Vacuous videos reflect the true message from Tory leadership hopefuls

There was a camera but also a makeshift autocue, powered not by electricity but by a converted bicycle under the presenter’s desk.

The faster you pedalled, the quicker the words rolled up the screen but the trick was not to be seen and heard puffing and peching with the effort required to make them do so.

There is an art to autocue reading, with or without that surprising innovation, yet going by the evidence of their campaign videos, none of the Tory leadership hopefuls have yet fully mastered it.

It is clear that Tom Tugenhadt doesn’t really need, and wouldn’t take, advice or assistance from anyone without gold braid on their shoulders. His style of address – no parody alas – is that of a brusque, no-nonsense upper-class military officer addressing a group of particularly thick and recalcitrant working class squaddies. I suspect he could do it in his sleep – and probably does. Rishi Sunak, desperate to be seen as just one of the guys, has difficulty, metaphorically speaking, walking and chewing gum at the same time. Weighed down by that £750 million fortune, his delivery is sporadic and increasingly desperate. Amidst a blizzard of elbow bumping, the poor little rich boy pleads with the viewer to be his friend and vote for him. Please!

Suella Braverman’s minders rightly concluded that filming her among ordinary people does at least a little to hide the fact that she is a wide-eyed ideological fanatic who has already been promoted well beyond safe limits.

Her manic Brexiteer zeal eventually burns through the pieces to camera, which are strangely accompanied not by the usual martial music but by a hymn, the words of which (forgive me, but I was brought up with such things) include references to the leadership qualities of a mythical fiery cloudy pillar.

Liz Truss is burdened with the challenge not only of reading her script, as the words rapidly disappear into the electronic ether, but also of moving her head as the camera inexplicably creeps from side to side. She fails in both tasks, her robotic stare matched by her halting, irregular, mechanical delivery. It is as if she has sold her soul in return for the chance to be prime minister, and it has departed, leaving nothing but an empty shell.

Penny Mordaunt does not address the audience directly at all, which is probably sensible. Strangely, however, this mirrors exactly my experience of her at Zoom Joint Ministerial Council meetings when she was chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, at which she nearly always kept her camera off.

However, as the script, music and images are all a hugely over-the-top risible parody of a Tory broadcast, it may be embarrassment that has kept her from starring in her own story. Let’s hope she is at least that self-aware.

It will be lost on all of them, but in fact, the chosen medium for this Tory leadership contest – the two-minute glossy social media video – is the message: vacuous; emotionally and intellectually false; tacky; devoid of meaningful content; all marketing and manipulation without accountability, full of empty, easy promises that will never be delivered; and cynically contemptuous of its audience.

They are about selling, not serving, despite the rhetoric. They are debris in the gutter of contemporary politics.

Unfortunately, the entire UK is in that gutter at present, dragged there not just by the Tory party, but by a media dazzled by show and indifferent to substance. Yet there are still places in which we can find inspiration.

To be – as Oscar Wilde put it – the people who despite having their feet in the gutter, are determinedly looking at the stars.

That has been literally true this week, for while the grubby sideshow (irrelevant to Scotland’s needs but still more than capable of damaging Scotland’s future) is taking place in the decaying Palace of Westminster, out in the pristine vastness of space, the glittering technological marvel that is the Webb telescope is giving huge cause for hope.

A million miles away, it is staring into the infinite universe and reminding us of our place in it.

That place is one of utter irrelevance, of course. Our entire planet and every one of us on it is less than a speck of dust in that greatest of all schemes.

We cannot but contemplate the strange, ethereal, enormous beauty of a picture such as that of the Cosmic Cliffs in the Carina Nebula and feel anything other than awe and insignificance.

Yet something more comes quickly to mind – respect for the ingenuity of those who have made such pictures possible certainly, but then also a realisation that our world is all we have, and that if we do not cherish it and everyone who lives on it, then no-one else will.

The cosmos does not care whether we survive or not – planetary, indeed solar-system wide, extinction and rebirth is a daily event out there – but we ourselves can and must do so.

Bearing that in mind is the first imperative. The second is using it to make a difference.

For example, would-be leaders need to address the real problems, particularly the planet-destroying climate emergency, not pretend that they don’t exist. To do so, they must respect their fellow human beings and treat them as they would wish to be treated themselves, not con them with make-up and movies.

John Adams, the second US president, talked of his country’s independence as being the opportunity to “begin government anew from the foundations and build as we choose”.

Looking at what government has become south of the Border through the prism of those videos, we need to do that more than ever. What we must aspire to came as a lesson this week from the stars. Let’s try and learn it.