July 2, 2024 - 8:00pm

Rishi Sunak appears to have taken a page from Hillary Clinton’s electoral playbook. This week, the Prime Minister, who’s fighting an electoral campaign not just for his own political survival but for the future of the Conservative Party, accused Reform Party leader Nigel Farage of deploying Russian-style disinformation bots to influence the upcoming 4 July election.

“It now appears as if Reform may be using the same tactics of using fake accounts to influence voters,” the PM said, referencing “malicious foreign actors.” If that seems like a bold accusation from Sunak — one issued on the basis of scant evidence — that may be for good reason.

Sunak’s comments look like an attempt to underline the Conservatives’ role as a well-vetted, trustworthy party to Reform’s political question mark. When Hillary Clinton launched the campaign to tar Donald Trump with accusation of colluding with Russia to win the election, the goal was to wound him so grievously he would be weakened while in office and as he ran for his second term in 2020. The fact that little of the reporting on Trump’s so-called Russia collusion was never substantiated — a theme examined by the Columbia Journalism Review — made almost no difference.

With Trump, the strategy partially succeeded. The president was dogged by accusations about collusion with Russia, which lay the groundwork for broader claims that he was a threat to democracy. But the victory was also pyrrhic. Over the past eight years, Americans’ trust in media has plummeted to record lows. Meanwhile, Trump’s base has never been stronger. The effect is that nearly a decade of conspiracy theories about Russian collusion have, in a sense, inoculated the former president to a wide range of accusations.

Sunak’s strategy here appears to be twofold. Firstly, it aims to delegitimise Farage’s campaign by framing it as influenced by foreign interference. Whether these claims are backed by evidence is up for discussion. The BBC recently claimed to have found that a number of accounts accused of being bots in fact belong to real British voters. Further, the two studies that have identified “bot-like” accounts — one by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and another by NGO Global Witness — have identified a tiny handful of suspected accounts.

In ABC’s case, an investigation turned up a mere five Facebook pages with “pro-Kremlin” messaging while Global Witness identified just 10 “prolific” accounts. In neither case is there a shred of actual evidence tying these accounts either to Russia or to Reform.

Evidence aside, the idea that five Facebook pages and 10 suspect accounts could influence a national election strains the imagination. A 2017 study by Stanford researchers published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that the combined effect of 115 pieces of pro-Trump fake news related to the 2016 US election that were shared 30 million times could have swung the results by just “hundredths of a percentage point.” This, the researchers note, is significantly smaller than Trump’s margin of victory in the election.

The second possible motivation for Sunak to pursue this route is that it is part of a strategy aimed at helping the PM maintain his influence within the Conservative Party even if he loses the election. Positioning himself as a crusader against foreign influence in British politics, the PM can cast himself as a champion of democracy, giving him enough of a boost among parts of the public to keep him in power as head of the party.

As the election date approaches, the PM’s accusations against Farage add a new layer of complexity to an already tumultuous political landscape. But above all else, it is an act of desperation — and one for which he will receive little reward at the ballot box.