New Labour’s final collapse

25 April 2007

Fraser Nelson takes to the road and finds voters turning to whichever parties will maximise the mutiny against Blair and Brown. The SNP is now a party of protest, not separatism — but have the Tories done enough to stay on track for power?

On the journey to his next appointment (graffiti-removal at a playground) Mr Osborne is briefed on the party’s chances by Peter Forgeham, the local Tory chairman. ‘Labour is expecting a drubbing,’ he tells the shadow Chancellor. ‘But what that means for us isn’t quite clear.’ This is true nationally: politics has entered a state of deeply unpredictable flux. The electorate may be deserting Labour, but it has not yet shifted its allegiance decisively to David Cameron. An ICM poll in Wednesday’s Guardian showed that the Tory leader has an 11-point lead as the person voters think would be most likely to take Britain in the right direction and a six-point lead over Mr Brown as the man voters think has the most potential as PM. Yet the Chancellor still has a narrow lead over the Tory leader as the man believed most likely to take the right decisions when the going gets tough. The electorate’s indecision is palpable.

There will be 10,455 town hall seats contested in England in 312 councils, and forecasts suggest that Labour will lose about 600 seats and that the Conservatives will gain about the same. But this is a poor proxy for the general election, as the lion’s share of contests are in Tory-inclined areas. The Conservatives are defending 4,340 seats — almost twice as many as Labour and the Lib Dems. The real significance is how successfully Labour can retain its votes — and how many of those it loses the Conservatives can snatch.

A few months ago, when Stephen Pound was still working for Labour chairman Hazel Blears, I heard him impress on a Labour meeting the need to get every single supporter out to vote. He had finally persuaded his extended family to support Labour, he said, but two of his aunts have since died: ‘But never mind, we always have postal voting.’ It was a joke (one presumes), but it underlines a more serious point. Postal voting, and its attendant shenanigans, will be a huge factor in these elections.