It’s mid-May, we have just completed the local and mayoral election races and the Prime Minister, to all intents and purposes seems to be going for an election anytime from October onwards.
And yet on a drizzly Thursday morning, I found myself on a train heading to Essex for a Labour campaign rally that I wasn’t entirely expecting.
When I got to the giant hanger venue, somewhere near Purfleet station, and walked into a hall with pledge banners, placards, Labour activists, the entire shadow cabinet and a tieless Sir Keir Starmer with his sleeves rolled up, I knew Labour – probably totally fed-up with the Prime Minister keeping them waiting (it is up to Rishi Sunak alone to decide the date of the election) – had decided to kick off their general election campaign.
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And that is what Starmer did, with a six-point “first steps” pledge card making concrete promises to voters that are either vague enough, or low ambition enough, for him to deliver.
I put it to him that he was watering down his missions for government – be it having all electricity generated by renewables by 2030 or having the fastest growing economy in the G7 by the end of the decade – for fear of failure.
He told me his “mission” promises still stand and his six-point plan is a “downpayment” on what a Labour government will do if elected in those first 100 days.
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On Electoral Dysfunction this week we talk about the long election campaign launching – be it Starmer with his glitzy rally in Essex, or Rishi Sunak with his rather more drab speech in an airless office of Policy Exchange think tank in central London (to be fair that was a scene setter).
The short campaign is the period between the dissolution of Parliament and the date of the general election where we have a few weeks of pure campaign.
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Hot-footing it back from Essex to record the pod, we discuss Starmer’s pledge card launch and I get to show it to Jess for the first time. Ruth goes through it line-by-line as she talks about the possible Conservative attack lines, linking what Starmer is promising now to what he’s said in the past.
From Starmer, we swing to Sunak as Ruth talks about Sunak’s speech on Monday, in which the PM sought to spell out why the country was safer under him, in a winding journey that cut across so many policy areas – defence, health, tech, education – it was hard to find a clear thread.
Ruth is very clear – to paraphrase – the Conservative party election guru Lynton Crosby, who helped Cameron and Johnson to victory, that her party needs to “scrape the barnacles off the boat” – focus – and clean up the message in the long campaign to get ready for the short.
“You can’t fatten a pig on the way to market,” says Ruth, quoting Crosby. “You cannot, in the last week of a campaign, introduce something. You’ve got to lead it out 12 months before, six months before, two months before, one month before. Starmer, it seems, has got the memo, Sunak has not.”
