Anyone who has kept half an eye on Australian politics in the last decade would have spotted something eerily familiar on UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s podium as he announced a hardline new policy regarding asylum seekers attempting to enter the UK via boat.
“Stop the Boats” is a phrase that has dominated Australian political discourse since Tony Abbott was opposition leader. So it’s worth noting the recent addition to Sunak’s office preceding their adoption of it.
We don’t know for sure if Australian campaign strategist Isaac Levido is the reason for this hardline stance, but a look at his history and influence makes it hard to believe any messaging would come out of Conservative headquarters without his approval.
Levido has been in and around UK conservative politics for years now. He was ditched by then-PM Liz Truss in October last year, which must have been a rough couple of hours. Once Truss’ impressively catastrophe-dense 45 days as PM was done and Sunak had taken over the office, MP Nadhim Zahawi invited Levido back.
Levido now runs his own consultancy firm called Fleetwood Strategy, but he is a protege of political dark arts master Lynton Crosby. Levido has said he received his “greatest training” while under Crosby during David Cameron’s 2015 election campaign. The impact on Australian politics of lobbyist and political consultancy firm Crosby Textor (now known as C|T Group) goes back to at least 2001, when, with Crosby as campaign director and Mark Textor as pollster, the Liberals rode the panic over the Tampa saga and the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks to an unlikely victory.
But it’s in UK conservative politics that C|T and its proteges have had their most consistent run of success in recent years.
Levido was deputy director of the Liberal Party during Scott Morrison’s “miracle” election win in 2019, before he was poached by the UK Conservatives to lead their team, becoming director of politics and campaigning for then-prime minister Boris Johnson.
Johnson had relied on Crosby for years, both as London mayor and a member of Parliament. At Conservative Campaign Headquarters, everyone — including Dominic Cummings, fellow dark arts practitioner and then-chief adviser to Johnson — reportedly deferred to Levido. And Levido wasn’t the only C|T associated member of Morrison’s team that Johnson eagerly snapped up.
Along with pollster Michael Brooks, New Zealand “digital gurus” Sean Topham and Ben Guerin — who had worked at CT subsidiary CTF Partners and were famous for, among other things, the sudden introduction of boomer memes to mainstream political campaigning — were hired by the Tories soon after Levido. See below for the result:
Love Actually star Hugh Grant noted at the time that the scene differs from the movie it’s parodying in one notable way — the card about “telling the truth” was missing.
Similarly, as the polls neared their close in December 2019, the official Conservatives account tweeted an image: “Get Brexit Done”. The accompanying text read “Make no mistake”. The approach of “people are talking about our messaging because it’s garbage, but they’re still talking about it” apparently worked. The clarity of “Get Brexit Done” cut through against muddled Labour communication on the issue, and the Tories had their biggest win this side of Margaret Thatcher.
This is when profiles of Levido started to appear, crediting him with orchestrating the victory. Indeed, it was reported that, as news of various Labour heartland seats being wiped out came through Tory headquarters, the assembled staffers belted out a chorus of “oh, Isaac Levido” to the tune of “Seven Nation Army”.
Unsurprisingly, as the COVID-19 crisis went through the gears Levido was brought back. He is credited with the early lockdown messaging of “Stay At Home, Protect The NHS, Save Lives”.
After Levido’s most recent return, preparation for the next election began. The Tories have moved from desperation — Labour is heavily favoured in recent polling, following the Johnson-to-Truss-to-Sunak clown show — to quiet hope after Sunak’s recent Brexit success in Northern Ireland.
Last week, Levido and Conservative Party chairman Greg Hands led an “away day” for MPs, setting out strategies for what is still an unlikely victory. The adoption of three words that came to sum up everything cruel, reductive and shameful in Australian politics since the time of Howard appears to be the first step.
There isn’t a big enough bucket, or a deep enough toilet to hold the amount of toxic material that my body wishes to reject after seeing that Tory Party Brexit advertisement.
