Here is the one and only great service Rishi Sunak could perform for his country. Nothing so became him as the leaving of office, despite the deluge. The prospect of another six months of zombie government, everyone waiting and waiting for Labour, was an almost unendurable state of stasis. Everything he proposed only added to the smell of death and desperation in the air.
Labour’s team could scarcely believe their luck, pinching themselves as they watched their opponent dash for the precipice. They were so ready that they could press send on a video within minutes. The contrast between their leader so draped in flags and the wretchedly bedraggled prime minister was more than any campaign could dream of. Yet these six weeks will feel eternally long, a never-ending prime minister’s questions day after day until virtually every voter has been beaten into submission, mumbling the one-word slogans in their sleep: “change”, “stability”.
As the experience of Theresa May – the “strong and stable” one – reminds them, a lot can happen, as she blew her lead and her majority in the 2017 election. Labour dwells on that obsessively, drumming warnings into every candidate and special adviser that complacency is the real enemy. Never for a moment do any of them forget to preface “what we will do” with “if we win”. Keir Starmer chased every possible supporter in a fundraiser campaign launched within hours of the announcement, followed by another from Angela Rayner. Inside the camp, they sound a bit hyper, “buzzy”. Starmer’s “six first steps” announced last week seemed timed as if they’d had some election timetable leak.
No prime minister has ever jumped early when they are a disastrous 20 points behind in the polls. So why did Sunak? Because he spied a tiny blip of a window when economic figures coalesced to look temporarily better – and he knows things can only get worse. That’s what Labour will encourage people to assume. It will rub in another Tory record – the first government to leave living standards lower at the end of a parliament. No graphs of downward inflation will stop people knowing their food prices are 25% higher than two years ago. Despite recent improvements, wages will not return to 2008 levels until 2026. Rents and mortgages have shot up, and a million more people are due to renegotiate their mortgages before the end of the year.
This is real life. Neither the most brilliantly deceptive campaign, nor the (now-doubted) electioneering genius of Isaac Levido, can undo what has been done. The more Sunak tries to sell “stability”, the more Labour will remind people what instability has done to them. Tory messaging is wildly out of kilter when Sunak warns that Labour will return us to “square one”. Is that Labour in 2010, when most people were better off than now? Is that before the axe of austerity shattered public services, when NHS waiting lists were at their lowest, child poverty fallen sharply, before the Brexit referendum calamity? “Square one” was a better place.
Then come the manifestos. Labour’s is ardently awaited. It knows it needs glittering prizes alongside the sobriety of inheriting a mammoth budget deficit; a £30bn black hole, says the IMF. A burst of hope is a prerequisite, and long-awaited policies that it has held back for the election will now need to shine. The Tory party manifesto will be pure fantasy. Any pledge it makes on schools, GPs, hospitals, councils, law and order, small boats, the environment or anything else will only be reminders of the devastation it leaves in its wake. The Conservatives have no hiding place, no safe topic for each morning’s press conference. Every issue is lethal for them to touch. Their attacks on Labour already sound puerile.
They will turn to “wokery” and Rwanda as their refuge, but that can’t save their bacon either. Instead, that will reaffirm, day after day, not only how remote they are from modern Britain, but how much they hate the country they have governed so badly. They hate its attitudes so much they simply deny them. Their broken electoral compass has no notion of where “middle England” lies now, the one that kept them in power for most of my lifetime. The country has changed, though the Mail, Telegraph and Sun deny it, having lost their finger on the national pulse long ago.
“There are 1,000 hours to save Britain,” wailed the Sunday Telegraph’s editor, Allister Heath, among the fleet of Tory columnists warning of Labour’s secret socialism. Sunak, he writes, must “fight for the majority against an out-of-touch pro-Labour elite”. Outside this cloud-cuckoo zone, the majority has become the “pro-Labour elite”, but the right refuses to accept truths in front of its nose. Its proponents cannot bear to admit that everything they hold dear is being resoundingly rejected by voters they still regard as theirs.
They rail against net zero targets, calling for “pragmatism”, yet 59% of people say the country is taking too little action on the climate crisis. Only 19% of respondents told the British Social Attitudes survey that people get benefits they don’t deserve (this figure was 40% two decades ago). The country is evenly split on Rwanda, but only 16% of people think it is good value for money. And while Sunak says VAT on private schools is an attack on “aspiration”, 71% don’t object to abolishing the tax break. People don’t want visas cut for foreign students, another Tory suggestion. While Tories keep warning Labour will wreck Brexit, people think overwhelmingly that Brexit has harmed their lives and the country, and 51% of people would support overturning the referendum result.
Here are the crunch markers for the end of the age of Thatcher: most people, including 73% of Tory voters, don’t want tax cuts and two-thirds of Tory voters want renationalisation of water and energy. People are not as nasty as Sunak thinks: nearly three-quarters of voters want benefits preserved, including 69% of Tory voters.
So when Sunak’s team despaired that all his crowd-pleasers failed to please, that’s because they had long lost any sense of how people feel and think now. Covid was pivotal in shifting these attitudes. A Labour victory would not just be due to the mayhem of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, but because Labour, by nature and instinct, inhabits where most people are, while the Tories paddle their canoes into the sunset of a discredited Thatcherism.
You know how far gone they are when they make the National Trust and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution into enemies of the people. Their patriotism is love of some imaginary country, detesting Britain as it is. That’s why this election is cathartic for the country, not a pendulum swing but an epochal change, even if Labour dare not quite believe it yet.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
