When confronted with a list of problems and setbacks afflicting the Government, a minister recently told me: ‘The darkest hour is just before the dawn.’ I doubt she really believed it, which is just as well because, in a scientific sense at least, it turns out not to be true. But Tory ministers – aware of the party’s looming fate at the next election – are seeking such crumbs of comfort.
In recent weeks, there has been a tsunami of announcements from backbenchers and former ministers that they won’t be standing again. Unhelpful by-elections look set to confirm what many suspect: the Tories are heading for defeat, come the next election. The whips office meanwhile has apparently been on a go-slow – unwilling or unable to persuade Tory MPs on the Privileges Committee to call off their increasingly hysterical vendetta against any colleague who has ever criticised anything they have ever done.
No wonder then that Labour has a favourite new attack line used successively in PMQs by Keir Starmer last week and Angela Rayner while deputising for him this week: ‘They’ve given up.’
It’s brilliant in its simplicity and potentially devastating in its effect on Tory morale and public opinion. If it becomes conventional wisdom that the Tories are goners, know they are goners and lack even the spirit to make a fight of the next election then this will very quickly turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Labour has a favourite new attack line
People are already noticing the depressed body language of Rishi Sunak, while his alleged moaning behind closed doors about his bad luck regularly percolates through into newspaper articles. The consensus answer to the not-entirely-flattering question of whether he most resembles John Major just before 1992 or John Major just before 1997 is leaning towards the later date. For the first time, the words ‘landslide win’ are attaching themselves to the underwhelming persona of Keir Starmer in pieces written by pundits from across the political spectrum.
So what is to be done? Is the answer to this going to be the same one that was given when John Redwood confronted a previous cohort of Conservative parliamentarians with his slogan ‘no change, no chance’ during his leadership challenge of 1995: ‘OK then, we’ll choose no chance’?
Just sleepwalking towards the edge of the cliff while the public becomes used to the idea of a Starmerite interregnum of indeterminate length is not only a miserable idea, but a stupid one as well. Because Labour’s position is not nearly as strong as its PMQs psy-ops would have us believe. For a start, any Conservative MP who has even briefly broken off from staring at his own shoes lately will have surely noticed that Labour is in big trouble as regards its war on the motorist.
In Cambridge, the local Conservatives have just won their first seat on the city council in more than a decade amid a voter backlash against a planned new congestion charge scheme. In the ongoing Uxbridge by-election, the Labour candidate, who was previously thought to be cruising to the smoothest of victories, has just signalled his opposition to Sadiq Khan’s imminent Ulez extension to the outer London boroughs.
For once, the living standards crisis may be helping the Tories as the appetite of increasingly hard-up voters for yet more very expensive eco-radicalism rapidly declines. And the response of Starmer himself – to say of Khan’s policy and the Uxbridge candidate’s contradictory stance that they ‘both…have to be accommodated’ – will surely play into public doubts about just who he is and what he is offering.
The list of his broken pledges, handbrake policy u-turns and cringeworthy fence-sitting exploits is too long to reproduce here. But any semi-competent Tory attack dog equipped with a Google search facility should be able to come up with a pretty devastating inventory of insincerity, poor judgment and untrustworthiness on his part.
And can it really be beyond the Conservatives to highlight Labour’s obvious weaknesses on immigration, both legal and illegal? On the former aspect, perhaps the Tories in their extreme laxity have given away the right to criticise anyone else ever again. But on illegal landings at least they are having a go. And the paucity of counter proposals being served up by shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper will only remind voters that most Labour politicians don’t actually care in the slightest about border control.
Parliament rises for its summer recess on 20 July. By then, the idea of inevitability around the result of the next election may have become a secure part of Labour’s armoury. But a quick, spirited counter-attack led by a PM showing some signs of life and backed by a ministerial team less mysteriously unavailable for broadcast interview could at least let voters know the Tories are not giving up and keep them in the game.
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