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I’ve only had one cup of tea.
Clear plan.
Vandalism.
OK. Sketchy Politics: Sunak Faces Starmy.
I like it. Starmy weather.
Right, Robert… it’s not November.
No.
But we seem to have a general election…
We do.
…on our hands. I see we’re both… I’ve smartened up. I put a jacket on because it’s serious times.
I’ve today spoken to the king, and he’s given me a dissolution. How hard is that? How hard is it to have an umbrella? I don’t know. Could even have been a Conservative umbrella… just saying.
You’ve beat me to it because I was going to say rain or shine, the country has to go to the polls on July the 4th.
This country is facing a stormy world. And you want the party with the… oh, no.
What can we say about poor, soaking Rishi Sunak? What does he have to do to change the weather?
Nice. I like it.
Yeah. And also, here is Keir Starmer, quite literally waiting in the wings.
But like the Teletubbies baby, the sun, hovering over.
And Starmer, I suppose, also has a kind of balance to strike between I’m promising you sunny uplands, but I might have to bring some rain as well, because what he’s inheriting in terms of the economy. And indeed, the security situation – so we’ve had a couple of inverted commas, bright ideas, brave ideas from Rishi Sunak so far – brave minister.
I always think it’s a terrible plan to unveil policy, particularly complicated policy, in a general election because, A, everyone dismisses it as election gimmickry, and B, if you’ve got a serious plan, you need to prepare the country for it. So what you end up doing is looking like somebody who’s just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what will stick.
And I also thought, you know, the principle of unveiling bold new policies was sort of tested to destruction by Theresa May. And actually, sometimes, you have a policy that you might be a good idea, or at least the outline of a policy that might be a good idea. But if you unveil it in the middle of a general election, especially when you haven’t had time to socialise the idea with your own party, let alone the country,
Socialise… you mean make sure people actually agree with it?
Yes. Or at least know about it.
So 2017… really interesting. That is the campaign in which there was a sudden reversal. It looked as if Theresa May was going to increase the Conservative majority, which was very slim. And, in fact, she lost her majority because of an unexplained item in the bagging area, or an unexploded bomb in the Tory manifesto, which was social care. I mean, how to pay for social care.
As we now know, the cabinet was sent up was it to Birmingham somewhere in the West Midlands, wasn’t it, for the launch of the Conservative party manifesto. And they were given first sight of the manifesto when they were on the bus being driven up there. And they all suddenly, including the welfare and pensions secretary, whose policy this was, and he didn’t know about it. And so you had a policy which literally was exploding on the cabinet only minutes before it exploded on the country. There is a balance here because, obviously, you don’t want to give your best ideas out to members of the cabinet who will leak them because stuff never…
That does happen, of course.
Stuff never, you know, holds. But, on the other hand, there is a value in sense testing them with people who don’t already agree with you, as we discovered.
So, as far as I can see – correct me if you think I’m wrong – but so far, the two ideas we’ve had from the Conservatives are quite core vote, sort of very appealing to traditional Tory voters. And one of those is designed to head off the danger of pensioners fleeing from the party. So this is my attempt at a look out pensioners, the elderly sign, because, of course, in 2017 it was how to pay for social care plans that disrupted Theresa May’s campaign, that we’re still waiting on. And one of Rishi Sunak’s ideas so far is to promise pensioners not just to maintain the triple lock on pension rises, but also then to sort of protect them from paying more tax…
But in their basic state.
…on their basic state pension. So that’s going for quite a core grey vote that the Tories normally can count on. What about his other idea, which has dominated for a few days, which is national service?
I think it’s really good. You have two problems.
I’m not an 18-year-old boy, so I’m not that worried. But if I were… or girl.
You have two problems which that policy’s attempting to address, and both of them are real. One of them is that Britain, you know, has let its defences run down, let its size of its army run down, let its military run down. And we’re facing a more unstable world. And the other is that we have lots and lots of young people who are not mixing as much as they used to and not getting out as much as they used to, for whom people think a little bit of time working in the community would be a good thing, might be helpful to them.
