It will not surprise readers to learn that senior Conservatives expect to lose the next election. For one party elder statesman, with whom I caught up earlier this week, “the only question is whether we’re out of power for five years, or 15.”
When I spoke to a Cabinet Minister before Christmas, they were preoccupied with which colleague might end up as Leader of the Opposition by 2025, and what factional infighting might colour the project of policy renewal outside government. Publicly, this minister is one of the most bullish voices insisting the Tories can win again; privately, they conceded the battle was over.
What will surprise some readers is that plenty of senior Labour figures also expect to lose the next election. We’re not just talking about the hard left, inevitably reluctant to accept that squeezing their candidates out of target seats like Kensington is a winning strategy. (Take it from me as a resident of Kensington: appointing a moderate candidate like Joe Powell, with appeal to the thousands of disaffected former Tory voters in the seat, is very much a winning strategy. Even if the Labour leadership privately admit that they’ve had to be “ruthless” to assert control of this divisive and high-profile selection battle.)
The soft left, who ran the party under Ed Miliband in 2015 and learned the hard way never to underestimate the resilience of the Tory vote, are vocal in their fears that Starmer hasn’t offered enough to differentiate himself from Rishi Sunak. As for the Starmer loyalists themselves, whether Labour moderates or all-out Blairites, they are well aware that Sunak has two years to make the political weather. Two years is a long time.
Sure, for some the mood is buoyant. At a Christmas party I attended this year peppered with Labour rainmakers, some of those present seemed giddy with proximity to power. More than one person decided to deliver an impromptu toast to Keir Starmer, present in the room, with an enthusiastic shopping list of policy proposals they fully expected him to implement when – not if – he walked into Downing Street at the head of a Labour government.
Starmer himself clearly finds this kind of talk deeply uncomfortable. Who wouldn’t? For a party leader, there’s no psychological pressure like being told an election is yours to lose. To many of his members, things look rosy. Only this week, a poll was released by the organisation Redfield and Wilton, which seemingly gives the Labour Party a 20-point lead. Team Starmer, however, know that there are icebergs under the surface of such polls.
Every survey taken in the last couple of months reflects the rampant chaos that has marked the last six months of life in the Conservative Party. The campaign group Best of Britain this week put pressure on Starmer by releasing an analysis of Focaldata polling from October, which highlighted the large numbers of people answering “don’t know” on their voting intentions, despite the fact that most were being polled even as Liz Truss’s government fell.
Worse, 38 per cent of voters in the Redfield and Wilton data preferred Sunak as Prime Minister, who also regularly outpolls Starmer on economic competence.
Yes, recent Tory gambling trashed this country’s economy. That has alienated some of the most loyal Tory votes. Even members of an affiliate group of financial services professionals affiliated with the Conservative Party were shocked by the cavalier attitude of Kwasi Kwarteng, when he spoke to them during his summer campaign to make Liz Truss leader of the Party.
According to three people present, they were surprised to hear Truss’ future Chancellor proudly declare that “when I bought my first property, I didn’t worry about the debt of my mortgage – I only worried about increasing my income”. Kwarteng’s implication was that the country should keep a similar focus on growth without worrying about debt; as he was to discover, voters did not share the cavalier attitude of an old Etonian in financial services when it came to taking risks with one’s mortgage.
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Yet there’s a growing sense among Tory outriders that sensible hands are back on the tiller. Sunak continues to make noises on immigration that will scare off some liberals, though it’s hard to see how he’ll be able to make good on his promise he unveiled on Wednesday to make it legally easier to bar most migrants arriving on small boats from rights in this country. (The looming fight over his promise to unpick all EU legislation by the end of 2023 is likely to suck all energy from the legislative timetable.) Despite this, the coalition of voters who brought David Cameron to power – twice – see something of the same in this new Tory PM.
Sunak’s rhetoric on the importance of the family unit stressed that a family “can and does take many forms”, emphasising that the Conservative commitment to the family doesn’t mean an exclusionary dedication to traditional family models. Nonetheless, he asserted passionately that Conservatives see families, whatever form they take form, as the essential building blocks of society. This is Cameronism, pure and simple. So too is Sunak’s focus on innovation and skills. And he has two years to remind voters what a One Nation Conservative PM looks like.
This may not be enough to save the Conservative Party by the next election. The Conservative Party has been in power too long and has overseen too many disasters, to reasonably expect more turns on the wheel. One symptom of a party in power too long is that it is reduced to undoing its own work. Consider two of Sunak’s flagship policies: his commitment to universal maths education until the age of 18 and his promise to limit the human rights protections which until now have allowed for serious investigation of any claims by migrants they have been victims of human trafficking. What is striking about these is that they both require this Conservative government to cannibalise legislation brought in by their own party.
Sunak’s commitments on maths cut across years of policy formulation on education for the 16-18 age group, developed under Michael Gove, Nicky Morgan and Justine Greening. His immigration proposals, which his team insist are essential to process more swiftly the deportation of undesirable migrants, constitute an even more dramatic attack on the legacy of Theresa May, whose Modern Slavery Act protects those who may be victims of human trafficking. The Act, developed with her advisor Fiona Hill, is amongst the former PM’s proudest achievements and the Tory Party’s few recent claims to a humanitarian conscience. In electoral terms, can voters place any faith in the next Tory manifesto, after watching it legally unpick its own promises?
In the upper echelons of both leading political parties, therefore, there is genuine uncertainty about the odds on the next election. Both the Conservatives and Labour are privately preparing to lose.
Yet if they are to inspire voters, each party should be preparing to win. Hunting around for a positive offer, Starmer may think the answer lies in a redeployment of personnel, if rumours of an upcoming Labour reshuffle are to be believed. He would be extremely foolish to demote the phenomenal Lisa Nandy, as one rumour suggests – Nandy, well-known for the amount of time she spends in her Northern constituency of Wigan, is one of few performers with universal appeal across Westminster influencers and her actual voters.
Instead, Starmer needs to give up on playing defence. Sunak may be a competent manager, but as the limp speech he gave today made clear, he is a mediocre political performer. He has failed in Wednesday’s speech to offer any policy to tackle one of our country’s biggest challenges – housing. On this, and so much more, Starmer has a chance to go on the offensive. To do that, he has to believe what the Tory Party believes: that Labour are on the brink of power.