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What an astonishing own goal.
As with many of the clearest and most grim stories, two photos say almost everything.
For several days now, the Conservative and Labour leadership teams have been telling me that the situation would change on Wednesday and Thursday of this week.
Politics will take a back seat as the focus shifts to the commemoration of the Normandy landings.
Until then, that wasn’t the case.
Rishi Sunak’s decision to cut short Europe’s most photographed, most watched and most moving event early was always likely to attract attention.
And so it was when Lord Cameron, who finished his job eight years ago, excused himself by saying “I’m not a leader” in front of a photograph of himself with three actual leaders – the prime ministers of the US, France and Germany.
Rishi Sunak instead rushed back to the UK to re-engage in the election campaign and recorded a lengthy interview with ITV.
We know this because ITV published excerpts from it last night, in which the Chancellor insists she has not lied about Labour’s tax reform plans.
Yes, that’s right: the Prime Minister left a D-Day event early, not to apologise for misleading claims about his opponents, but to apologise for leaving early in the first place.
Labour has inevitably jumped on this, pointing out that Sir Keir Starmer stayed on until the end.
This detail is important because Rishi Sunak was involved in much of the commemorations.
Mr Sunak attended a UK event in Ver-sur-Mer alongside the King and Sir Keir.
However, he did not attend the subsequent event in Omaha Beach.
It was there that Sir Keir was photographed with Ukrainian President Zelensky.
A Labour source told me: “What does it say about his judgement that he’s got it so badly wrong this time? It should have been clear yesterday that there was only one place to go,” adding: “This just makes them more desperate. It shows the mess they’re in.”
Of course they would say yes, right?
But such policy changes and explicit apologies are extremely rare, especially in election campaigns.
How did it happen?
Many questions remain about how this situation, which the Conservatives now acknowledge was a blunder, actually came about.
Whose idea was it for the Prime Minister to leave early?
Here are a few I managed to put together.
At the end of May, the French government told the BBC that “Rishi Sunak’s attendance at the international ceremony is not guaranteed as the UK ceremony will take place first.”
What Sunak missed was the international ceremony.
British sources say yesterday’s trip was planned six or seven weeks ago, before the election was called – although the Prime Minister was clearly thinking about it at the time.
In other words, the argument is that the plan from the beginning was for him to miss the final event, and so the decision to return early was not sparked by the interview he recorded with ITV on his return.
Whatever their motivation, they now admit it was a mistake, and it feels like a critical moment in the campaign.
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