The Tories are right to be nervous

Despite their consistent poll lead, the Tories are anxious. There is only a week to go and in many seats the race is far too tight for comfort. Because they have no potential partners in a hung parliament, if the Tories win, it will be by the ‘skin of their teeth’, I’m told. ‘There’s quite a lot of nervousness at CCHQ,’ says one cabinet minister sounding decidedly nervous.

The big Tory concern is that the Remain vote is beginning to coalesce around Labour. To date, the Tories have benefitted from the fact they’re uniting the Leave vote, while Remain is split. If that changes, the likelihood of a majority will be greatly reduced.

How has Labour managed to pull off this squeeze, when Jeremy Corbyn himself has said that he would stay neutral during a second Brexit referendum? Perhaps, as one Tory campaign aide frets, the Tories have been ‘too effective at framing this as a binary choice’. He continues: ‘If we’re going to get Brexit done, then Remainers will vote for the other guy, whatever he says.’

The question now is: what is the floor of the Liberal Democrats’ support? There should be enough voters who want to vote for an unequivocally pro-Remain party to keep the Lib Dems’ share of the vote in double digits, and if they maintain their current share, it is hard to see how Labour can make up enough ground to deny the Tories a majority. But if the Lib Dems slip much further, the election could get very close indeed.

Most senior Tories still expect a slim Conservative majority at the end of all this. They believe that Jeremy Corbyn and a desire to get Brexit done will see them home. Corbyn’s ratings haven’t climbed in anything like the way they did in 2017.