Whisper it, but Labour is still on course for majority government
Whisper it, but Labour is still on course for majority government
Caution, meet wind. Also this week: an extremely short history of Washington DC.
Just two examples should suffice to make the point. On Friday the former Evening Standard editor Emily Sheffield, who clearly hails from the metropolitan Cameroon tradition – she’s literally his sister-in-law – wrote a column under the headline “I now think Rishi Sunak is going to win the next election”. Two days later, the Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh, a man whose views were starting to look a bit palaeolithic when Harold MacMillan was still moving about, published his own piece, headed: “Rishi Sunak is whacking Keir Starmer all over the park and revived jaded Tory appetite for battle”. These guys hail from opposite ends of the Tory commentariat, yet both are making the exact same point. The right-wing press has clearly decided that it’s time for a vibe shift.
Columns like this – there is no shortage of others – are, I think, yet more proof for my theory that the pro-Tory press are going to swaddle their party to death. But I’ve written about that before so this time let’s instead ask why people keep writing them.
The obvious reason – or at least, the thing that’s given everyone the excuse to write this stuff – is that the polls do genuinely seem to have slightly narrowed of late. After months of Labour leads in the 20s or even 30s, they now seem to be clustering instead in the mid to high teens.
Behind that, I suspect, lies the fact that Rishi Sunak has cleared the extremely low bar implied by the phrase “better than his immediate predecessors”. The Windsor Framework is a genuine achievement, partly in terms of improving the UK’s trading arrangements, but also in changing the tone, and making clear that a handful of Europhobic lunatics no longer get a veto on British foreign policy. People don’t vote on policy, let alone policy towards Northern Ireland, a place a depressingly large proportion of the UK population don’t grasp is in the UK at all – but they do vote on tone, and Sunak looks serious in precisely the way Johnson did not.
So: if Tory prospects were going to improve, this would be the time. But there are other, less reality-based reasons Tory commentators are itching to write those columns. Sometimes things are written because we want them to be true1; sometimes, because our audience or contacts do. Then there’s the fact that the Tories actually do have a record of winning with a losing hand, just as Labour has one of losing with a winning one: as the FT’s Stephen Bush has noted, a child whose favourite colour is blue would do a better job of predicting elections in this country than most actual political scientists.
And then there’s the papers’ insatiable desire for novelty. We’re looking down the barrel of nearly two years of waiting for the inevitable, and where’s the fun in that? Much better, from the columnist’s point of view, to inject a spot of uncertainty to liven things up a bit.
On the other hand, surprisingly few people seem to be writing the “Labour are actually favourites to win a landslide”, because even though that’s actually supported by the evidence it’s not something either the right or certain bits of the left actually want to believe. That makes it the most novel take of all. So, what the hell:
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