Dominic Raab and the government look out of touch – a dangerous thing in politics

It’s always a perilous moment for politicians when they decide to wander into the realms of popular culture and risk displaying to the world how little they know about the concerns of ordinary people.

But Dominic Raab’s bewildering move in muddling a central feature of the Black Lives Matter campaign with scenes from Game of Thrones took the problem to a whole new level.

I’ve always been a little sympathetic with politicians who get caught unawares over internet memes or football arguments or the latest twist of a soap opera or reality TV contest.

After all, do we really want the people running our country to spend their days surfing social media and wondering who to vote for on The X Factor?

But it is quite another thing for the foreign secretary to apparently be completely unaware of the origins of “taking a knee”, given its history and the attention given to US athletes protesting police brutality in recent years. Let alone at a time when the gesture has become a key symbol of a movement in the UK too.

To Donald Trump, it’s the trigger for reams of splenetic tweets. To Keir Starmer the prompt for a photo op to display his respect for minority communities. But to Raab, it’s something he thinks people copied from a fantasy TV show which has something to do with subjugation.

And it’s not the first time in recent weeks that ministers have appeared simply not to have heard about the subjects which are dominating the conversations of voters around the country in Zoom chats and internet posts and socially distanced excursions to the park.

When Marcus Rashford sent his open letter to the government pleading for disadvantaged kids to be fed over the holidays and recalling in heartfelt language his own experience of hunger as a child, he was applauded across the country by people with no interest at all in football.

But when Boris Johnson executed his humiliating U-turn and agreed to keep funding free school meal vouchers, he said that he’d only heard about Rashford’s campaign – which had been widely reported for weeks – that morning. Aides later said the PM just happened to notice a repeat of an interview with the Manchester United star when it was repeated a day after its initial broadcast.

And to make matters worse, health secretary Matt Hancock referred to Marcus as “Daniel” in an interview the next day. He claimed he had mixed him up with Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, but the distinct impression was that he too had just stumbled across him for the first time.

It’s well known that Johnson and his inner circle – aide Dominic Cummings foremost among them – have little time for the media. There have been attempts to exclude “unhelpful” publications from briefings, boycotts of radio and TV programmes where the questioning is deemed too robust and even occasional uses of the witless “fake news” barb.

But this week’s bizarre ramblings raise the question, do these people even watch the TV or read a newspaper? Do they know what people are talking about outside their little clique? Do they not even have people paid to tell them this stuff? It’s a fine line between staying aloof from the passing frenzies of the press and appearing out of touch with the world, but Johnson’s team risk crossing it.

Yours,

Andrew Woodcock

Political editor