With their new advert, the Labour Party have managed to do the unthinkable and almost make me feel sorry for Rishi Sunak.

For one, I doubt anyone involved in its creation - or almost anyone else for that matter - believes the claim that Sunak thinks people that abuse children shouldn’t go to jail. Given the rightful backlash in times past when members of Sunak’s party, mostly notably Boris Johnson, were unfairly and offensively accusing Keir Starmer of being soft on child abusers one would think they should know better.

It is absolutely fair to publicise and campaign on the fact that much crime in the UK is effectively legal at present given the horrendously low rates at which crime is solved. Undoubtedly a huge part of that is the mismanagement and underfunding of both the police and other public sector bodies that may have been in a position to prevent a certain amount of crime taking place in the first place that the Conservative government has subjected us to over the last decade.

It’s right for Sunak and his colleagues to be held accountable for that and the other ways that they have damaged British society. But personal and almost certainly untrue adverts like this are not the way to go about leveraging that, even if you believe more incarceration is a valid goal. I’m curious how well the advert even polls with people, not that that should be the sole deciding factor as to whether one releases such material.