A definitive ranking of the Tory leadership election campaign videos from least to most nauseating

One of the few bad things about Boris Johnson’s resignation is the fact it’s released a swarm of horrid Tories into the limelight. Between now and September 5th (the day the new PM is set to be announced) a merry band of fuckwits will compete to see who has the worst opinions, and in turn who is the preferred candidate of the Conservative Party membership. To kick things off, they’ve all launched campaign videos that generally have the production quality of a Viking Cruises advert with the content of an SU officer’s election campaign TikTok. Here’s a definitive ranking of all the Tory leadership election campaign videos from least to most nauseating.

6. Tom Tugendaht

Tom Tugendaht’s video is, in a word, grey. Not a crumb of personality can be found in the clip that aims to sum up his leadership campaign. However, by including subtitles, only being a minute long and not featuring any convicted murderers, it doesn’t even come close to being the most nauseating. More on the murderers later…

5. Liz Truss

One of the greatest political moments of our age was Liz Truss’s “pork markets” speech. But now it seems that her preferred meat of choice as changed, as “to win the next election” we need to “de-liver, de-liver, de-liver”.

Her campaign video is, thankfully, not that long. It’s got more of a Netflix glow than Tugendhat’s gritty detective drama aesthetic. No big errors. Nothing much to laugh at. Basically, it’s reeeeeallly fucking boring.

Anyway here’s the pork markets vid…

4. Sajid Javid

The message of Sajid’s video is essentially: “My name’s Sajid Javid and I’m just a normal person like you. I drink tea, eat marmite and have a shiny head.” But Sajid Javid isn’t a normal bloke- he has £8m in the bank.

Another thing I found particularly annoying about the video was his dog, which has a bark that cuts through you like the knife Saj used to stab Boris in the back.

Here’s a washed out still of the little bastard:

Nonetheless, Saj did put subtitles on his video (presumably because he knows no one wants to listen to his dog) which I respect.

3. Rishi Sunak

Sunak’s video was the first to drop. “Let me tell you a story,” he begins. All I’m thinking at this point is that the video is nearly three minutes long and my TikTok-addled brain can’t cope. The message is all about hard work, family values and patriotism, but I can’t hear it over the sleep-inducing piano that’s playing in the background.

 

Also, for a little fella he’s got massive hands which, in Rishi’s words, make him the perfect person to “grip this moment and make the right decisions”.

In fairness, it’s not overtly bad, but it does kind of jar with a certain video of Rishi that happened to be doing the rounds on the same day that his campaign trailer was released. In this clip, Rishi reveals that he has no “working class friends”.

2. Grant Shapps (TikTok edit)

Finally someone made a leadership video that caters to my attention span. Finally someone made a TikTok. Oh, wait. It was Grant Shapps. Grant Shapps made a TikTok.

The former head of trains did actually make an adult-sized version of the video but it’s not worthy of a few measly sentences because unfortunately for Grant, and fortunately for humanity, he has now dropped out of the leadership contest.

Ah well…enjoy this monstrosity anyway.

1. Penny Mordaunt

The intro is giving Little Britain, yet somehow Penny Mordaunt found a way to make her content even more problematic than the noughties cult TV show. That’s right, in the first edition of her campaign video, she included a clip of convicted murderer Oscar Pistorius.

Following this blunder, Mordaunt was forced to relaunch her video, rendering it a steaming pile of stock images, mostly consisting of tractors and flags because that’s what Britain is.

And while she’s clearly going down a policy over populism route, it takes until the very end before you actually realise the video is about Penny Mordaunt, by which time most people have surely nodded off. That being said, #PM4PM is a good hashtag. Does it excuse putting Pistorius in the campaign vid? I’m going to go with: no.

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