Labour is starting its hardest election campaign woefully unprepared

The opposition parties about whom Theresa May complained in her speech launching the snap election are grinding into action. Their size and resources seem to be inversely proportionate to how prepared they are: the Lib Dems say they have already selected around 400 candidates to contest seats, while Labour hasn’t selected any candidates in seats it doesn’t hold.

The party is contacting its 2015 candidates to see if they might stand again so it might mount reasonably well-informed campaigns in key seats (or formerly key seats: a campaign with an ounce of wisdom would have to name seats it already holds as ‘key seats’ while accepting that many of its sitting MPs will just be washed away). This in itself sounds like wishful thinking: many 2015 candidates are still paying back colossal personal debts from the previous campaign, and a good number of them were sufficiently bruised by that campaign, in which the party dramatically pulled out resources from seats as it wrote them off, to need a few more years to forget how terrible it was before they even consider standing again.