90s TV satire The Day Today.

With staggering effrontery and without permission, Mordaunt used clips of people such as Prof Susan Gilbert and Paralympian Jonnie Peacock and even Oscar Pistorius (has Mordaunt heard the news about that particular international treasure?). She has now had to cut them out, but – chillingly – her shot of Jo Cox is still in, shown with a supercilious, faux-modest remark about Tories not having a “monopoly” of decent values. She uses images of Churchill, Thatcher, Cameron/Clegg (together in their coalition bromance) and Theresa May, and even a sheepish clip of Boris doing a gag about “Let’s get breakfast done”.

After what seems like an age, we finally get to a still photo of Mordaunt, together with her robotic voice intoning her weirdo slogan. How very odd.

Rishi Sunak

Ex-chancellor Rishi Sunak gives us the slickest film, which does at least look as if some work has gone into it – work that might even have begun before his actual resignation.

It’s a smooth montage of Sunak elbow-bumping the public, occasionally wearing a Covid mask, taking meetings, dynamically striding around, all interspersed with the regulation drone/stock “British things” footage and Sunak doing Autocue-eyeball-wobble pieces to camera about the need to take tough decisions to secure our future.

He begins by re-using a catchphrase from the late Max Bygraves: “Let me tell you a story …” And then there’s a heartwarming tale about his grandmother’s arrival in this country as a hardworking immigrant, then his pharmacist mum and NHS GP dad. But sadly nothing about his experiences at Winchester, about his wife’s family and he unsportingly doesn’t use the now legendary clip from his appearance on the 2001 BBC documentary Middle Classes – Their Rise and Sprawl, in which young Sunak says: “I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper class, I have friends who are working class … well, not working class.”

Sunak isn’t going in for low-tax rhetoric and finally he asks: “Do we confront this moment, with honesty, seriousness and determination, or do we tell ourselves comforting fairytales?” His own style seems to be a triangulation of this approach, a social-realist Grimm brother, about the little kid who works hard to buy the beans to grow his wife’s Nondom Magic Money Tree.

We finally get his slogan: Ready For Rishi! Due to the underlining, it looks more like Ready For Rish! A rhyming-slang reminder of his great moment, and the sort of thing he might have shouted during the pandemic when he suddenly appeared at people’s restaurant tables with their garlic bread.

Rehman Chishti

I’m standing to be the next leader of the Conservative Party and your Prime Minister. For me it’s about aspirational conservatism, fresh ideas, fresh team for a fresh start taking our great country forward. (Full video on my Facebook page). pic.twitter.com/0BBOkqmKgV
— Rehman Chishti (@Rehman_Chishti) July 10, 2022

Rehman Chishti is the British-Pakistani Tory MP for Gillingham and Rainham, appointed as a minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office by Boris Johnson. For its sheer low-budget chaos, his leadership campaign video deserves some kind of arthouse cult status.

It is simply a three-minute clip he’s stuck up on his Facebook page, with no graphics of any kind, talking about his vision for the party and country’s future, outdoors, in front of what looks like a bush of nettles and a dark cloudy sky with the phone at an unflatteringly low angle while the wind in the microphone rumbles off-puttingly in the background. And perhaps due to Chishti hitting the end-record button too soon, it actually cuts off before he’s finished speaking.

Stirringly, he says: “Our great country is a great country because of its great people, who believe in resilience, who believe in resourcefulness and who are …” And there it stops. What was Chishti going to say? Is there a director’s cut somewhere in which he finishes “… controlled by lizard people on the planet Neptune who need to be placated with regular human sacrifices and I am the only Tory leadership contender who fully appreciates this”?

Otherwise Chishti’s approach is almost unbearably bland as he witters away to his smartphone about unexceptional things such as mental health and gestures incessantly with his hands as if doing a private form of sign-language. This is the half-hearted video of someone who expects to withdraw his candidature in return for supporting someone else.

Liz Truss

I have a clear vision for our country and economy – and the experience and resolve to deliver it.https://t.co/koPyqw4wIG#lizforleader pic.twitter.com/V9jENJmyj6
— Liz for Leader (@trussliz) July 11, 2022

This has to be the most fantastically dull and self-satisfied of the videos so far: Truss goes in for the same kind of patriotic stock footage and drone shots that Mordaunt loves, but interspersed with her own pieces to camera (not a generic voiceover) and her script is sometimes unbearable.

“We need to deliver, deliver and deliver to the British people …” she says solemnly, a phrase which is three times more meaningless and cliched than: “We need to deliver to the British people.”

As foreign secretary, Truss is able to use loads of images of herself importantly meeting world leaders on the world stage and so far, she is the only candidate who is breaking out the U-word: “We need a prime minister with experience, who can hit the ground running from day one, whether that’s ensuring Putin loses in Ukraine or getting the economy going.” Stirring stuff, though how exactly would Truss be “ensuring” that Putin loses in Ukraine? Sounds like a very big spending increase on the military – and how are we going to pay for that? Well, never mind.

Truss goes on to say: “I am tackling the impasse in Northern Ireland through the protocol bill that will fix the problems of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement” – though there are no clips of her shaking hands and smiling happily with Jeffrey Donaldson or Michelle O’Neill. Disappointingly, she doesn’t at any stage rant about the influence of Michel Foucault, the French philosopher whom she has in the past blamed for undermining educational values. Most unsportingly of all, Truss doesn’t capitalise on the one thing that has cut through with the public: Jan Ravens’ impression of her for BBC Radio 4’s Dead Ringers. Her slogan is “Trusted To Deliver” when of course it should be: “I KNOW!’”