Was this the week the wheels came off for Rishi Sunak? After two weeks of campaigning for “a clear plan of bold action for a secure future” the verdict in the polls is clear: voters don’t like his clear plan, they don’t want his bold actions, and they believe their future will be more secure without him. All of this was true even before the prime minister’s calamitous Thursday afternoon decision to leave D-day commemorations early for a pre-recorded media interview. Make no mistake: the Conservatives are now staring down the barrel. Their campaign is failing on every front, with precious little time left. Voters are making their minds up, and what the prime minister offers is not what they want. A key theme of every recent Conservative campaign has been to build up the leader and sow doubts about their opponent. But a leader-focused approach only makes sense if voters like your leader, or at least prefer them to the alternative. The prime minister’s three Tory predecessors all started their campaigns ahead, giving them an advantage to try to press home. Sunak has no such advantage. His leader approvals at the start of the campaign are among the worst ever recorded – as bad as Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, or Gordon Brown in the depths of the financial crisis. His campaign trail choices have not improved things. Keir Starmer may not set hearts racing, but running against such an opponent he does not have to. Starmer began this campaign with the same leader ratings advantage as Tony Blair had over John Major in 1997.
The campaign to date has not changed this picture, as Opinium’s regular questions on leadership qualities confirm. Keir Starmer gets no stellar ratings, but he still outshines Rishi Sunak’s dreadful ratings on every quality from being in touch to likability and competence.
Governments can also run on their records. We see this in the Conservatives’ promotion of their “bold actions” on Covid furlough, energy prices, pensions and taxes on the campaign trail, and in debates. Framing a campaign around past successes can be a smart strategy when voters credit you for performing well. The problem for Sunak is that his party’s reputation is now battered, and voters give his government poor marks across the board.
The polling verdict on the outgoing government is damning. More than six in every 10 voters think the government has performed badly on every single issue except defence and security – and Sunak’s blunders last week will probably cloud that one remaining bright spot. Voters give the government even worse marks on the issues they care about most, with 80 or 90% giving them a fail grade on the issues that matter most to them. Other polling paints a similar picture – more than four-fifths of voters polled by Ipsos last week are dissatisfied with the way the government is running the country (83%), and two-thirds do not think the Conservatives deserve to be re-elected (67%). Both of these figures are the highest recorded since Sunak took charge. The bad news doesn’t stop there. In campaigns, established parties can typically lean into brand advantages, drawing on long-established strengths. Not this time. Sunak’s Tories now trail Labour on every single issue in the most recent YouGov polling. Longstanding Tory advantages in areas such as immigration, crime and defence are gone, while Labour have opened up towering leads in traditional areas of strength such as health, education and housing. Crucially, Labour have opened up a lead on the economy, overturning an advantage the Conservatives held even in the 1997 landslide defeat. The legacy of Liz Truss cuts deep.
If voters don’t like the past, get them to look to the future. No wonder, then, that the Tory campaign has showered us with eyecatching new pledges and policies. While the new policies poll well in isolation, they haven’t changed the electoral weather. The problem once again is reputation. Voters who feel the government has failed on everything don’t trust Sunak or his party to deliver anything new. A new restaurant can produce an eyecatching menu, but it won’t succeed if the chef has health and safety violations and there’s a fire in the kitchen. The Tory policy barrage was perhaps not expected to turn around fortunes across the board. The goal was narrower: win back disaffected Brexiters tempted by Reform UK. Announcements such as national service and the pensions “triple lock plus” were supposed to secure the right flank, even at the risk of further alienating moderate swing voters. Nigel Farage sent that strategy to the seabed on Monday when he returned as Reform UK leader. The Conservatives cannot hope to out-Farage Farage – the Reform curious who distrust Rishi adore Nigel, who can trump any red meat offered by the Tory campaign with a bigger, juicier steak of his own. The Tories have wasted two precious weeks trying to see off a revolt on the right which is now all but guaranteed to hit them hard. Farage is certain to hurt the Conservatives. The only question is how badly.
Many of these disadvantages were baked in long ago. This was always going to be a campaign against the odds. Yet Sunak seems determined to make things worse with a campaign full of dubious claims and political pratfalls. This week’s Opinium poll for the Observer only adds to the bad news, with growing Labour leads on the biggest issues and more than half of voters saying the Tories had a bad week. Four in 10 of those polled said they thought it would be a good thing if the coming election entirely obliterated the Conservatives, as happened to their Canadian cousins in 1993, going from a majority to just two seats. Such voters may yet get their wish. Two weeks in, the dial has shifted from likely defeat to looming disaster. An electoral asteroid is streaking through the British atmosphere. Impact in the Tory heartlands is just weeks away. Brace, brace. Robert Ford is professor of political science at Manchester University and co-author of The British General Election of 2019