Despondence grows as election campaign reaches halfway point

Good morning. The election campaign has reached its halfway point. More importantly, from now on, every single day is polling day for somebody. The campaigns are all launching their manifestos this week to do double duty: in part, to sum up what the parties are offering at the election, but also for a big media hit now postal ballots have started to come through people’s letterboxes.

Some thoughts on the state of the race and how the parties are feeling about it below.

Losing heart

I doubt this is going to come as a galloping shock to anyone who reads this newsletter, but the mood inside the Conservative party is not good. Staffers do not think the campaign is going well (and nor do most other people).

As readers know, I like to use Ipsos Mori polling where possible as it is our oldest pollster. That historical trend is stark: satisfaction with the government is lower now than it was in April 1997 or April 2010. Rishi Sunak continues to be incredibly unpopular in both comparative terms (ie he is significantly more unpopular than Keir Starmer) and absolute terms (ie he is polling worse than John Major in 1997, and about as badly as Jeremy Corbyn in 2019).

Added to that, the Tory party has a manifesto that many in the party think did not offer enough red meat to the right; a party machine that is demoralised by gaffes and by the sight of the party chair parachuting himself into one of the party’s safest seats; and one that, thanks to Sunak managing to ambush his own side with his snap election, was badly outspent in the final days before the UK’s tight pre-election spending limits kicked in.

As the FT revealed earlier this week, the Conservative campaign is now pivoting to warning voters about a Labour landslide. This is, in my view, their best available strategy, given the decisions they have taken since Boris Johnson was forced out.

As George Parker explains in an excellent Big Read, the Conservative party’s political predicament has been a long time in the making — and although in my view Sunak has done a number of things to aggravate the problem, it did not start with him, and it was never going to be resolved by a slick campaign. (Though it doesn’t help that this campaign is far from slick.)

The voters they have the best chance of winning back — former Tory voters who are now undecided — are at odds with the party in many ways. But in the main they really dislike Keir Starmer and the Labour party. Sunak cannot compete with Nigel Farage on immigration, he is not trusted on tax and voters have a low opinion of his party more generally.

But the Conservatives have more chance of winning back these voters by warning them about a Labour landslide than they do with any form of positive policy offer.

The mood in the SNP is also despondent. Like the Conservatives, they have the difficult hand of having been in office for a long time, they are still feeling the fallout from two quick changes of leader, and their finances are not great. (Simeon Kerr has written an excellent in-depth piece on the SNP’s shoestring campaign.)

But the big difference is that most people I speak to in the SNP think the party is doing the best job it could considering the circumstances — which is not true of most people I speak to on the Conservative side.

As for the Liberal Democrats, I said pretty much all I have to say about their campaign earlier this week. Their mood is pretty chipper, as you’d expect.

On the Labour side, the party leadership feels that Sunak’s manifesto reveals his desperation; they hope that their own manifesto, which will be short on surprises, will be seen as a contrast to it. In Labour’s manifesto (which launches today), the party will emphasise the importance of boosting British growth and the green transition, consciously geared around their project of reassuring as many people as possible. (As Robert Shrimsley put it in his column yesterday, Labour’s battle cry is essentially “What do we want? Huge change. When do we want it? Over the next 10 years in modest increments.”)

In terms of what might shift the dial this election, Labour’s manifesto is the last predictable event that could — one way or the other.

Now try this

I intend to reach further levels of self parody at the BFI tonight, where I’m going to see an early showing of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. It’s a 1968 film, nominally about a couple in crisis, in which the crew of the documentary argue and discuss how best to make the film. It features Miles Davis on the soundtrack.

Top stories today

• On a shoestring | Anxieties about the SNP’s ability to hold on to its dominant position in Scotland amid a funding crisis rise among canvassers, as Labour spends big on billboards, leafleting and social media.

• Risky bet | Rishi Sunak’s principal private secretary has been placed under investigation after he placed a £100 bet on a July election date just three days before the vote was announced.

• Raring to go | Keir Starmer is expected to delay the House of Commons recess if his party is to win power, with one senior Labour official saying “we are hungry and can’t wait for September to start”.

Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.

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