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Rain and red faces: the best of Rishi's election gaffes
PM has suffered string of mishaps on the campaign trail, from a football faux pas to a 'Mickey Mouse moment'
Has Labour "installed a saboteur" in Conservative campaign headquarters? That was the question posed by the London Evening Standard, following a gaffe-strewn opening to Rishi Sunak's general election bid.
Two weeks into the campaign, there has been "no shortage of gaffes and blunders" from the prime minister, said The Independent. Here are a few of Rishi's red-faced moments:
Things can only get wetter
A damp Sunak announces 4 July as the date of the UK's next general election outside 10 Downing Street on 22 May
(Image credit: Henry Nicholls / AFP / Getty Images)
Eschewing the £2.6m Downing Street press briefing room, Sunak revealed the July election date from a lectern outside No. 10 in the middle of a downpour, as Labour's 1997 election anthem "Things Can Only Get Better" blared from a nearby protester's speaker.
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Party leaders want to launch their general election campaigns on a high, but "without so much as a brolly, and drowned out by a megaphone and Labour anthem", the PM had a "torrid time", said Madeline Grant in The Telegraph.
"I'm not going to deny that it was a bit wet," Sunak told LBC. Perhaps the awkward start set a tone for the weeks ahead.
Welsh Euros
The PM was also "left red faced" after an embarrassing football blunder while visiting a brewery in Wales, said The National. Sunak asked the workers if they were "looking forward" to the Euro football tournament.
His question was met initially with an awkward silence, before someone pointed out that Wales had not qualified for the tournament. The moment was widely mocked on social media, where one person commented that "it's day one and he's made about five mistakes".
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The exit sign
Sunak suffered another unfortunate moment when he was photographed standing underneath an exit sign – arguably the worst position for a campaigning prime minister.
He is photographed "hundreds of times a day" and "some of them will be slightly less flattering", said the BBC, but the "exit door" is "not where he wants to be heading".
'Sinking ship'
Sunak disembarking from a boat tour while visiting a maritime technology centre at a dockyard in Belfast
(Image credit: Henry Nicholls / WPA Pool / Getty Images)
The PM made another blunder during a visit to Northern Ireland's Titanic Quarter when he was asked by a reporter whether he was captaining a "sinking ship".
"If you look at what's happened over the past few weeks, you can see our plan is working", Sunak answered, but even the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who was standing next to him, "could be seen struggling to contain his grin", said The Independent.
Councillor session
In a Q&A event at a distribution centre in Derbyshire, Sunak took questions from an audience of seemingly random employees, with footage showing the PM thanking one man for his "important question". It later emerged the question had come from Conservative Leicestershire County councillor Ross Hills, one of two Tory councillors in the audience as alleged "plants" to lob soft questions Sunak's way.
The upside-down flag
"Just minutes" after the party's first election broadcast was released, it was pointed out that it featured the UK flag upside down, prompting derision on social media.
"The Union flag upside down is a distress signal. Sounds about right… You're having a bad one, aren't you?" wrote one wag. But later, Home Secretary James Cleverly, a former army officer, insisted the "distress signal" claim was "complete nonsense".
The Mickey Mouse photo
Sunak's accidental 'Mickey Mouse moment' during a stop-off at the Nifty Lifts headquarters in Milton Keynes
(Image credit: Leon Neal / Getty Images)
No sooner had Sunak pledged to tackle so-called "Mickey Mouse" university degrees, than he was photographed in front of a machine which appeared to give him the rounded ears of the iconic Disney character.
It was an unfortunate image. "When your party is planning to go after 'Mickey Mouse' degrees", it's "probably best you don't look like the famous animated mascot", said Indy100.
Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i news site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.
