The Tories don’t need silly pledges to scare off Labour in this election

We are coming to the end of the first week of an election campaign that few were expecting when this week began. The parties are drawing their battle lines: the Tories are warning of a happy Vladimir Putin and a ‘coalition of chaos’ involving the SNP, Labour and the Lib Dems, while Labour is making this an anti-establishment election (though what precisely the Establishment is up to and which naughty coffee chains it involves remains vague, even for the party’s MPs promoting that message on the airwaves). The Lib Dems, meanwhile, had long worked out their pitch as the anti-Brexit party.

Of course, not all Labour MPs are talking about the way the Tories are ‘rigging’ the system or how Jeremy Corbyn proposes to solve that. The bulk of moderate MPs have decided to tell their constituents that Corbyn isn’t going to win an election and become Prime Minister so it’s safe to vote for them as a strong Labour Opposition.

The problem with this line – other than the obvious, which is that it is a desperate situation when someone’s opening gambit is that their party is definitely incapable of winning an election – is that it relies on voters being able to imagine Labour as a strong Opposition party.