US politics is awash with crude and misleading attack ads. Now it’s the UK’s turn

The Sadiq Khan attack ad produced as part of the Conservative London mayoral election campaign. Composite: @Conservatives/X

One of my favourite jokes in The Simpsons concerns the unhinged nature of US political advertising. “Mayor Quimby supports revolving-door prisons,” a growly voice narrates over footage of exactly what you imagine. “Mayor Quimby even released Sideshow Bob, a man twice convicted of attempted murder.” And then, a final disclosure at a noticeably faster pace: “Vote Sideshow Bob for Mayor.”

This was a great joke – but it wasn’t entirely a joke. The real revolving door ad, which featured similar imagery, had been used by the George HW Bush campaign to tar his 1988 opponent, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, as soft on crime. That in turn was a sort of sequel to the “Willie Horton” ad, in which other Republican operatives had tried to pin the violent crimes of the eponymous African American on Dukakis, governor when Horton was released on furlough. The entire campaign was widely condemned as one long racist dog-whistle intended to terrify white people into voting Republican. It also, upsettingly, worked.

If we ever believed British politics was above such tactics, then the past few years, of Brexit and everything that’s followed, has surely dissuaded us of the notion. The real thing that’s protected us from attack ads when we’re trying to watch Corrie is, instead, the Television Act 1954 (“no advertisement shall be permitted which is directed towards any religious or political end”), leavened with just a pinch of our much tougher libel laws. It isn’t culture or moral fibre that’s historically given British political campaigns a different tone to American ones. It’s regulation.

Now, though, a number of factors are conspiring to bring this halcyon age to an end. One is that the ad-free subscription model used by the streamers has started to wobble: on certain platforms, the ads are creeping back in. The 1954 act was also designed for a world of broadcast TV, not one where you’re just as likely to encounter ads on streaming or social media: the latter were not included in the ban, on the not unreasonable grounds that, in 1954, they didn’t exist. Even the last law to amend the rules in this area, the Communications Act 2003, dates, hilariously, from seven months before the birth of Facebook.

Another issue is the government’s decision to raise the amount political parties can spend nationally during a general election campaign, from £19.5m in 2019 to £35m next time. Much of this increase is inflationary – the cap has not been raised in some time – but it nonetheless means the two biggest parties, at least, will likely have huge war chests. They’ll probably spend much of those on video ads, which are cheaper and easier to make than ever and also, thanks to the internet, much easier to distribute.

Put all that together, and the result is a world in which the parties are poised to invest unusually heavily in video ads, and streamers and social media platforms are poised to take their money. This newspaper reported that even ITV was considering running political ads on its streaming platform, ITVX. If it didn’t, someone else probably would. The prospect of an AI-powered Rishi Sunak popping up to address billpayers by name in the middle of Love Island surely can’t be far away.

In retrospect, the parties have been limbering up for this for some time. In 2019, the Tories used YouTube to publish a baffling 72-minute animation of Boris Johnson apparently reading some notes on a train, all set to chill out music (“lo fi boriswave beats to relax/get brexit done to”). More recently, the party has used X to publish ads claiming to highlight the state of Labour-run hellholes such as London and Birmingham, and which, complete with growly American voiceover, owe a direct debt to the 1988 Bush campaign. On Tuesday, Labour published horror-film style footage of Liz Truss telling the British electorate that she had “unfinished business”. And the only thing standing between us and footage of Ed Davey doing something embarrassing in front of a giant, misleading bar chart is the fact the Lib Dems are unlikely to have the budget.

Politicians should be careful what they pump into our homes, however. Those recent Tory ads may have done more damage to the party that produced them than Labour. And one factor in the almost complete destruction of the Canadian Tories in the now infamous election of 1993 was their own attack ad, which showed a picture of the partially facially paralysed Liberal leader Jean Chrétien and posed the question, “Is this a prime minister?” “It’s true that I speak on one side of my mouth,” Chrétien responded. “I’m not a Tory: I don’t speak on both sides of my mouth.” Before embracing attack ads, the parties should remember that they don’t always hit their target.

Jonn Elledge’s new book, A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps, is published on 25 April