General election game on

This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers

The 2nd of May 1991 was a great day for the Liberal Democrats. As the results came in from that year’s local elections, action man leader Paddy Ashdown hailed the progress made by his party. The Lib Dems gained more than 400 seats and hit a projected vote share of 22%. Three party politics was declared to be back in England.

The Tories had a terrible night in 1991, losing more than 1000 councillors, even though they had replaced their leader and the country’s Prime Minister late the previous year.

Yet under a year later the Conservatives led by John Major won the 1992 general election, securing more than 14 million votes.

What happened?

Famously, Labour’s then leader Neil Kinnock failed to  convince a sufficient number of voters that he was made of Prime Ministerial stuff. Already the signs were there in those 1991 local elections. Despite the Tories losing all those seats, the projected gap on national vote share actually narrowed. In the run up to the April 1992 general election the Conservatives hammered Labour on taxation and the shadow chancellor John Smith miscalculated, not realising that attitudes to taxation in the south of England and the Midlands tended to be different from Scotland, where high taxes were, and still are, regarded as a progressive badge of honour. 

Parallels with the situation now are not exact, of course. They couldn’t be, thirty years later when the circumstances are different.

This time the Tories have laid on an emblematic economic screw-up before the general election and not afterwards. Six months after the Tory election victory in 1992 came Black Wednesday, when Britain fell out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in humiliating circumstances, after the government was taught a lesson by the markets. This time, the Tories have already pulled a similar manoeuvre before the election, by facilitating Liz Truss’s mini-budget that shred confidence last September.

Today, pollsters and psephologists disagree about how best to measure where the parties stand on vote share after these latest results. Are the local election results, adjusted because they only include some of England, the best measure? Or are the polls and the models individual pollsters use a better guide? The metric used by the BBC and the venerable Sir John Curtice (chief chronicler of electoral chaos) suggests the gap between the two parties is nine points. Sky News downgraded its projection on vote share. After much excitement overnight, on Friday evening it said its experts calculated a cap of seven points.

Labour wanted and needed its lead to be in double digits to indicate an unassailable lead and trigger an outbreak of Tory panic. A gap of nine points might be just about enough to suggest a Labour victory is definitely coming next year. A gap of seven is not.

What these results mean is that it is “game on” for the general election. The local election results point to a wide range of prospects from a robust Labour majority to a Tory recovery and a narrow victory for Rishi Sunak, with a hung parliament possible. In other words, the general election is competitive.

The leaders of both main parties have, each in their own ways, done something quite remarkable in getting their parties to this point and making them competitive again so soon after previous disasters.

For all his flaws – what does he believe, is he a lawyer taking a brief? – Starmer has moved Labour from a position in which a victory would have equated to national catastrophe under Jeremy Corbyn, to the situation now when a Starmer government will strike many Britons as a perfectly reasonable prospect. In less than four years, Starmer has moved from trying to make Corbyn Prime Minister to making Labour mainstream again.

When Rishi Sunak took over as leader of his party in October last year the Tories looked completely doomed, destined to go down to the kind of obliteration suffered by the Canadian Conservatives in 1993, when they lost 167 seats and were left with only two seats. Only six months later the British Tories have a shot at redemption. Somehow some parts of Sunak’s party seem to have forgotten where Boris Johnson and Liz Truss led them.

Here comes Ukraine’s spring offensive test

Russian casualties for the last five months have hit 100,000, with 20,000 dead and 80,000 injured. That is according to estimates published by the US government on Monday. The Russian death toll in Ukraine has accelerated since the first phase of the war, according to White House national security council spokesperson John Kirby. Many of the deaths in the last five months have been in the battle for Bakhmut, in Donetsk Oblast. The Ukrainians are clinging on in one corner of the city in an attempt to deny the Russians a victory. The suggestion is Ukraine has fought there to suck in Russian manpower and firepower, sapping Russian reserves ahead of a spring offensive by the Ukrainians. 

Now comes the test. Allies have sent the kit requested and the preparation is done. The concern on the Ukrainian side is that expectations have been raised to such a level that anything short of a major breakthrough will be perceived as a failure and reduce the Western appetite for continuing what could be a long war of attrition against a foe prepared in grim, classic Russian style to keep throwing men into the fight.

The Ukraine war has slipped down the news agenda in recent months. It is about to move front and centre again.

King of Bowls

A colleague emails me an advert run by her local bowling alley, a venue that according to customer reviews is one of England’s least attractive bowling venues. It is offering a Coronation special offer, with drinks, plastic flags and mini pizzas thrown in alongside a bowling session. A picture of the King is used. In the image he is not bowling, but he is smiling. Is he smiling because he has never been forced to go arcade-style bowling, surely one of the worst leisure activities devised by rapacious American capitalists?

The advert is decked in bunting and Union flags in celebration of the great day. There is a lot of this stuff about. Everywhere you go in Britain in the last week – online and in real life – there are Coronation special offers and themed advertising invoking a tenuous connection with the great, solemn occasion. An airline invited me to get in the spirit by booking flights. Perhaps this was aimed at potential customers who want to escape the occasion.

I’m not going anywhere. This is a momentous event to savour. And if you want to help get in the spirit, why not ask friends who are yet to subscribe to join Reaction. If they take out a subscription this weekend using the code #godsavethekingandqueen our team will phone up next week and sing them the national anthem, though I must check this with the team. The offer is subject to terms and conditions. It is what King Charles would want.

Coronation cheer

There now follows a short advert for the British monarchy. Isn’t it a wonderful institution? Yes, yes, republicans among you will think today’s ceremony is a load of old-fashioned nonsense. Traditionalists among you will think it not old-fashioned enough and deplore the alterations made to the ceremony. Personally, I do think it is a mistake to have invited Elton John and the cast of Abba musical “Mamma Mia! The Party” to perform Dancing Queen in Westminster Abbey during the interval while the monarch is anointed with Prosecco(*). But we must all move with the times.

Beyond that, what a wonderful weekend this is. It’s a moment of rebirth and renewal after the pandemic and the death of the late monarch. It’s time (I’m writing on Friday evening, not at breakfast) to go to the pub and raise a glass in celebration.

(*) Correction: Elton John and the cast of Abba musical “Mamma Mia! The Party” have not been invited to perform, I understand.