Any lingering doubts about the result of next month’s election have been dispelled by Rishi Sunak’s inexplicable decision to leave last week’s D-day commemorations early. Only the scale of the Tory defeat remains in question.
Last week was supposed to be the start of the Conservative party’s fightback. The idea was to go hard on Labour’s tax and spending plans in the hope that it would make voters forget that they are poorer now than they were at the start of this parliament.
The strategy got off to a decent start, mainly because it clearly rattled a Labour party still haunted by its traumatic defeat at the 1992 election. Want to know why Rachel Reeves is so obsessed with getting the national debt on a downward trend? Look no further than Neil Kinnock snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in one of the biggest poll shocks of modern times.
Finding it hard to understand why Labour was so desperate to rubbish the claim that taxes would need to rise by £2,000 a household if Keir Starmer becomes prime minister? The idea of a Labour tax bombshell is not new; it was minted by the Conservatives during their successful 1992 campaign.
What’s more, there are similarities between then and now. In 1992, the economy was only just coming out of recession. Interest rates had been raised aggressively to combat high inflation. The Conservatives had ditched a proven election winner for a grey technocrat. The shadow chancellor, John Smith, had gone out of his way to appear solid and statesmanlike, presenting Labour’s tax and spending plans in the form of a shadow budget.
The then chancellor, Norman Lamont, found a way of cutting taxes in a pre-election budget so the scene was set for a contest dominated by the issue of whether hard-pressed voters were prepared to risk voting Labour. Not enough of them were, it turned out.
The scars of that defeat run very, very deep, which makes it all the more strange that Starmer was caught unawares by Sunak’s £2,000 “bombshell” attack last week. James Bowler, the permanent secretary to the Treasury, had written to Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary, the day before the debate to say that the Tory dossier should not be presented as having been produced by civil servants. Starmer could have pulled the letter out of his pocket and instantly stopped Sunak’s attacks.
The vehemence of Labour’s subsequent rebuttal speaks volumes. It was a clear mistake for Starmer to let Sunak make the £2,000 claim multiple times before dismissing it as “absolute garbage”. Another four weeks in which there is a 1992-style focus on Labour’s tax plans was the last thing Starmer wanted.
As it happens, Labour’s concerns are misplaced. That’s partly because thinktanks such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Resolution Foundation and the Institute for Government have been as dismissive of Tory tax and spending plans as they have been of Labour’s. And partly it’s because the parallels with 1992 are not exact.
For a start, Labour’s poll lead has been consistently higher – 20 percentage points or more – in the past year than it was in 1991-92. When Kinnock appeared at a rally in Sheffield a week before polling day, polls were showing Labour up to eight points ahead, but on election day Major secured an overall majority of 30.
A second factor was that Major fought an effective campaign. Positioning himself as the underdog, he found a useful prop in a soap box which he took with him around the country. The then prime minister took a lot of stick from the media for seemingly spending much of his time in DIY superstores, but had tapped into something: voters spend a lot of time and money doing up their homes. Major seemed like an ordinary bloke, someone that people could relate to. Sunak lacks the common touch and, as last week’s blunder shows, is politically inept.
Major was also fortunate that the seismic event that undid his premiership – sterling’s ejection from the European exchange rate mechanism – came five months after the election was held in April 1992. Black Wednesday was such a blow to the Tory party’s reputation for economic competence that it was not until 2015 that it again secured an overall majority. The economy was humming by the time of the 1997 election but Major was on the wrong end of Tony Blair’s first landslide.
This time is different. The event that has undermined voter confidence in the Tories – Liz Truss’s disastrous seven-week stint in Downing Street – happened in the current parliament. The pound has recovered after flirting with parity against the US dollar but higher mortgage rates are a reminder of the market turmoil that followed Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-budget.
These recent events make it that much harder for the Conservatives to exploit the tactic that was so successful in 1992: the idea that things might be bad but they would be even worse under Labour. Starmer’s main attack line – that the Tories have presided over a catalogue of chaos – resonates with voters.
Sunak kicked off the campaign by saying he had a plan and Starmer didn’t. That failed to move the dial so he is now trying a different approach: that Starmer does have a plan but it simply amounts to a plan to raise taxes and make pensioners worse off.
Will this approach work? Not a chance. That was true before the D-day furore and it is even more the case now. Labour can stop worrying. There will be no repeat of 1992. Sunak is about to lead the Tory party to a defeat of epic proportions.
