UK: Labour's top brass know the election battle will be brutal, but they can hardly believe their luck
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/23/labour-election-battle-keir-starmer-rishi-sunak