Lord Cameron’s rival video reminds Rishi who’s boss

Talk about kicking a man while he is down. Rishi Sunak will have woken up this morning reeling from the response to the interview he and his wife, Akshata Murty, gave to Grazia about how they split the domestic chores.

Presumably the aim of the film was to show the world that the Prime Minister and his wife might be worth several hundred million pounds, but they are still just like the rest of us. Instead, Sunak only showed himself to be even weirder than we thought: fastidious about making the bed and borderline obsessive about the dishwasher. AI scientists speak of the “uncanny valley”, where robots become more unsettling the more lifelike they become. Sitting uneasily on their sofa, Sunak and Murty plunged head-first into the ravine.

At this trying time, with his party 20 points behind Labour in the polls, Sunak might well have expected some support from his Foreign Secretary. Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, ennobled and emboldened, had other ideas. He has taken the opportunity to release a video of his own, a slick piece to camera marking his first 100 days in office.

Where Sunak’s is awkward and uncertain, Cameron’s is confident and polished. He has a clear political message: namely that he is doing a good job, while Sunak’s message seems to be “I am a human being.” An alien watching the two films side by side would conclude that Cameron was the more serious of the two, the silverback gorilla to Sunak’s timorous tamarin, an effect that Cameron no doubt doesn’t mind at all.

It starts with the set-up. Sunak’s static, sofa-bound interview leans into the Good Morning Britain style of interrogation, where interviewees are trapped by soft furnishings into saying something embarrassing. Murty occasionally clutches her husband, as if to shake him into being more relaxed. At times they have the awkward, frightened look of a couple who have realised, too late into the meeting, that they should not have agreed to have their marriage counselling televised. Keep smiling and it will stop soon.

Cameron’s, on the other hand, is all thrusting dynamism, mimicking the purposeful walk-and-talk style of The West Wing, the American drama in which politicians must conduct all their conversations on the move because they are so busy saving the world. The conceit is that Cameron is a man in a whirlwind of important tasks, on his way to a debate as we speak, but can spare his social media team one minute and 24 seconds of boasting while he makes his way downstairs to the car.

The dim lighting and shaky handheld camerawork, with visible cameras, adds to the impression that he is a man in a hurry, who happens to have employed a frustrated feature-film director to work in his comms team. Being shot from two steps below is a good look for few middle-aged men, but by remaining brisk, Cameron offers us little time to dwell on his jowls. There is also some unfortunate jazz overlaid on top, adding to the effect that Cameron is giving a single-take monologue in an arthouse film that will be shortlisted for a prize at Venice, rather than showing off about Ukraine grain negotiations.

His delivery is clear, however, without apparent reference to notes. Where Sunak, who fasts every week and has no vices except a bit of a sweet tooth, seems uptight to a fault, Cameron has a reputation for being too casual. This is the man who, in the immortal words of Danny Dyer, was “in Nice with his trotters up” while the country tried to sort out the Brexit he had brought about. A man who as prime minister was fond of “chillaxing” with computer games. This is Cameron 2.0, not a cavalier Flashman type but a dedicated public servant, called like Cincinnatus from his gypsy caravan and honoured to serve again.

It helps that Cameron has a message that is difficult for the idle reader to fact-check. When he boasts that he has made 36 visits to 26 countries, like a guy showing off about his gap year in Freshers Week, we must take his word for it. When Sunak starts talking about the dishwasher, however, with the fraudulent air of someone who has recently looked up the concept on Wikipedia, even his allies start to smell something fishy.

Cameron knows the tricks of political conversation, which include the rule that saying anything – even rubbish – in a plausible manner is preferable to silence. Sunak shows the opposite gift, of making completely quotidian activities sound bafflingly alien.

By the end of Cameron’s video, as he reaches the entrance to the Foreign Office to head off to his debate, he has only been speaking for just over a minute. But in that short space of time he has reminded us that he is engaged in high-level work, he has done this before, and he knows how to play the game. Cameron has only been in the job for 100 days, but as he is evidently keen to remind everyone, perhaps especially the Prime Minister, he has been in politics for much longer than that.

This tale of two videos shows that Cameron can still walk the walk, talk the talk and, most importantly, walk and talk at the same time. Sunak, on the other hand, struggles to sit still and smile without putting off potential voters. That’s the risk of having a big beast back in the room: you have to be sure it’s on your side.

Comparison

The Power Play

The subtext of Cameron’s video is to show Sunak how it’s done. Where Sunak has a reputation for being uptight and wanted his video to convey that he was normal, Cameron has the opposite problem. His reputation is for being a lackadaisical chill artist, so his video was all about showing bustle and purpose, like a LinkedIn post brought to life. If it so happened that, in the process of honestly conveying the achievements of his first 114 days as Foreign Secretary, Cameron reminded his party – and the voters – that he has more natural leadership in one tucked-in thumb than Sunak has in his whole person, that would only be a happy accident.

The Aesthetic

Gloomy, shakily filmed walk-and-talk style, with visible cameras and dodgy lighting, like a Paul Greengrass film. You can tell that someone in his team is a frustrated cinematic auteur, determined to use whatever tricks they can think of to show Cameron as a raw, business-like kind of operator. Sadly the illusion of immediacy is shattered by the bizarre free-jazz soundtrack over the top. But the dynamic style is very West Wing, while Sunak and Murty clutching each other on their sofa is rather more Good Morning Britain. We will gloss over the way that, despite being filmed like a TikTok video, the film has been released on Twitter. Some boomer habits die hard.

The Appearance

Cameron, shot from below (always a difficult look for a middle-aged man), does his best to look powerful while also trying not to fall downstairs. Tricky. But it’s all too brisk to dwell on the jowls.

The Content

An catalgoue of the things he has done, including lists of trips like a student showing off about his gap year in Freshers Week. Cannily he has made less mention of things he has signally not done, such as call for a ceasefire. Nor has he drawn attention to the enormous foreign policy problem he created in the form of Brexit.

The Delivery

Polished and fluent, especially compared to Sunak and Murty’s marriage-counselling awkwardness. Perhaps to a fault: you can’t help but wonder what Cameron is not telling us. But on the evidence of these two videos, a day apart but rather unalike in dignity, it is hard not to conclude that Lord Cameron remains miles away the better communicator. Shown the two films side by side, an alien would surely conclude that the older man was the Prime Minister. The risk for Sunak is that voters might start to wish it, too.

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