Rishi Sunak’s campaign is doomed but these voter groups could shift things slightly

Good morning. The Labour party’s plans for government have “hidden and ducked” the hard economic choices they will have to make. “Their proposals on tax, benefits and public service spending would be barely enough to detain us in analysing a modest one-year fiscal event”. Unless they are very, very lucky with the OBR’s borrowing figures they will either have to cut spending (the details of which they have kept hidden from us) or raise taxes (ditto). So says Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Which would be a pretty devastating day in the office for the Labour party if Johnson wasn’t also saying these things about the Conservative party. (You can watch or read Johnson’s full remarks here.)

Both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have deliberately been coy on the inescapable upward pressures on public spending — our ageing population, the darkening geopolitical backdrop, and so on — because they don’t think that their electoral interests are served by talking openly about their solutions to those problems.

Every bit of evidence before us indicates that this is going to pay off for Starmer in a big way in less than two weeks’ time.

In the long term, I think it’s risky for Labour and more importantly for British democracy (do read Martin Wolf’s excellent column on that latter point if you haven’t yet). Starmer is making a similarly restrictive set of promises to the ones Boris Johnson made in 2019 and it may well end the same way.

As prime minister, Sunak has a greater ability to set the tone and parameters of the election than his opponents. While both Sunak and Starmer deserve blame for an election in which we are being forced to take a leap in the dark, Sunak deserves a greater share precisely because he is the one in charge.

The prime minister’s strategy has led him into fighting a campaign that is every bit as dishonest as that of his opponents, but instead he is going to be severely beaten. It’s bad enough to fight an election campaign that is dishonest and self-serving. It’s even worse to fight one that is dishonest, self-serving and obviously doomed.

And this isn’t a hindsight 20:20 thing: I wrote way back at the start of Sunak’s premiership that he needed to fight the next election with an honest account of what his government would have to do if re-elected, precisely because I thought if he didn’t, he would end up fighting an election a lot like this one. (I can’t say I predicted that he would also be mired in a betting scandal, would skip out on D-Day, launch an election campaign shortly after getting whomped in the local elections, launch said campaign in the wet and while being drowned out by D:Ream, and so on.)

But there are still nine days to go, and two big dynamics that, while unlikely to change the big picture story — a change of government — could still shift things slightly in the Conservative party’s favour. Some more thoughts on what those two things are.

Feel the fear and take it away

Here’s one way to understand the final fortnight of this election — via a fun term from political science: consideration sets! These are the options that a voter is willing to consider. These change all the time — unless you are very, very, very tribal indeed, you will have more than one party in your consideration set at any given time, and over the course of your life the parties you have in your consideration set will change.

Nonetheless at any given election, a party will, for whatever reason, find that voters have either added them to their consideration set or taken them away. There are two groups of consideration sets that I think are worth pondering over in the next two weeks:

People who are anti-Conservative, but not particularly pro-Labour: in other words, people whose consideration sets are something like Labour-Liberal Democrats-Green, in no particular order. This group forms one audience for the Conservatives’ warning of a landslide Labour majority, and they might become less inclined to vote for the party that is best placed to beat the Tories (usually Labour, sometimes the Liberal Democrats, in a handful of places perhaps the Greens) if they think the election is a done deal.

People who like the Conservative party in general but think this government has run out of road: or, in other words, people who voted Conservative in 2019 whose consideration set is Reform and the Liberal Democrats — unless it looks as if Labour is going to win in a landslide.

I have spent a lot of my time on the road in this election in usually safe Conservative seats, because that’s where the polling suggests we should be focusing. I meet a lot of people in these places who essentially say some variation on “the Conservative party needs a refresh and the country needs a change — so I am voting Lib Dem or Reform”. Some of these people have explicitly said to me, long before the Tory campaign started talking about it, that they didn’t want Labour to win a particularly large majority.

Public First has handily polled UK adults on what they want to happen to the Conservative party at this election, and as you would expect, most people want the party to be sharply rejected. But the proportion of people who want the Conservative party to get somewhere between 100 and 249 seats (27 per cent) is a lot larger than the Conservative vote share.

Now, I don’t think for a moment everyone in this group is up for grabs. One important variable in the remaining two weeks is whether people who want the Tory party out of power, but not out of business, start to think that there is a real risk that the party will be wiped out.

It’s these two groups who, if they shift late, could yet mean that we end up with something far from what the polls suggest at the moment.

Now try this

This week, I mostly listened to the Broadway soundtrack to Hadestown while writing my column. I’m seriously contemplating going a second time, because as good as the Broadway soundtrack is, I think the West End cast, Hades in particular, are incredibly strong.

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Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.