We all know the value of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards, this is a bigger version of it. So the policy is voluntary commissions in the military for a year and compulsory citizen service of some kind one weekend every month. There’s nothing inherently terrible about these ideas, but they’re completely unformed, they’re not thought through at all, and they shouldn’t be coming through in the middle of an election. Therefore, instead of being something serious that is discussed, it’s just, as I said, another piece of spaghetti thrown at the wall. And what we’re seeing are…
And they’re very expensive… very, very expensive…
And, of course, some of the money would come from levelling up funds. What we’re seeing here and…
Am I allowed to put the hard hat on, Rishi Sunak.
You can put the hard hat on Rishi Sunak.
There we go. It’s a dangerous world, the prime minister keeps saying.
Yes. Tin hat time. And I think… it’s not bad. But I think what we’re seeing is a clear Conservative strategy. We’ve got to look like we’re interesting, get people talking about us again, and shore up our core vote. Two groups we’re worried about… older voters because they’re the only people voting for us, literally.
Well, they do…
You have to be over 70…
Older voters do turn up.
…according to the polls. They do turn up. And according to the polls, you have to be over 70 to be more likely to vote Conservative. And the second group is those people who might be dallying with voting for the Faragist Reform. So what you have: a bit of national service, which isn’t actually national service, in terms of the military, to appeal to those voters, and a little bit more money for pensioners because he actually got it in the neck after the last budget when they proposed a national insurance cut, which didn’t help pensioners…
Doesn’t help pensioners.
He got famously attacked by Janet Street-Porter on daytime TV saying, why do you hate pensioners? So here we are. I don’t hate pensioners. Here’s some money.
OK, so 2017, there was this kind of reversal in the campaign, but 2019, of course, was a really, really good night for the Conservatives because of sort of bringing together all of the people who had supported Brexit, all of the people who were scared of Jeremy Corbyn, and the people who liked Boris Johnson. None of those…
Is that Boris?
No, we haven’t got a Boris…
Far too well-groomed.
Let me draw a Boris.
But yes, you’re right.
So, in fact, this was dubbed by the psephologists when they wrote it up afterwards… The BBC election, Brexit, Boris, and Corbyn. We’re in different territory now.
We are. The 2017 election was the outlier. It was the one that was unusual for several reasons. First of all, all the small party vote got squeezed horrendously so that the Labour party in the Conservative party together got something like 83 per cent of the vote, which is extraordinarily large amount.
Sort of against expectations.
Because it was absolutely about Brexit. People didn’t really know Jeremy Corbyn. Hadn’t formed a precise view on him they wanted. But they thought… they’d heard he wasn’t going to win, and they wanted to stop the Tory version of Brexit. And then, on top of that, the more they saw of Theresa May, the less they actually thought they liked her. So it was a very, very unusual election with a confluence of factors. 2019 – much more normal election. Here’s a set of policies. Here’s two leaders. One of them doesn’t look right to us. We’re not voting for him. And I think this looks much more like a conventional election to me.
Well, it does. So Boris is kind of off the scene. And although it’s thought he might help out and he’s obviously got a newspaper column that could disrupt…
So I was just laughing that off. Boris helping out.
Stay out to help out might be the slogan for Boris in this election. But Jeremy Corbyn has sort of resurfaced because he’s actually intending to stand against the Labour party and against Keir Starmer’s candidate in his Islington seat. What do you think’s going on so far for Starmer? Because I referred to what I think is this very interesting balancing act that Starmer has got to pull off of promising hope – here’s our little sunshine – whilst inheriting very complicated circumstances on the economy and on the international picture, which is why Keir Starmer is never photographed without the Union Jack behind him at the moment because he’s also got to reinforce this message about ‘it’s a dangerous world. I can help you’.
