Rishi Sunak has badly misjudged the mood of the nation

Editorial: The Conservatives’ accident-prone election campaign is the worst they have run since at least 1945. The party hardly deserves to come second

Rishi Sunak’s party trail Labour by a huge margin with one day of campaigning left (PA)

As an overlong election campaign staggers to its end, a few tentative conclusions – and one extremely confident one – may be asserted. Barring some asteroidal event, it can be said with confidence that Labour will win this election with a working majority to govern for a full parliamentary term – and quite possibly by a landslide.

The latest Techne poll for The Independent confirms that the polling has hardly shifted during the last six long weeks. Labour still has a lead of around 20 percentage points, and has slipped back a little from recent peaks; the Conservatives are barely able to rely on their core vote, albeit they’ve rallied slightly in recent days; and the Farage-led Reform UK surge has subsided.

Mr Farage’s latest hard-right vehicle has been rightly embarrassed by bigoted comments from some of its candidates and others associated with the party, some defections back to the Conservatives, accusations of Russian “bot” support, and an overly understanding attitude to Vladimir Putin and his unprovoked war in Ukraine. Reform UK will cause serious damage to the Conservatives, and inadvertently boost Labour’s Commons majority; but the promised Farageist “revolt” has not materialised.

To borrow the much-used metaphor, Sir Keir Starmer is taking his last few cautious steps in his journey with the priceless Ming vase across a newly polished and treacherously slippery museum floor. Every attempt by the prime minister and his team to trip up Sir Keir has failed.

Indeed, the whole Conservative campaign, it’s fair to say, has been one long catalogue of blunders, gaffes and scandals – many more unforced errors than we’ll see at Wimbledon in the coming days. As polling day approaches, their attacks on Labour have become more personal and more desperate, culminating in a preposterous accusation that Sir Keir would be working a four-day week and knocking off at 6pm. It’s silly, and disfigures what is already a ropey publicity drive.

At this point, it does seem very much as though Rishi Sunak made a serious error of judgement in choosing to take his case to the country now, and gambling on a long campaign to grind Labour down. It is difficult to argue that he’d have done any worse by following widespread expectations and leaving the election until the autumn.

According to what we may assume is in his much-vaunted (and still unpublished) “plan”, the voters would have been given tangible evidence of the success of his policies, rather than yet more promises. There would have been some more cuts in national insurance in an autumn statement.

A few token flights full of terrified refugees would have taken off for Rwanda. Interest rates, and mortgage bills, would have started on a downward trajectory. And, as it turns out quite significantly, Nigel Farage would have been busy as a warm-up act for Donald Trump. Mr Sunak might well have still lost, and badly – but the scale of the debacle might not have been on the near-terminal scale he is now heading for. All of those factors could, and no doubt were, weighed when the prime minister was contemplating his bold move at the end of May.

Mr Sunak can claim that he was unlucky to be rained on in Downing Street. His advisers must have been distracted when someone suggested a campaign visit to the Titanic Quarter in Belfast. Nor, presumably, can he be blamed for the bets allegedly being placed by those around him on the date of the election using insider information.

But it was surely he and he alone who decided to leave the D-Day commemorations early, reportedly against the express warnings of David Cameron. And it may be safely assumed that the eccentric policy of bringing back national service was his idea, and that he was aware of a series of lurid, personal and increasingly hysterical attacks launched against Labour and its leadership.

Perhaps most ill-judged of all was to stake so much of his premiership on the promise of tax cuts. These pledges the public, by and large, either didn’t believe, or else concluded that they’d much rather have access to functioning basic public services. An extra few hundred pounds a year is of little comfort when you’re waiting months to see the cancer specialist.

The accident-prone Conservative campaign of 2024 is the worst the party has run since at least 1945. They hardly deserve to come second.

Mr Sunak had much promise when he began his premiership, and can be credited with clearing up some of the chaos left behind by Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Theirs was a grim legacy. Yet it is equally plain that Mr Sunak made his own mistakes, too, and called too many things wrong as he went into this election.

He badly misjudged the mood of the nation. We shall soon see quite how badly.