Senior Labour figures are privately only just starting really to believe Keir Starmer will walk into No 10 in three weeks’ time. Shadow cabinet ministers, having been nervous that the polls would narrow, are beginning visibly to relax by a millimetre or two.
Starmer’s language in public is sounding more confident about the prospect of government. And behind closed doors, Labour politicians are talking about what they will do in government as if victory is all but certain.
Aides insist otherwise – that they are as cautious as ever and refusing to take the result for granted. “We are trying to just concentrate on our own campaign and taking one day at a time. We are ignoring what the Tories are up to. We are just trying not to make any mistakes,” one senior aide said this week.
They also are attempting not to show too much glee at the Conservatives’ misfortune, from Rishi Sunak’s D-day blunder to his aide’s £100 “flutter” on the date of the election just before it was called.
But at the halfway point in the campaign, there is a growing belief across the parties that, in the words of Nigel Farage, “it is over, Labour has won”.
Despite this, the election is still full of drama and tension with three weeks to go – with the campaign electrified by Farage’s late return as Reform leader. The main unknown is just how sweeping the Conservative losses will be and the extent to which Farage’s Reform party can eat into its vote.
If the polls are to be believed, some seismic events are possible, including Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, becoming the official opposition, Nigel Farage entering parliament on his eighth attempt, Labour overtaking the SNP in Scotland, Tory big beasts from Iain Duncan Smith to Jeremy Hunt losing their seats – and maybe even Sunak himself being run close by Labour.
Sunak claims still to be “energised” but has cut a lonely figure when campaigning in formerly safe Tory seats without a big entourage of cabinet figures alongside him.
Many longstanding Tories are having to fight harder than they have before in their seats, such as Hunt and the defence secretary, Grant Shapps. And some Conservative MPs are panicking, such as Andrea Jenkyns who was ridiculed for putting a picture of Farage on her leaflet without even asking him.
However, others are more sanguine, believing that many of their traditional voters will still turn out for them and that those stating they will opt for Reform will be “flaky” when it comes to the ballot box.
One Conservative former cabinet minister defending a middling majority said he thought Labour was most likely to win but he still believed more seats would stay Conservative than the polls predict.
“The best example is 1992 when we all went off to the election and the bosses said: ‘Clear your desk, you’re not coming back,’” he said. “The press was sure, Neil Kinnock was sure. Then it turned out not to be the case. On the doorsteps, we were getting: ‘You don’t fucking deserve it, but I’ll have to vote for you anyway I suppose.”
Some Tory MPs who have done full canvasses of voters in their seats also claim to have been surprised on the upside by results that appear to be more favourable than the polls indicate, suggesting the party could still hold on in some rural or suburban “blue wall” pockets where the Lib Dems and Labour vote are split.
However, many others are despondent. One Conservative MP facing a threat from the Lib Dems said the response to him on the doorstep was “glacial” and that Sunak had “thrown us to the wolves” by concentrating on Reform defectors at the expense of centrist votes.
With manifestos now published, aside from Reform’s, the next three weeks are likely to bring more scrutiny of the parties’ policies – and a continuation of the row between the parties on who will raise tax the most.
Starmer will be hoping to cruise towards the finish line without any major upsets, which means saying very little that is new and minimising the risk of things going wrong.
In contrast, the Tories need a gamechanging moment. The party has already reached for warnings about a hung parliament, and when that did not seem credible it began to claim this week that the country should not give Labour a super-majority – a threat that it had been hoping to keep in its back pocket for the very last moment. Sunak is almost out of levers he can pull.