The Labour party… it’s all about reassurance. It’s ‘you can trust us again. You can trust us on the economy’. We’ve got Rachel Reeves. Did you know she used to work for the Bank of England?
Apparently so.
You can trust us on defence, not least because I’m always standing in front of a Union Jack. We’re not like Jeremy Corbyn’s party. And these are the two absolute fundamentals. You have to reassure the public. Ordinarily, this would not be enough. Ordinarily, this is a sort of baseline, but at the moment the Conservative party is so unpopular, so many things have gone wrong, but actually, just saying we’re safe, we’re serious, you’ll have some stability is a pretty solid election strategy.
And the only question I think about what Labour’s doing and we’ll have to see how the next weeks – six weeks is a very long election – is whether they feel at any point the need to be a bit more expansive and promise a bit more, or whether they think they can get all the way to the finish line just by saying we’re safe, we’re serious, wouldn’t you like that for a change?
So just to remind people, the finish line that you have referred to, the magic number of MPs you need for a majority is…
326.
326.
Technically a bit lower…
It’s a bit weird because the Speaker stays out of politics. And the Sinn Féin don’t vote because they have a self-denying ordinance on UK matters because they don’t want to be part of the UK. But so this is the magic number to have a majority in the Commons. The Labour task is interesting, isn’t it, because there’s a lot of chat about how the swing that Keir Starmer needs to get that majority is even bigger, for example, than what Tony Blair achieved in 1997, since we’re doing a bit of history over here. But it’s more complicated this time, wouldn’t you say? Because a universal swing is not actually how it works under first-past-the-post.
There’s a lot of talk about how the Labour vote has become much more efficient. Instead of just piling up votes in areas that’s already going to win, the vote is a bit more evenly and well-distributed. So there are lots of seats where, in fact, they don’t need a giant swing where it’s thought that perhaps a 5 per cent to 7 per cent swing will be enough to take them. And, of course, that’s partly a function of what happened in the last election, where all those formerly Labour seats that we call the red wall fell and may well fall back again into the Labour party. And I think what we’re seeing more generally, in fact, is the British electorate is becoming more volatile. Fewer of them are fixed.
That’s definitely true.
And, actually, what we call those red wall seats, if Labour do take them back at this election, as we sort of think they’re going to, they won’t now be safe Labour seats again. They’ll be marginal…
They’ll be swing seats, yeah.
They’ll be swing seats again all the time. So what we’re going to see is the possibility of much more substantial swings all the time. And being beaten badly in one election won’t mean that you’re out for two or three terms, as perhaps we always assumed it did 20 or 30 years ago.
So if the Tory strategists are thinking, OK, we need a few of these bold, possibly overly bold, and that was… I was just coughing. There was nothing… there was no subliminal message in my cough.
So if we think that what the Tories are trying to do is appeal to their own Conservative voters to make sure they shore up that core vote, Labour’s got a different task to get to that magic number for a Commons majority.
And even though the polls are incredibly healthy in terms of Starmer’s lead, he’s being warned all the time by Morgan McSweeney, the campaigns director, that it’s not in the bag. Don’t be complacent. And reversals happen. And he’s absolutely right to have that approach because it isn’t in the bag. However good it looks for them, there’s five weeks to go, and things go wrong. Things happen. But having said that, you’d rather be him than him at this stage of the campaign, quite clearly.
Should we try and help him? Look, we didn’t actually give him a little umbrella. There we go. Poor Rishi Sunak.
Umbrella and the helmet – he’s well-protected now. I just think Labour has got itself into a place where as long as people feel it’s OK, they win because they are fed up with the Conservatives. It does feel like a change election. The danger for Labour is that it’s not offering us enough clarity on the change and being super cautious. But on the other hand, the Conservatives have got themselves into a place where it maybe doesn’t matter that much. And the overarching story, the one we’ll look back on in this election when we’ve got the result, when we know what happened, is did Labour play it too safe? And at the moment, there’s nothing saying that they are.
