And they're off ...

It’s nearly five years since, in the immediate aftermath of the 2019 general election, I decided to ring down the curtain on the blog that I’d been writing every week for the previous fifteen years.

Now, however, I have decided that it’s time for a revival — just for a short run this time, to take us through what promises to be the most consequential UK election since 1997.

I’ve been a bit of an election addict for a very long time. The first one I reported on was forty-five years ago, when in 1979, for three exhausting weeks, I criss-crossed the country in the media battlebus that followed Margaret Thatcher as she stormed to the first of her three successive election victories. That was when the Labour prime minister James Callaghan famously observed, shortly before going down to defeat: ‘There are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants.’

‘It does not matter what you say or do.’ Words that I suspect Rishi Sunak will be ruefully recalling — even though he was not yet born at the time. Because all the signs are that his time — and the Conservatives’ time — is up. 

It is very nearly thirty years since the Labour party under Tony Blair swept into office. Time for a sea-change. Rishi Sunak knows it, his party knows it, and most importantly, voters know it.

So do I think the result is a forgone conclusion? Yes, in the sense that I have not the slightest doubt that Labour will win on 4 July. (Warning: I also predicted that Remain would win the Brexit referendum in 2016 and that Hillary Clinton would beat Donald Trump later that same year. My track record on such matters is far from impressive.)

But No, I don’t think Labour will cruise to an effortless victory without breaking a sweat. Because here’s another warning: prepare for the unexpected. As Donald Rumsfeld once observed, you can anticipate the known unknowns, but not the unknown unknowns.

The history of election campaigns is littered with what at the time were unanticipated crises. Back in 1992 (this is one strictly for only the most diehard of election aficionados), there was the War of Jennifer’s Ear, when Labour ran a party election broadcast about a five-year-old girl with glue ear who had to wait a year to get the treatment she needed.  The story turned out in reality to be a bit more complicated, and The Sun ran the headline: ‘If Kinnock will tell lies about a sick little girl, will he ever tell the truth about anything?’ 

In 2001, the then deputy Labour party leader John Prescott swung a punch at a protester who had thrown an egg at him. And in 2010, then prime minister Gordon Brown was caught on mic calling  a voter who had complained to him about immigration a ‘bigoted woman.’

So beware of The Wobble. All campaigns have a Wobble, and this one will be no different. A Wobble is what happens when a campaign is derailed by a thunderbolt out of a clear blue sky. 

So, for example, within the next couple of weeks, the Daily Mail, among others, will dig into their carefully researched digital files and start running story after story along the lines of ‘Shock disclosure from Starmer’s past.’ They will dig out any number of controversial legal cases he was involved in during his time as a human rights lawyer, and they will gleefully regurgitate quotes from when he tried, with only limited success, to serve as a loyal (-ish) member of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow Cabinet.

How Labour react — and whether they decide to retaliate in kind (it has already been reported that they are ready and willing to descend as far into the gutter as the Tories) — might well have at least a marginal impact on the final vote. 

But here’s the bottom line. It will be all but impossible for the Tories to make the case that after fourteen long years in power, they still have what it takes to govern the country. The record number of Conservative MPs who have decided to throw in the towel strongly suggests that they no longer have the stomach for it — indeed, to me the most plausible explanation for Mr Sunak’s decision to pull the plug now, torrential downpour or not, is that he has simply had enough.

His message to the people? ‘There’s little to no chance of things getting any better, so there’s no point in me hanging around. Let Starmer clear up the mess.’

Indeed, according to The Guardian’s political editor, Pippa Crerar, as soon as the prime minister fired the election starting gun last Wednesday, ‘One government minister was seen thrusting his official red folder towards his opposition number, whom he had happened to bump into. “You might as well have this now,” he said.’

One more warning: If you’re allergic to the words ‘plan’ and ‘change’, I suggest you take yourself away to some far-off land and stay there until after 4 July. The Tories will intone ‘Starmer has no plan’ until you want to throw up every time you hear it, just as Labour will repeat ‘It’s time for a change’ until you want to scream. Sorry, but that’s the way it’s going to be.

I don’t often find myself agreeing with George Osborne, but I was struck by the observation attributed to him by Tim Shipman in the Sunday Times: ‘Rishi has made two big calls in his career — backing Brexit and backing Boris … the two most catastrophic things to happen to this country in the last decade.’

In 1979, James Callaghan, who had taken over from Harold Wilson at the fag-end of an exhausted Labour government, could see the writing on the wall. In 1997, when a young and energetic super-salesman called Tony Blair swept John (‘grey man’) Major out of Downing Street, there was a similar smell of inevitability in the air.

And so it is in 2024. When Keir Starmer was elected Labour leader in 2020, all the Westminster sages agreed that it would take him at least two more Tory terms in office before he’d have a decent chance of turfing them out.

But then came the Covid pandemic. And Partygate. And Liz Truss. And the near collapse of the country’s public services: the NHS on its knees, teachers in droves giving up teaching, water unfit to drink. 

Oh yes, and Brexit, the self-inflicted catastrophe that dares not speak its name. I don’t envy the Tories their task, trying to sell that record to mightily pissed-off voters.

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