Friday, May 24, 2024

Tory election campaign hits an iceberg in Belfast's Titanic Quarter


Rishi Sunak's shambolic election campaign rolled into Belfast today and James McCarthy of Belfast Live was not impressed:

Having been informed by the Conservative Party that the visit would be taking place at a fourth-floor office block in the Titanic Quarter, reporters arrived to find no PM and no press conference.

After a flurry of frantic phone calls we were directed to a car park half a mile away from where we had been originally sent to and once again, there was no sign of the Prime Minister or his officials.

Several more phone calls and a WhatsApp location pin later, we were met by the Secretary of State's SPAD who walked us through an industrial complex to the waterfront. There, to our surprise, the Prime Minister was having the time of his life, zipping up and down the water on an electric speedboat, under the watchful eyes of the national media.

Having found the correct location, you would have been forgiven for thinking that all would go to plan from here on in, but in true Thick Of It style, it was like a clown running through a minefield.

While the national media captured the Prime Minister's aquatic adventure, local reporters were prevented from filming the Prime Minister disembarking the boat and eventually frogmarched to the other side of the road by the Conservative Party's press team to a location where we could merely watch on through a fence.

But McCarthy got his revenge when he was finally allowed to meet Sunak:

When I asked the Prime Minster if given that we were in the Titanic Quarter, if he was captaining a sinking ship, it may have elicited a smirk from the Secretary of State, but in reality, the Prime Minister's answers were full of the usual bluff and bluster.

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