Tories are having a debate among themselves about whether they can somehow contrive to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat or are doomed to be chewed up and spat out by angry voters whenever the next election comes. Confronted with persistently terrible poll ratings, the gloomsters think they’re trapped in a repeat of an old horror movie about an age-raddled, scandal-riddled and bitterly divided Conservative government that has forfeited public respect for its competence with the economy or anything else. They know how that plotline went under John Major. The denouement in 1997 was a landslide defeat. On this reading, the public have made up their minds and are just drumming their fingers until they get the chance to chuck them out. Rishi Sunak will have the occasional positive episode, as he did with brokering improvements to the Northern Ireland protocol. He will exploit the opportunities of his position to perform on international stages, as he did at the Franco-British summit with Emmanuel Macron on Friday. The chancellor will attempt to claw back some confidence in the Tories’ financial management, which will be Jeremy Hunt’s central goal when he presents the budget this week. To Tory fatalists, despairing into the bottom of their wine glasses, none of this will really matter a damn. Mr Major had some good moments before the 1997 election, and the economy was doing quite well by the time it was called, but his government couldn’t be saved from oblivion. In the wake of his eviction from Number 10, he lugubriously lamented: “If I had stood unopposed, I would still have come second.”
Senior Labour people are not arguing about whether we are reliving the run-up to ’97. That’s because none of them think they have a chance of replicating the 179-seat majority won by Tony Blair. Sir Keir Starmer’s party had a 10-point advantage in the polls as the curtain crashed down on Boris Johnson’s shabby premiership, Labour moved 30 points ahead during the lunacies of Liz Truss and has settled into a 20-point lead since Mr Sunak moved into Number 10. That’s big and gives Labour people lots of hope that they can win, but the sensible ones are acutely conscious that opposition poll leads almost always shrink in the approach to an election. “The risk for us is that we get used to being 20 points ahead,” says one member of the shadow cabinet. “We have to be ready for things to narrow, as they inevitably will. We have to be prepared for that happening and not wobble when it does.” As Sir John Curtice, the psephological savant, says: “For all the government’s recent difficulties, Labour’s route back to power is markedly more rugged and steep than the one Tony Blair had to negotiate in 1997.” Then, Labour needed a swing of just 4% to get to a parliamentary majority. Thanks to the dismal legacy of the last election, its worst result since 1935, Labour has a vast mountain to scale. It probably requires a swing of 12% to get over the line – a bigger shift than the 10% achieved by Mr Blair.
