With Starmer floundering, Farage flailing and Ed Davey acting a fool, a Tory revival is now on the cards
Source - Daily Telegraph - 31/05/24
The polls may not reflect it yet; in fact they remain positively dire for Rishi Sunak and the Conservative Party. But many good things have happened for the Tories this week. Credit where it’s due – that feeling we have had for weeks and months now, that the Conservatives are facing some sort of electoral apocalypse, about to be made as extinct as the dinosaurs, has been replaced by something rather more nuanced.
I appreciate that some of you remain of the opinion that the Tories have done such a bad job squandering Boris Johnson’s 80-seat majority that they deserve not just to be punished but destroyed. Sunak is still viewed by his harshest critics as an unelected manifesto-abandoning wet whose five-point plan is doomed to failure. With tax, spend and immigration all having boomed over the past 14 years, the Conservative malaise is both palpable and understandable.
However, Sunak’s decision to call a snap general election on July 4 is fast being vindicated as a rare example of sound strategic political thinking from the PM. Not only did it catch Reform off guard, but it has also caught Sir Keir Starmer with his socialist pants down. The Labour blow up over Diana Abbott’s candidacy in Hackney North has dominated the headlines, completely overshadowing Wes Streeting’s NHS proposals and Rachel Reeves’s economic plans. It has also reminded the electorate that Labour is as big a basket case as the Tory party.
Having long accused the “broad church” Conservatives of fighting like rats in a sack, we are now witnessing Labourites, Left and Right, losing their religion. Notwithstanding the lunacy of restoring the whip to Abbott and spending days prevaricating over whether she can stand for Labour despite her 37 years in parliament and 33,000 majority, the fiasco has given voters a glimpse of how divided a future Labour government will be.
If they’re like this when they’re not even in power, what kind of hell will break loose once they’ve been handed the keys to No 10? And while Labour have spent the past nine days serving up word salad and empty waffle (think the shadow chancellor’s “investment through partnership between strategic government and enterprising business”), the Tories have come up with some actual policies.
Indeed, Sunak has been positively imaginative. Social-media platforms dominated by Left-leaning Generation Z predictably hated it, but the “bring back National Service” pledge has gone down a storm with the Tory base. A survey by More In Common found that among the general public, more people support it than oppose it.
Nigel Farage, Reform’s honorary president, attempted to poo-poo the idea, before being reminded that he himself had called for National Service for 16 year olds on his GB News show last year. And by his own admission, his decision not to run as an MP is a direct consequence of Sunak firing the starting gun early last week.
Polling by Savanta for this newspaper now suggests that Reform may have peaked at 11 per cent – with support now down to 9 per cent. Reform leader Richard Tice’s migrant tax plan is already falling apart at the seams after leading hotelier Sir Rocco Forte, who employs hundreds of foreigners at Brown’s hotel in London and The Balmoral in Edinburgh, described it as “the craziest thing I’ve ever heard”. Quite how Reform is going to stand 630 candidates, with no time and even less money in the party’s coffers is anyone’s guess.
The Liberal Democrats aren’t faring much better, and are being outgunned on the anti-sewage, socks and sandals front by the Greens (currently polling ahead of the Tories among the under-50s, according to YouGov).
The yellows’ campaign has hardly been helped by the idiotic antics of its hapless leader Sir Ed Davey, who has spent the week falling into Lake Windermere, childishly cycling down a hill with his legs in the air and riding on a slip and slide in the vein of a contestant on Total Wipeout. Despite his desperation to be noticed, the Remainiac has been virtually absent from the campaign so far. If you can name a Lib Dem policy (and you don’t work for the party), then do write in.
The Conservatives have also been politically shrewd in announcing the pensions triple lock plus – a formidable piece of political spin in fixing a problem they’ve caused by freezing tax thresholds for so long.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt was unequivocal on the airwaves this week, insisting that taxes will come down if the Tories are re-elected. Reeves, on the other hand, has seemingly only been able to promise that they won’t go up – while confusion remains over what Labour might do with VAT, amid suggestions that the party could lower the VAT threshold for businesses to £50,000 after Hunt raised it to £90,000.
Yes, the Tories may well be having to undo their own dirty work – but the effect has been to make pensioners feel more secure and Labour look more punitive. If the Conservatives continue to be bold, then fortune will favour the brave. A lot is riding on the manifesto. Put simply, it must convince people they’ll be better off under the Tories and poorer under Labour.
What we also witnessed this week was Sunak finally letting his guard down and showing us “the real Rishi”. Before he appeared on The Daily T, the Telegraph podcast I host with Kamal Ahmed, I expected the PM to be his typical tetchy self (in that Savanta poll, voters regarded the former Winchester head boy and investment banker to be more “arrogant” than Starmer). But it seems he has had some media coaching at last.
Bounding into the studio on Tuesday in an unabashedly chipper mood, he gave us one of the most personal interviews of his political career, chatting about everything from Star Wars to faith and family. He seemed human again. It was the nice Sunak we remember from lockdown.
Sure, this is a short campaign, but we’ve seen big surprises in recent years. What some pollsters are saying (as opposed to the polls) is that the Labour lead may be overstated, and that the undecideds will have a huge bearing on the result.
Rather than a Tory wipeout and Labour landslide, Starmer’s floundering could lead us to another Theresa May 2017 situation, with himself as the emperor without clothes. Everyone laughed when Sunak first suggested a hung parliament. But the momentum building behind “no overall majority” shows the Tories are having a much better campaign than Labour.
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