Good afternoon. Since I last wrote to you, the following things have happened. Long and delirious paragraph follows.
Three new MRP polls predicted varying degrees of Conservative annihilation, the worst of them projecting a collapse to 53 seats and prompting a Daily Telegraph front page headline in a font size normally reserved for mass casualty events in the home counties: “Tory Wipeout”. The Gambling Commission was revealed to be looking into a second Conservative hopeful, Bristol North West candidate Laura Saunders (pictured above, centre), over an alleged bet on the timing of the election. Michael Gove compared the Tory campaign to the Scotland football team, which you will recall lost 5-1 to Germany on Friday. Jeremy Hunt admitted he might lose his own seat. Laura Saunders’ husband turned out to be the Conservatives’ director of campaigning, Tony Lee, who is also facing questions from the Gambling Commission and has taken a leave of absence two weeks out from the election. Bloomberg reported that (£) Tory campaign resources are being moved out of constituencies with majorities of around 10,000 because they are no longer viewed as winnable. The Conservatives deleted an unfortunately timed social media post that warned “if you bet on Labour, you can never win” alongside a video of a roulette wheel, that had already been viewed 1.4m times. Promotion started for Boris Johnson’s forthcoming book, with a picture of the former prime minister looking like a particularly monstrous horror movie villain, and the tagline: “UNLEASHED”.
Lol, but also, blimey. Where do the Tories go from here? The answer appears to be the Hurlingham Club, where they are holding their summer party tonight. Tables cost £12,000, and honestly, I might start a GoFundMe.
More on an omnishambolic 24 hours, if I can think of anything other than lol and blimey, after the headlines.
What happened today
Economy | The Bank of England has held interest rates at 5.25%, marking the seventh consecutive time the central bank has left the cost of borrowing unchanged. Dashing Rishi Sunak’s hopes of a pre-election cut, the Bank’s monetary policy committee said they wanted to see further evidence that price growth would remain subdued.
NHS | The NHS in England will need £38bn more a year than planned by the end of the next parliament, political parties have been warned. The Health Foundation said both Labour and Tory manifesto promises were well short of the funding needed to cut the care backlog and end long treatment delays.
Birmingham | An independent candidate standing in Birmingham said “70% of hell will be women” on a podcast earlier this year, it has emerged, as polling suggests he is closing the gap with Labour. Akhmed Yakoob, 6% behind Labour’s Shabana Mahmood in Ladywood, also joked about domestic violence.
Analysis: Dead party walking
I’ve thought about it now, and concluded that there is very little analysis to be done on a bewilderingly bad 24-hour period that nonetheless just confirms what we already know. Gove is right that his party resembles the Scottish football team, but only in that it is now locked in a mortal struggle for second place. The more apt comparison may be with the corpse in Weekend at Bernie’s, which is strangled, shot and washed out to sea several days after being subjected to a fatal heroin overdose. You might find bullet holes in the body, but that doesn’t mean that’s how it died.
In lieu of any wider meaning, here’s a rundown of what went wrong.
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The polls
The MRP polls in wide circulation over the past few weeks have painted a picture so bleak that many have struggled to credit it, but let me quote elections analyst Dylan Difford for the third time this week: “We are now at the stage where the only thing that stops an unprecedented result, like those seen in most projections, are things that are themselves unprecedented.”
A disclaimer is still necessary: unprecedented things happen, unpredictable events intervene. There are still plenty of tight races, like the ones Jessica Elgot reports on today in Essex; the polls are a description and not a prediction. But you don’t even need to take the ugliest of last night’s polls, the Savanta one suggesting Rishi Sunak himself would lose his seat, to understand how daunting the position appears to be. YouGov have the Tories down to 108 seats; More in Common have them at 155.
If the broad direction suggested here is correct, the biggest consequence of where the right place in the range turns out to be is probably the future direction of the Tory party. The most apocalyptic predictions rule out a bunch of plausible leadership contenders, and leave Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat as the only serious candidates. That is a straight fight between the right and moderate wings of the party, and the membership would almost inevitably head towards the fringes.
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The defeatists
Michael Gove and Jeremy Hunt are the latest to acknowledge the likely scale of the defeat today, although neither of them can quite rival work and pensions secretary Mel Stride’s line yesterday: if the polls are right, he said, Labour is headed for “the largest majority virtually in the history of this country”.
There’s not much need now for confirmation that this is approved messaging. But Aubrey Allegretti of the Times provided it this morning: CCHQ is briefing candidates that they should “warn against handing Labour a blank cheque” and that “only the Conservatives can win enough seats to prevent an unaccountable Labour majority”.
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The gambling problem
After Pippa Crerar revealed last week that backbencher and Rishi Sunak aide Craig Williams placed a bet on the timing of the election, the Gambling Commission asked bookmakers to look through all substantial bets on a July poll in the same period. Last night, it emerged that one of Sunak’s close protection officers had been suspended and arrested. Now the Gambling Commission is looking into candidate Laura Saunders and her husband Tony Lee. Stop the bets!
The head of campaigning taking a leave of absence with two weeks to go sounds pretty bad … until you think about how the last month has gone. Indeed, one argument in his defence might be that this does not appear to be the campaign of someone who had any prior warning at all.
