Campaign catchup: Tories tanking, Starmer soccering, vetters not vetting
Good afternoon. If you have noticed a mood of inertia descend on the election campaign, you are probably onto something.
Now that all of the UK-wide parties have launched their manifestos, with the SNP to follow tomorrow, all of the set pieces with the potential to consequentially shift the course of the national race are out of the way. It is too early to call the result, but it is not too early to say that barring something major and unforeseen happening, Labour are very likely to win. And if I’m repeating myself, that’s because nothing much seems to be changing.
A few minutes ago, the Guardian published a story that underlines that analysis – exclusive details of a new MRP projection by Ipsos, the first by any pollster entirely conducted after Nigel Farage entered the race, showing Labour on track to win a mammoth 453 seats. It is sensible to view any poll with scepticism, but that should be balanced against an acknowledgement that across all the major pollsters, the error required for the reality to be a new term for Rishi Sunak would make the Trump miss look like a rounding error.
More on the Ipsos projection, plus who Nigel Farage is blaming for his dodgy candidates, after the headlines.
What happened today
Labour | Keir Starmer has said he is “concerned” about the impact of the law introduced by the Conservatives requiring people to produce photo ID to vote in general elections. Labour has not committed to repealing the law, but Starmer told Sky News that his party will review how it operates if it wins the election.
Conservatives | The Conservatives will turn to Boris Johnson in an attempt to boost their faltering election campaign, according to reports. Tens of thousands of letters signed by the former prime minister are expected to be delivered later this week.
Liberal Democrats | The Liberal Democrats could increase their total seats in the new parliament owing to a more efficient vote distribution across the UK, say experts, despite the party polling a lower national vote share than in 2019.
Analysis: What we learned from the Ipsos projection
It is not impossible that something unforeseen will have a big impact in the last two weeks of this campaign, but it is not obvious what it would be. The only thing I can think of likely to shift a lot of votes towards the Tories is some sort of Reform meltdown – and Rishi Sunak was already taking a pasting before Farage got into the race. Maybe the Tories will enter open civil war if their numbers get even worse, but that is not likely to do them any favours with voters. Nor does Sunak have the kind of advantage on national security that seems likely to mean that a major international incident would work to his advantage.
The new projection published by Ipsos is its first multiple regression and post stratification (MRP) model of the campaign – a technique which uses a very large sample size to provide individual constituency estimates by looking at how the specific demographic groups in each area are likely to vote. It is generally viewed as a subtler tool for assessing the state of play seat-by-seat than traditional polling, which assumes every constituency will behave in the same way.
Like any poll, this one is a gauge of where things are today – not where they will end up. But like every other poll in recent days, it suggests that the route back for Rishi Sunak is close to impossible. On the basis of an online survey of almost 20,000 people, it estimates that Labour could win 453 seats, the Conservatives 115, the Lib Dems 38, and the SNP 15, with three each for Reform and the Greens. It also suggests that Nigel Farage will win in Clacton while Jeremy Corbyn, running as an independent, is on course to lose to Labour in Islington North.
Importantly, all of the fieldwork was conducted after Farage returned as leader of Reform. So it should capture any effect of his presence on support for his own party and the Conservatives.
How liable is all of this to change? Well, Ipsos says that 117 seats are currently too close to call – and that even slight change in the Conservatives’ favour could push them back into the lead in 50 seats they are currently losing. On the other hand, something similar could happen in the opposite direction. And even the best case scenario for the Tories in these constituencies would not come close to changing who wins the election.
According to Ipsos, Labour is strongly favoured to win 275 seats, and deemed likely in another 91. It needs 326 for a majority. One way to think about the chances of this changing is to say that the Tories would need to win all of the seats categorised as tossups where it is contention, and then a massive proportion of the seats either leaning or likely Labour, to get back to parity.
As Pippa Crerar notes, all of this will likely encourage the Tories to continue with their strategy of warning of the risks of a so-called super-majority, and claiming that a landslide would leave Keir Starmer unaccountable to the electorate. The important question that this might influence is the extent of the likely Conservative defeat - and that will come down to where you draw the lines between “very bad”, “disastrous” and “existential”.
When reading about polls like this, it’s quite natural to respond with a sense of disbelief: nothing like this has happened in living memory. There are also those who argue that all polls should be banned during the campaign, because they start to shape the outcome of the race instead of just report it.
But it doesn’t seem unreasonable, in such unprecedented circumstances, for voters to be able to make their choice on the basis of a realistic depiction of the context for their votes. And as the election data analyst Dylan Difford pointed out today, “If we didn’t have polls, the last few weeks would have included commentary about how the national service policy was winning back older voters and no doubt wishcasting around a narrowing race.”
While polls are imperfect, they provide better information for an informed democracy than you get by guessing. Meanwhile, the Conservative pollster Lord Cooper points out, “You can’t ban polls, only their publication. That would mean campaigns and hedge funds would know what was going on, but voters wouldn’t.”
