The polls will tighten. The polls will tighten. The polls WILL tighten. This has been the drumbeat banging away in the background of British politics for a year or more. It is the soundtrack when Labour ducks into a defensive crouch despite the opposition’s soaring leads. It is the tune that Tories whistle to themselves rather than surrender to complete despair about what the voters are going to do to them at the ballot box.
I have lost count of how many times I have heard angsty Labour people tell me that Sir Keir Starmer’s huge advantage in the opinion polls is bound to shrivel. This paranoia comes from Labour’s miserable track record of losing past elections it expected to win. It is further prompted by the desire to keep the party on its toes and disciplined. It is also the product of the belief, for which there is some evidence, that the electorate is much more volatile than it used to be. Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s director of campaigns, has an anti-complacency tool that he deploys against colleagues who assume that victory is already in the bag. He shows them a slide deck of election results over recent years, among them contests in Australia, America, Germany and Norway, in which there were dramatic shifts in voter support during the final leg of the race. He uses this to warn them that what the electorate are saying today is not a guarantee of what they will do in the polling booth.
