Perhaps my favourite aspect of economics is how expectations can become reality. If enough people believe something – say about the value of a commodity – it will often shift to that new price. In a world of randomness and chaos, I find it strangely satisfying.
Expectations play an important role in politics too, particularly in the run-up to local elections. All parties like to set a low bar they know they can beat. That’s why a few weeks out from polling day, the Tories started suggesting they might lose 1,000 seats. The thinking goes that when they ‘only’ lose 200, 300, or even 500 seats, it looks like a reasonable result, particularly for mid-term. Labour of course tries the same thing, though with a little less chutzpa.
The thing is, it shouldn’t make a difference. Grizzled political journalists know what the parties are up to. Take the Conservative position – they are performing badly in the opinion polls, so you might expect them to get hammered.
But these local elections are a re-run of 2019, when the party, in what appeared to be the death grip of Theresa May’s leadership, received only 28 per cent of the vote, losing more than 1,300 councillors. In other words, they are already starting from a low base. There is only so much further they can fall.
The parties play this game because it works. Calamitous predictions roll the pitch ahead of time, give ministers doing something to say on the night, and no matter how badly they perform, by morning they can always say words to the effect of ‘people thought we were going to lose 1,000 seats – but we only lost 300, this is a great victory.’ That is a valuable narrative to eke out.
The absolute classic of the genre – and one of my all-time favourite late New Labour anecdotes – is this one told by former party advisor Theo Bertram, about the 2007 local election results and who won Bury.
But there is a problem with the expectations game – it only works to a point. This is actually true of economics too – if it turns out that the stock generating all types of buzz doesn’t actually do anything, it should fall back to its pre-hype valuation. That is because narratives can only bend reality so far, and for so long.
At some stage, after telling yourself and the media that everything is fine, you find yourself heading into a general election 10 or 15 points behind and absent a polling error, no one really cares about your line to take or how well you managed expectations. Because you’ve just lost power.
In the comment pages, Defence Editor Robert Fox says Ukraine is slowly bleeding Vladimir Putin’s plan dry. Martha Gill calls ‘No mow May’ a figleaf hiding this government’s abject failure on rewilding. While Ayesha Hazarika urges King Charles to reach out to Harry and Meghan.
And finally, it’s 25 years to the day since this happened. Would you believe it?
