Events Dear boy, Events

The art of the political event is in the preparation. Never has an election campaign seemed less prepared. And that's because Sunak and team see that as a job for the little people they sidelined.

I wrote last week my immediate reaction to the disaster that was the launch of Sunak’s election campaign. Nothing I have seen since then has been much better. There is much to say about the mutinous mood of the Tory party and the increased (and increasingly visible) enmity between their MPs, the leadership and CCHQ.

I remember an international football season once where the England players had a bet on how many song titles they could slip into their TV interviews without the journalists noticing. I mention this because it seemed an inside joke that was being played out in the open. The Tory election campaign looks very similar. I mean how else do you explain the team sending a Prime Minister 20 points underwater in the polls to visit the Titanic Museum?

Over my career, I have managed hundreds - if not thousands - of events. Over that period, things have inevitably gone wrong. I don’t claim to never have made mistakes - but I do claim to have learned from them. What event management boils down to is a great combination of imagination, flair, attention to detail and planning, planning, planning.

The imagination and flair are the fun part. Doing something that will make your event stand out. When I was at a local government think tank we knew that just those four words themselves might be enough to put people off. So we had a deliberate communications and event strategy that pushed things outside of the norm. We held a conference at The Magic Circle (a lovely venue and great for all sorts of puns for breakout sessions) and we invented interesting formats like gaming council decision-making (simulated of course) or putting the very concept of ‘devolution’ on trial - with myself as judge replete with a gavel.

But what really makes events work is hard graft. Admin work that can be tedious and boring but makes sure that on the day you have as great a chance as possible of avoiding potential pitfalls of the known unknowns (having a wet weather plan, for example).

And this is where Sunak and his team seem to have utterly fallen down.

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