The Tories are full of ideas at the moment. They’ve announced three major new policies in the past week. It feels like someone asked Rishi Sunak, “What would you do if you were prime minister?”, and he got really into answering. Then he must have remembered that, weirdly, he is prime minister. And the accurate answer would be: “Not much other than pander to the right-wing of my party by attempting to deport refugees to Rwanda and wait for an economic miracle while being relentlessly photographed in a hard hat.”
But what a productive burst of enthusiasm! Suddenly the Conservatives are announcing plans to bring back national service for 18-year-olds, introduce a “triple lock plus” to protect pensioners from income tax and abolish more than 100,000 university places. Is all this an attempt to stick it to the young for being overwhelmingly likely to vote Labour (if they vote at all)? Was it a response to Keir Starmer’s proposed extension of the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds, which would certainly enhance the leftwing vote?
What can the Tories do to counterbalance such a youthful lefty influx? Extend the franchise to people who have died? Why should people’s political opinions perish with them? Do the views of the dead not count? We should be urgently re-enfranchising corpses. What a scandal that “the few”, having saved the country during the Battle of Britain, no longer have a say in who runs it.
The received wisdom is that people get more rightwing as they get older and, with rising life expectancy because of advances in medical science, that’s good news for the right. It’s old people not young ones who are the future, and the triple lock plus is Sunak’s attempt to shore up support from that demographic. Though it raises the question of how many tens of thousands more crotchety old rightwingers might still be on the electoral roll if the Tories hadn’t screwed the NHS quite so hard over the past 14 years. Maybe they were worried those people were tipping over into supporting Reform: a future Tory government would keep people alive long enough to become rightwing but allow them to die before they get too rightwing.
But why these new Tory proposals? Maybe it’s natural: manifesto launches are coming up, so it’s an obvious time for announcing policies. Labour, sitting on a massive opinion poll lead, is playing it very safe on that front. Rachel Reeves doesn’t seem to be planning to do anything at all other than move house. Perhaps this creates an opportunity for the Conservatives to knock Labour out of the running with a bewildering bombardment of ideas. Is that the plan?
Possibly. But there’s no getting around the fact that the Tories have been in office for 14 years, and Sunak himself for more than 18 months. The phrase “you’ve had your chance” comes deafeningly to mind whenever they propose anything. When Reeves said she wouldn’t increase income tax or national insurance, the economic secretary to the Treasury, Bim Afolami, had the breathtaking nerve to say: “Just the same old Labour party who have no plan to cut taxes…” What?! He’s criticising Labour for not planning to change a status quo for which, as a minister in the current government, he is responsible. They should cut taxes even though he hasn’t. Of course, he’s also saying the Tories will, or would. But they haven’t, have they? If they think Labour should, why haven’t they? (To be fair, Liz Truss tried but it broke the economy.)
It’s the same with all these new policies. They just make us think: “If you reckon this is such a good idea, why haven’t you done it already?” The Tories can’t get away with announcing what they would do if they won the election because they’ve already won the past four elections and we know perfectly well what they would do because it’s what they did. Their only path to victory is to persuade voters that what they did was OK, even good – or at least better than what their opponents would have done.
This is an enormously difficult task given the horrendous state of the country. And Sunak’s team must have concluded that it’s actively impossible – indeed that, whatever they do, electoral defeat is inevitable. For me, that is the only logical inference from this absurd flurry of policy announcements: the people around the prime minister are certain that he and the Conservatives will lose the election. If we assume that, their behaviour suddenly makes sense. Their priority is not really maximising Conservative votes, but rather making it seem in retrospect, after Sunak has been defeated, that they did everything they could.
Despite everything, Sunak’s best bet would still probably be trying to sell the government on its own record, viewed through the lens of the Conservatives’ dated self-image as a party of fiscal prudence, economic competence and legislative probity (notwithstanding the Johnson and Truss administrations). That is, the whole “the plan is working” approach they favoured until the moment the election was called. Not everyone is broke or disillusioned and millions always vote Tory. But it would still probably fail and, if and when it did, his campaign team would look like they hadn’t risen to the challenge.
To create that impression they need to be able to point to the efforts they made and these big ideas are evident efforts. “We were coming across as a dynamic new government in waiting,” they can say, “but the situation was irredeemable from the start.” It is with this future defence in mind that they have, ironically, abandoned the most effective strategy in order to appear to have adopted a more effective strategy. In an attempt to prove that they never gave up hope, they betray the fact that they’ve completely given up hope.
Is this good news for Labour? Not necessarily. These Conservatives who think they’re going to lose are the same people who sent the prime minister out into the pouring rain, with neither mac nor umbrella, to appeal for five more years in office. I mean, seriously: what do they know?
