Economic woe is about to collide with the Tories’ empty promises – giving the opposition a chance to prove itself to the electorate
Ahead of the Labour party conference this weekend, many are hoping for a magic leader’s speech to turn the tide overnight. Orthodoxy decrees that a midterm opposition should be polling far ahead, not in Labour’s current position – three percentage points behind the Tories. But it would be a historic first for Labour to overturn its worst defeat in eight decades in just one leap. Many of the seats it lost in the 2019 election had been sliding away for years. “You go bankrupt gradually, then suddenly,” is how Ben Page of Ipsos Mori describes the slow erosion of support in seats such as Sedgefield, in County Durham.
Keir Starmer, who is polling well below Boris Johnson (though both have negative approval ratings), has remained relatively unknown, voters still vague on who he is and what he stands for. Covid-19 prevented the opposition from making bareknuckle assaults on a government coping with a deadly emergency. Meanwhile Tory mega-donors have funded “more polling and focus groups than I’ve ever seen”, says Page.