As for whether this can really be happening: Difford had the most plausible answer for that, too, which we quoted in yesterday’s newsletter. “We are now at the stage where the only thing that stops an unprecedented result, like those seen in most projections, are things that are themselves unprecedented,” he wrote for Sam Freedman’s Substack.
As he also pointed out, the events of the last few years have been pretty unprecedented in themselves. “Unprecedented polling error would not be enough to negate one of the largest reversals of fortune in British electoral history … Every precedent was unprecedented once and every party comes to an end.”
What’s at stake
As part of a video series looking at issues that matter most to local communities, Christopher Cherry and Maeve Shearlaw visited Port Talbot, where many voters are worried about the future of the steelworks where at least 2,800 jobs are on the line.
They found a mood of deep scepticism about the likelihood of improved economic prospects after the next election. “Everything relies on the steelworks, everything is magnetic to the steelworks – this is what Port Talbot is,” says one interviewee who doesn’t want to vote for any of the options on offer. “It’s absolutely devastating. The government should have sorted this out years ago.” Margaret Jones, a food bank volunteer, says the closure is affecting the community “incredibly” and adds: “we’ve got our stocks up and ready”. On the election, she says:
We don’t do politics. Although having a food bank in the centre of a town like this is itself a political statement. We shouldn’t need food banks. I’d like to make an announcement in the Guardian tomorrow – food bank closed in Port Talbot, no need any more. Now wouldn’t that be wonderful?”
The Greens meanwhile seem nervous about whether they will be blamed for the looming closure. Anthony Slaughter, the party’s Welsh leader, says:
There is a need to switch to electric arc furnaces to reduce emissions, we can’t get around that. But that was first floated in 2016, there were first discussions about converting. If that had been put into place then … we could have had a gradual, just transition, retraining of workers, because these are skilled workers we’re going to need in the green new deal.
But governments have sat on their hands for so long, and now you’re faced with ‘you’re going to shut this down’. People in Wales know, they have a deep historical memory of what happens when industries walk away from communities. Companies have made a lot of money out of this community, it’s time they gave something back.
Winners of the day
Premier League football clubs, after Keir Starmer squashed a suggestion from shadow culture secretary Thangam Debbonaire that they could be subject to a 10% transfer tax to fund clubs lower down the pyramid. “Let me just kill it dead, we’re not looking at that,” Starmer said. (Meanwhile, the Labour leader is on the next edition of the Guardian’s Football Weekly podcast, and complains about late kick-offs.)
Loser of the day
Colin Bloom, the owner of Vetting.com, after Nigel Farage threatened his company with legal action because some of the Reform candidates it was paid £144,000 to run social media checks on turned out to hold questionable opinions. Vetting.com blamed the timing of the election for the issues.
MP telling voters not to be so stupid of the day
It’s Conservative farming minister Mark Spencer, who warns the public that Labour will be in power for 20 years “if we get this wrong at this general election”. Always goes down well!
Quote of the day
Over my cold, dead corpse.
Ruth Davidson, former leader of the Scottish Conservatives, on the prospect of Nigel Farage eventually becoming a member of her party
Number of the day
***
35%
Proportion of children in the poorest fifth of households affected by the two-child benefit cap, according to the IFS. The average affected household will lose £4,300 a year.
Dubious photo opportunity of the day
Rishi Sunak and David Cameron, who attempted to feed some sheep in north Devon. “The sheep have run away,” Bloomberg’s Alex Wickham reported.
Andrew Sparrow explains it all
The pick of the posts from the king of the live blogs
10.47 BST | Starmer’s LBC phone-in - snap verdict: Starmer is determined not to admit publicly that anything he said about Jeremy Corbyn when he served in his shadow cabinet was a lie, and he wriggled repeatedly when asked if he would have served in a Corbyn cabinet … But does the Corbyn issue really matter that much? Voters know that when MPs praise their leaders during election campaigns, they are not always being 100% sincere, and no one following politics at the time ever believed that Starmer was an arch-Corbynista.
What was perhaps most striking was just how confident he sounded. He admitted for the first time that his performance in the first debate had not been great, he was quite withering about the Tories’ latest scaremongering, and he seemed to be making a negotiating pitch to the BMA junior doctors’ committee, urging them to call off strike action pending talks with a Labour government next month. In other words, he sounded like he knows he will be the next prime minister. All the evidence suggests he’s right.
Follow Andrew Sparrow’s politics live blog every day here
Read more
Listen to this
What are the main UK parties promising on climate and is it enough? – Science Weekly
Ian Sample is joined by global environment editor Jon Watts and biodiversity reporter Phoebe Weston to find out what the manifestos have to say about nature and climate, and whether anyone is promising the level of action scientists are asking for
What’s on the grid
Today, 6.30pm | Channel 4 debate on immigration and law and order with representatives from seven leading parties.
Today, 10.40pm | Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay interviewed by Nick Robinson on BBC One as part of Panorama’s pre-election series.
Today, 11.59pm | Deadline to register to vote. Do it here.
Tomorrow, 11am | The SNP launch their manifesto.
Tomorrow, 5pm | deadline to apply for a postal vote. (We previously incorrectly listed this as last Friday.) Do it here.