Once we start seeing some action in the polls. As I said, I think, Isaac Levido has always said the polls will narrow during the campaign when people start paying attention.
Levido’s the guru… campaigns guru.
Conventionally, that tends to be true. But there are no rules that says they narrow. It could be that actually…
Maybe they’ll widen
…the more they decide, actually, I quite like Keir Starmer, you have that confirmation bias, where once you think you’re going to vote Labour, you decide you like Keir Starmer after all. But what I think we’re seeing in the first week is let’s knock back the Reform vote, which in the polls is showing at around 10 per cent or 11 per cent, get that down to say 8 per cent in the first week or so, that’s a boost to the Conservatives.
Suddenly, the narrative of the election changes. Maybe people around Labour begin to panic a little. Say you better do this, you better do that. Knock them off their stride. And that’s going to be the story of the first half of the campaign. If the Tories can do that, then we’ll feel like there’s a battle, even if maybe there isn’t. But if they can’t, if we get to week two or three and the Reform vote is still where it was and the Tory vote seems stuck, it’s very hard to see how things shift.
There’s a lot of talk about when the Labour wobble comes, not if, i.e., it can’t possibly go this smoothly for them for six weeks because it’s been very slick the first few days. Do you think that wobble will come over policy rows – for example, workers’ rights, which is something that Labour has promised? Or do you think it will be more of a kind of self-confidence wobble because, for example, the left, perhaps the Green party, start to say, well, what is this change? Look, we’ve got a one-word slogan from Keir Starmer.
…on the lectern in front of…
It’s on the lectern when he or Rachel Reeves speak – one word, ‘change’. What is that change? And do you think that there’s a danger that the questions about what you can actually deliver when, frankly, it’s raining on the economy, it’s raining on Europe in terms of threats and security, that that actually might cause a wobble?
I think there are two questions on the wobble point. On the Labour side, we all sort of assume… we see a bit of a narrowing in the polls. People start worrying and saying to Starmer, you must do more, you must spell out more of the change. He’s not going to think that. Morgan McSweeney, his campaign is not going to think that. Rachel Reeves isn’t going to think that. They’re going to stick with their plan. But people around them will start saying if the polls start to move and narrow, you will start to see some of that noise happening.
And that’s where that gets worrying. I don’t think it’s about a particular policy issue, although, obviously, things go wrong. I think it will be about the Tories are catching us. We’ve got this wrong. We’re playing it too safe. The flip side of this wobble point, however, is that there’s no law that says only the Labour party, because they’re in the lead, has a campaign wobble.
I think that’s very true.
Absolutely possible that the Conservatives… you’re already seeing noises off and bits of discontent about the way he called the election, the fact they haven’t got candidates in place. One of their ministers is on holiday, says he’s not coming back.
Lots of senior ministers have jumped ship, as we said last time. So Michael Gove is standing down in Surrey. Surrey is entirely represented by Conservatives at the moment. But a lot of them could very much be on the way out because the Lib Dems are really biting at their heels in that territory.
Supposing you get an MRP one of those big multivariant polls which says the Tories are going to lose X-many 150 seats, whatever, the wobble could come on this side too. So although I think there will be one, I don’t think it’s guaranteed it’s a Labour wobble.
So we’ve discussed Labour’s one-word slogan, ‘change’. The Conservative slogan – ‘Clear plan . Bold action. Secure future…’ what happened to the three word winning slogans of the Tory side.
It’s very simple – ‘Stay at home, support the NHS, save lives’. So what is it again?
Clear plan… you see, I don’t think this is going to work. You’ve got too many words – ‘Clear plan. Bold action. Secure future’.
Bold is one of those words… it’s a bit like radical, which politicians like. What’s the evidence that the country likes bold? Bold and secure – they don’t seem to me, necessarily, to know what they’re saying. But are they actually the same thing? Is the country sitting at home going, what we really want now from the Conservatives are some bold and radical policies, things that will really shake things up…
Because you haven’t been exciting enough over the past few years.