I’d like to see LInton Crosby and Mark Textor in the middle of the Sahara with no water. We forget in all this that is the colonial legacy and in our own case the policies (a poor choice of word maybe) of our allies that created the refugee crisis. The total number of boat people since 1999 would not fill the SCG. Malcolm Fraser realised that the Vietnames refugees were in part the result of our misguided meddling in Indo China and assisted the creation of an orderly process. His odious little toad of a treasurer was the only cabinet member to vote no- J W Howard. We abrogated outr responsibility by not doing the same, due to Howard and the modern LNP’s innate racism. And we are still betraying those who worked for us in Afghanistan.
I’d like to see Howard exiled to a dry, rocky island somewhere in the Pacific. See how he likes it. The bag of scum.
Rather than “..a dry, rocky island..” it would be preferable for it to be a tidal one.
Given the legitimate traffic across the narrow English Channel , fully stopping the flow of boat refugees may be a little more difficult that if it were the somewhat longer journey across the Indian Ocean
But I don’t think they mean to physically stop the boats – they mean to copy the other element of the LNP policy, sending asylum seekers offshore and never letting them into the UK.
At great taxpayer expense, whilst propping up a government in Rwanda that has a reputation worse than Nauru’s.
France warned the UK that if Brexit occurred the border moved from Calais to Dover.
“Didn’t see that coming”.
By “…sending asylum seekers offshore..” do you mean the ‘Labor’ Malaysia deal?
No, I regard that as the most humane proposal so far. It’s more like sending them to Nauru or Manus Island.
Unfamiliar with the Malays attitude to freeloading ferangi?
There’s a reason ‘AMOK‘ is a word borrowed from Malayan.
As I read the Guardian UK yesterday I thought how eerily familiar the refugee-immigrant situation all sounded.
The next UK general election will be fascinating. Will the Cameron>May>Johnson>Truss>Sunak series suffer the fate as A>T>M? Or are the Poms true masochists?
One reason things could continue on the same disastrous trajectory in the UK, despite the ghastly and ruinous experiences of the past decade or more and the Tories lack of any decency, principles, talent, competence or reasonable policies, is the absence of compulsory voting. The Tories, like the USA’s Republicans, are intent on making as much use of that as they can and are busy putting up obstacles to voting. Stop The Boats is running alongside Stop The Votes.
That was why I couldn’t understand how the Brexit vote could be considered a solid result.
That’s because it wasn’t. The Brexiters got away with it by insisting very loudly it was a clear result despite being marginal overall, nowhere near a majority of all registered voters and voted down in Scotland and Northern Ireland. They shouted down down anyone who objected and ignored all the mass protests. And somehow everyone also forgot that officially the vote was advisory, not binding in any way. The Brexit vote could have been handled much as the WA secession vote in 1933 if the UK government had been so inclined. Brexit can reasonably be seen as a coup disguised by pretending the vote had settled the matter.
The Brexit referendum, in a land of voluntary voting, had the highest turnout in more than a century, over 72% of whom 51.89% voted YES and 48.11% voted NO – unusual in being a clear majority in favour rather than the usual minority win of FPtP.
EG Thatcher at her most popular in 1979 was not within cooee of having a majority of votes cast, never mind of the full, semi comatose electorate.
The most stupid decision the UK has ever been coerced into. ‘Cutting your own throat’ comes to mind.
They’ve Fishnets poncing around, the Mad Monk pontificating and Bookcase propounding there. Karma.
Ah yes, now there’s a dream-team. The UK not only benefits from the pontificating of the Mad Monk, it also employs him as a Trade Advisor. Perhaps we could let the UK know that if they play their cards right they could get Morrison too, since he’s at a bit of a loose end now. I suppose it would be going too far to hope they would take the entire previous federal cabinet as a job-lot, making a sort of reparation for the days when the UK sent its ne’er-do-wells here.
Sorry, Bookcases has taken up a possie at the ANU and so, he is available for a small amount of the time to bang the drum.
Fishnets and Toned Abs should be required to disclose their residential arrangements in the UK, or, drop their Australian passport off sooner rather than later.
Never overestimate the intelligence of the british people. They will surprise you every time.