Regardless, his suspension was reported to have led to “WhatsApp burning up with completely apoplectic Tories.” It meanwhile looks pretty bad that the police officer has faced more severe consequences than the Westminster insiders – Labour have called for Saunders to be suspended and say that this may be a matter for the police. Neither she nor Lee have commented. And could there be yet more to emerge?
Evening Standard columnist Tom Newton Dunn compared it to the last days of Rome: “fill your pockets with whatever you can, because the temple’s coming down”. No word on whether Romulus Augustulus’ confidantes nipped down the bookies, or deleted any unfortunate tweets about it (see above), but Rishi Sunak might be intrigued to learn that he was exiled to a nice villa on the west coast.
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The retreat
Speaking of apoplectic Tories: spare a thought for those with majorities of 10,000 or so, who are now seeing party resources reallocated away from their seats because they are no longer deemed to be winnable.
That means money and party activists sent to the truest of blue seats, including Sunak’s own, Bloomberg reported. It is also in line with the prime minister’s own activity: half of the constituencies he has visited since his D-Day debacle have majorities of over 20,000.
That is a sensible distribution of resources given the circumstances. But it is also likely to mean even more Tories concluding that their hopes of staying in a job have evaporated, and that they have little reason for public loyalty to the leadership.
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The ghoul
My first reaction on seeing this picture of Boris Johnson was to wonder why he was promoting his new book with an illustration of Michael Fabricant’s wig floating through the air; Rishi Sunak’s is likely to have been a bitter reflection on how, if his predecessor really wanted to be helpful, he might ask his publishers to steer clear of advertising featuring the word “unleashed” instead of signing a few letters.
The implication, many of the party membership are likely to hope, is that the famously taciturn newspaper columnist will finally say what he really thinks, and perhaps return to lead them back to the promised land. But given the state of his likely inheritance, I wouldn’t bet on it. Unless a senior Tory does first.
What’s at stake
Both leading parties have tried to focus on housing today, with the Conservatives’ Michael Gove claiming that the Tories will deliver 1.6m new homes and abolish stamp duty for first-time buyers on homes up to £425,000, and Labour’s Matthew Pennycook saying that discounts on former council homes sold under right to buy would be reviewed.
The Guardian’s social affairs correspondent, Robert Booth, reports that a new Labour government would be coming under pressure in another area: private renting. The party has said that private landlords would no longer be able to auction rented homes to the highest bidder, and that requests for upfront rent will be capped – as well as promising to ban no-fault evictions.
But the Renters’ Reform Coalition, a leading campaign group, says that the party is not doing enough to tackle a crisis in the sector. Campaign manager Tom Darling said:
“We’ll need to see more detail as to how Labour intends to deliver security of tenure for private renters. In particular, how will they prevent back doors to no-fault evictions through new eviction grounds and how they plan to tackle evictions through unaffordable rent hikes.”
The London Renters Union said that “none of Labour’s new measures would protect tenants facing inflation-busting rent hikes and outrageous asking prices”. With rent inflation in London at 13% last year, the group is calling for rent controls. Spokesperson Jae Vail said:
The party is right to highlight the problem of rising rents, but today’s announcements will not offer much hope to the millions living with the constant fear of being driven out of their communities by unaffordable rents. Labour must prioritise our right to a home over landlords’ profits and commit to real rent regulation.”
Winners of the day
Melons, after Labour’s candidate in Poole, Neil Duncan-Jordan, deployed one to devastating effect in a punchy video warning about some suspicious Lib Dem bar graphs that you really ought to watch. These plucky upstarts are unlikely to challenge lettuces for supremacy among spherical-political foodstuffs, but it’s nice that they get a moment in the sun.
Losers of the day
I did try to find something – anything – else, but it’s the Conservatives. See above.
Surprising campaign issue in Surrey Heath of the day
It’s whether Margaret Thatcher was blame for the Falklands War – a claim made by local Reform candidate Samantha Goggin at a hustings event, in a video unearthed by Spectator political correspondent James Heale. Goggins also argued that “supporting the Ukraines” was in danger of dragging the UK into another conflict. As a reminder, Reform have had some trouble with candidate selection.
Quote of the day
The only logical way for this election campaign to end is for it to transpire that Rishi Sunak has placed a massive bet on himself losing
Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera on X, formerly Twitter
Number of the day
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9
The number of disabled people in line be elected to parliament, using YouGov’s recent MRP polling, out of 650 MPs in total, according to a new report from the Disability Policy Centre. There are 28 candidates with disabilities out of about 4,500 in total. If disabled people were represented in politics according to their proportion of the UK population, there would be about 136 disabled MPs, Lucy Webster wrote last month.
Dubious photo opportunity of the day
Yikes.
Read more
Listen to this
On the road in Chingford and Woodford Green – Politics Weekly UK
Politics Weekly UK is in the London suburb of Chingford and Woodford Green, where a spat between Labour and its former candidate is threatening to split the progressive vote. The Guardian’s John Harris talks to the now independent Faiza Shaheen (above), Labour’s new candidate, Shama Tatler and Iain Duncan Smith, who has represented the area for the Conservatives for more than 30 years.
What’s on the grid
Today, 8pm | Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Ed Davey and John Swinney take part in a BBC Question Time special, taking questions from the audience for 30 minutes each.
Tomorrow, 8.30am | Welsh Labour manifesto launch.
Tomorrow, 7pm | Reform leader Nigel Farage interviewed by Nick Robinson on BBC One as part of Panorama’s pre-election series.