If you can substitute all the words and it still seems logical – so could it be a bold plan, clear action, and secure future? Or could it be a secure plan with clear action and a bold future? If you can push them all around and it still means the same thing, then it means absolutely nothing.
OK, there we are – your slogan has not passed the FT subbing test, I’m afraid. So it is, as we have agreed, a difficult world. And the Conservative party, in fact, told us on the morning that they called the election that it’s so dangerous that we all have to sort of stockpile and prepare for disaster. So that’s just drawing attention, once again, to the difficulties that I think Starmer might…
I think their Prepare website was a perfectly sensible idea.
I’ve got a lot of tinned tomatoes.
And perfectly sensible idea to tell people to have a few things in their home in case you don’t want to be reliant on Thames Water. I don’t think that was a terrible thing to do. Admittedly, launching it on the day of the election, not so much.
Yeah, maybe not. So the one thing that we have not discussed is the issue that dare not speak its name, which I’m going to provocatively put on the table, only to be told by you that I have to take it off again.
Yes, take it off.
Brexit – nobody’s talking about Brexit. Funny that.
We’ve been resolutely on message in not talking about Brexit.
Is anybody going to talk about Brexit, the giant, historic…
The Conservatives don’t want to talk about Brexit because the majority of the country doesn’t think it’s been a good thing so far. Even among Leavers, they think it’s been badly implemented. So Tory flagship policy – they don’t want to talk about it, not least because we got it done, didn’t we?
Labour party doesn’t want to talk about it because it’s got that Remainer baggage and it’s trying to win back Leave votes. And the moment it says Brexit has been a failure, people will say, well, what are you going to do about it? And the answer is not much. And the Liberal Democrats don’t want to talk about it because – well, actually, they’re not talking not very much at all. But they’ve got a couple of seats somewhere they think could be jeopardised by talking about it.
So the Liberal Democrats say that those massive by-election wins they’ve taken off the Tories over the last couple of years – two to three years, actually – around about a third of the voters who helped them win those seats are Leavers. So if you’re trying to hold on to those by-election wins and then build in Tory territory, maybe not right now, maybe we’ll talk about it after the election.
You and I disagree because I don’t think Liberal Democrat voters are coherent in what they actually believe. They’re voting Liberal Democrat because they don’t want to vote for the others. And, in this election, you’ll vote Liberal Democrat because you want to vote against the Conservatives, and Labour isn’t viable option where you live. I think the Liberal Democrats’ silence on what was their absolute hallmark position is awful.
Well, what we’re saying is, crucially, the opposition parties are all in a play-it-safe campaign, aren’t they? So I’ve been watching – because I’m an entirely normal person – all of the 1997 overnight and next-day coverage of the election in May that year, which swept Blair to power in a landslide. And it is so notable that John Major, as he hands over, goes on and on and on about handing over a benevolent economy, that Blair came in really with an amazingly generous background of economy that’s doing well, holiday from history in terms of the international scene, great relations with our neighbours. That is not the backdrop this time. So it’s hard hats all round now.
No, I think it’s much closer to the sort of the Liam Byrne handover, isn’t it? I’m sorry, there’s no money left. I know so many people… all of the political journos I know are with you on this in watching these old elections. I don’t get it. I have to say, I was I was there at the time. I don’t see the need to watch it again.
I can’t get enough of it, not least for looking out to see whether you or I are in the background of any of the shots, which does sometimes happen.
Don’t need to see what I look like in 1997. It will just depress me.
OK, so the backdrop is pretty negative, we’ve agreed. They’re slugging it out to be in charge at a very difficult time. In fact, I’ve been stockpiling. You’ve got your brolly.
I’ve got my umbrella.
But it’s raining.
It is.
A hard rain is going to fall on an incoming government.
Very good.