The polls will tighten. The polls will tighten. The polls WILL tighten. This has been the drumbeat banging away in the background of British politics for a year or more. It is the soundtrack when Labour ducks into a defensive crouch despite the opposition’s soaring leads. It is the tune that Tories whistle to themselves rather than surrender to complete despair about what the voters are going to do to them at the ballot box.
I have lost count of how many times I have heard angsty Labour people tell me that Sir Keir Starmer’s huge advantage in the opinion polls is bound to shrivel. This paranoia comes from Labour’s miserable track record of losing past elections it expected to win. It is further prompted by the desire to keep the party on its toes and disciplined. It is also the product of the belief, for which there is some evidence, that the electorate is much more volatile than it used to be. Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s director of campaigns, has an anti-complacency tool that he deploys against colleagues who assume that victory is already in the bag. He shows them a slide deck of election results over recent years, among them contests in Australia, America, Germany and Norway, in which there were dramatic shifts in voter support during the final leg of the race. He uses this to warn them that what the electorate are saying today is not a guarantee of what they will do in the polling booth.
“The polls will tighten” is the mantra also to be heard from Tory people. It is the result of their yearning to find a reason to be cheerful accompanied by sheer disbelief that Labour can really be so far ahead. Many psephologists and pundits have been expecting the Tory deficit to narrow, because the history of previous UK elections tells us that incumbents often experience some kind of uplift when the moment of national decision comes into sharp focus. Full disclosure: I have been anticipating at least some degree of Tory recovery as we approach the election.
And yet tighten is the one thing that the polls have resolutely not done. Since Rishi Sunak became prime minister, Labour’s lead in the poll of polls has sometimes been more than 20 points and it has rarely fallen much below that hefty advantage. There’s been the occasional dip to jangle Labour nerves and trigger brief episodes of false hope among Tories. But the overall message has been consistent.
Labour’s towering headline lead is accompanied by an advantage on two key metrics. That is Sir Keir besting Mr Sunak as the preferred choice of prime minister, and Labour being rated superior for economic competence. If anything, the Conservative outlook has not brightened with the passing of time, it has grown more occluded as they have clattered closer to the buffers. The most recent tracker poll from Ipsos Mori, the oldest of the UK’s polling companies, puts the Conservatives on a share of just 20%, their lowest rating in the near half-century that Ipsos has been running this series. The previous Tory nadirs were 22% in December 1994 and May 1995, when John Major was en route to a landslide defeat in 1997. Rishi Sunak’s net approval rating is –54, a record low for him. He may think himself an expert at stacking the dishwasher but the voters are pointing him towards the waste disposal.
That’s one of the reasons I have been immune to the recent outbreak at Westminster of spring election fever. So long as they have road left to run, prime ministers do not willingly submit to a contest when they are being told that they will be crushed by the challenger. Another reason for my scepticism about a spring election is that Mr Sunak, who assumed office on 25 October 2022, has been at Number 10 for just 16 months. He will at least be able to claim he had two years as prime minister if he can make it to November.
Between now and an autumn election, the most dangerous point of the calendar for him is probably the May local government contests and their immediate aftermath. The Tories have become very accustomed to being thumped at the ballot box, but at this encounter with the voters they are highly likely to experience losses on a scale that will make some of their previous defeats look like a light slap on the wrist.
As my colleague Michael Savage points out, the council seats at stake were last contested in 2021 during the pandemic when the Covid cavalry was riding over the hill. The “vaccine bounce” helped the Tories to make significant gains – which means they have a long way to plunge this spring. Massive losses could conceivably trigger a putsch against Mr Sunak by Conservative MPs frantic enough to try changing leader yet again in the desperation to save their skins.
So no Tory more than the prime minister needed Jeremy Hunt to somehow contrive a gamechanger budget that would transform Conservative fortunes. “This had better work, because nothing else is,” one senior Tory remarked to me shortly before the chancellor got to his feet – only to disappoint those in his party looking for a miracle. It was foolish for them to invest big expectations in this budget because that required the chancellor to be a magician (which he isn’t) with lots of cash to splash (which he hasn’t).
Any voter who found the budget make-believe even more implausible than usual was in expert company. Analysts are almost universally agreed that Mr Hunt peddled fiscal fantasies based on fictions about future spending and taxation that will unravel once we have got to the other side of the election. The main political takeaway is that the Conservatives remain wedded to the notion that cuts to headline tax rates are a potent way to beguile the electorate. The Tory punt is that this will induce voters to forget years of economic crisis and chaos while forgiving them for the fact that the average household will be worse off at the election than they were at the time of the last one. Mr Hunt’s brag that Britain is on track to become “the world’s next Silicon Valley” must have jarred with the millions whose living standards have been in Death Valley.
By choosing to lop two percentage points off national insurance, the chancellor set his face against all the polling, suggesting that most voters would have preferred him to prioritise spending on public services. Mr Hunt must think that a lot of people are lying to pollsters. In that respect, he has company within Sir Keir’s senior team. Many in Labour’s high command, especially those supervising election campaign strategy, distrust voters when they say they don’t fancy a tax cut. That’s why Labour did not oppose the reduction to national insurance announced last autumn and the further cut unveiled in this budget.
Obviously they understand that this will make it even harder for Rachel Reeves to fund repairs to the public realm and find money for other things a Labour government would like to do. That consideration is trumped by fear of handing a potential campaign advantage to the Tories along with a determination to hammer the Conservatives for putting taxes on a trajectory to take the largest share of national income since 1948.
I haven’t had to look far to find Tory MPs doubtful that this budget will turn around their fortunes. “Hunt probably did as much as he could do in the circumstances, but it wasn’t enough,” one former cabinet minister remarks. “It’s not going to move the dial.” There’s supporting evidence for that view in the post-budget poll conducted by Opinium that we publish today. Far from voters being wowed, seduced or even mildly impressed, more than twice as many respondents rated it a bad budget as those who thought it good. One member of the cabinet, who is usually among its more upbeat members, sighed to me: “The electorate have basically decided that they’ve had enough of the Tories.”
For sure, a lot can happen between now and decision day. The economic record might not feel quite so rotten to some voters if household disposable incomes improve over the next six months. Labour could surprise us by committing an act of self-sabotage. There is some time left for the polls to shift. But after such a protracted period of the Tories trying and failing to budge them, we should entertain the possibility that the polls aren’t going to tighten much – and perhaps not at all.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
