The government of the UK has called an election for July 4, which is an interesting choice of date. The narrative since Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called the vote has been that this election will be a bloodbath for the Conservatives. Much of this has to do with a British electorate who is ready for new blood in power.
The two major parties, the Conservatives (or Tories) and Labour, are almost indistinguishable in terms of policy. Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, has nudged his party ever closer to the center, while the Tories have abandoned many genuinely conservative positions.
Add to this mix the presence of other parties. Other left-leaning parties like the Liberal Democrats and the Greens shouldn’t affect the election much, while regional parties like the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Plaid Cymru (a Welsh nationalist party) will make some waves. The SNP is even threatening to supplant Labour in notoriously left-leaning Scotland. But up until recently, the biggest wildcard was Nigel Farage’s Reform UK; however, in recent days, Reform’s threat has subsided somewhat.
Related: Is a True Conservative Movement Rising in the UK?
Conventional wisdom is that the Tories are in for a bad day on Thursday. (Do I dare call it the worst July 4 for Britain in 248 years?) Former PM Boris Johnson spoke at a rally on Tuesday in which he mused, “Is it not the height of insanity, if these polls are right, that we are about to give Labour a supermajority?”
Pollster James Kanagasooriam cracked that Johnson’s last-minute rally speech was like “the person at a dinner party who says, ‘Can I help?’ 30 seconds before dinner comes out.”
James Heale reports at The Spectator:
Labour is ‘highly likely’ to win a landslide majority tomorrow of historic proportions, according to Rishi Sunak’s own candidates. During this morning’s media round, Mel Stride was asked by the BBC if he agreed with Suella Braverman, who wrote in the Telegraph that a near wipe-out looks to be on the cards. ‘I have accepted where the polls are at the moment,’ replied the Work and Pensions Secretary. ‘That we are therefore tomorrow highly likely to be in a situation where [Labour has] the largest majority that any party has ever achieved,’ adding that he thinks it will be ‘much bigger than 1997’.
But just a few hours later Sunak backtracked slightly when asked on ITV if he had given up. Asked whether the election was now about reducing the scale of a Labour victory, Sunak told This Morning: ‘[Stride] wasn’t quite saying that. What Mel was doing was warning of what a very large Labour majority, unchecked, would mean for people,’ Sunak said. The PM added that he’s ‘fighting hard for every vote’. He cited analysis showing that ‘just 130,000 people can make the difference in this election. So, everyone watching who thinks, “Oh, this is all a foregone conclusion”, it’s not.’
Unforced errors aren’t helping the Tories either. One member of Parliament who was also on the shortlist to be the party’s next leader, Kemi Badenoch, may lose her election because her local council forgot to send vote-by-mail ballots out. That mistake could also sabotage her chances to lead the party.
But just how bad is the drubbing going to be? That’s not all that clear. On The Spectator’s Coffee House Shots podcast, Heale spoke with Kanagasooriam and Katy Balls about the scenarios. Kanagasooriam referred to the scenarios as three “doors.”
“The first door, which I think companies like Cervation have come out with is just quite an apocalyptic scenario of the Conservative Party basically vying with the Liberal Democrats for second and third place on around 60 seats,” he said.
“The second door, which is a host of companies, including my own [Focaldata], which is a very, very bad election outcome for the Conservatives, but around 110 seats. So terrible fall from 370, by the way, on national boundaries,” he added. “Eight points lower than the lowest vote share it's had since the franchise, but still around and still sizeable and still triple figures.”
“And then I guess the third door, which people don't talk about, which is swing back to don't knows, a slightly higher vote share,” he concluded.
Kanagasooriam posited that the first two scenarios were equally likely at about 40% each, with the third “door” roughly 20% likely. So it sounds like this election is up in the air in a lot of ways.
Of course, since the vote takes place on an American holiday, we might not report the results in real-time. If nobody else covers it on Thursday, I’ll have a recap and post-mortem on Friday. Stay tuned.
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