How the Tories planned to spend this summer behaving like an opposition party

Unless you’re as optimistic as Jon Ashworth, it’s pretty clear that messaging-wise, Labour have had a pretty bad summer. There are many reasons for this that many wise people have examined in quite some detail and at quite some length, but one of the major strategic errors is that the party appears to have made entirely the wrong assumption about what the Tories had planned for recess. Labour was clearly just lying in wait for more mistakes and bad news to come crawling out of the woodwork over the holidays. But they’d reckoned without the months of careful planning that the Conservatives had put into this slower season.

I understand that the party was holding meetings on how to manage recess months ago, and had planned a programme of announcements, speeches, stunts and neat little infographics about how well their policies are going. They printed half a million more pledge cards to hand out.