We ought to be thinking about a hung parliament and a second election in 2025

Speculation is devoted too much to the extremes of Labour or Conservative success at next year’s election, and not enough to the middle

Speculation about the next election is constant, yet it alternates between two outcomes that ought to be unlikely. One is a Labour majority, which would require an unprecedented recovery in the party’s fortunes from one election to the next. The other is a majority for Rishi Sunak, which would require a Conservative prime minister to cling on for an also-unprecedented fifth term.

The gap in the election-speculation market is the vast tract of land in between those two possible outcomes: a hung parliament. Given the rival claims made by the Labour majoritarians and the Conservative contrarians, an inconclusive result in the middle seems to be the underpriced outcome.

The parliamentary recess has given us a preview of how the election will be fought. Labour’s main message has been focused on the local elections at the start of next month; namely a freeze in council tax bills that would have happened if there had been a Labour government, paid for by a higher windfall tax on oil and gas companies.

That message lays the ground for a general election campaign designed to make that imaginary Labour government a real one, by offering to tweak the priorities of the Treasury, to protect “working people” at the expense of undeservedly rich corporations.

The Conservative message has been that Sunak, the pleasant and competent prime minister, has been solving problems and “making progress” – the phrase he used in a long interview on Thursday – which a Labour government would put at risk.

Both messages have been disrupted. Labour managed to disrupt its own campaign by publishing an ad on Twitter that asserted that the prime minister thinks child sex abusers should avoid prison. I don’t think the ad worked: undecided voters would think it unfair – David Blunkett, no snowflake as home secretary, thought it was “down in the gutter”. And the idea that it created a fuss that would draw attention to the Tories’ record of running down the criminal justice system is just wishful Labour thinking.

What ought to be more worrying for Keir Starmer, though, is that he didn’t know about it before it was published. A “Labour insider” was quoted as saying: “Keir’s got far bigger things to fill his day than Twitter graphics.” That suggests that the Labour campaign machine is out of control and liable to misfire in a general election. Everything ought to be accountable to the leader, who should personally sign off an ad as controversial as that. “Labour insiders” either didn’t realise how controversial it was, or took Starmer’s approval for granted.

As a Labour special adviser from an earlier, more successful period, put it to me: “It’s all a bit ‘You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’ – Starmer and his team are not naturals at this kind of thing and it showed here; they overcooked it.”

Starmer was then forced to defend the ad – disowning it would have looked even weaker – further distracting the party from its core message.

Meanwhile, Sunak managed to disrupt his own message by admitting in that long interview with Paul Goodman, the editor of Conservative Home, that “stop the boats” didn’t actually mean the boats would stop by the time of the election.

That was obvious from the start, but the prime minister’s admission drew attention to several recent pieces of evidence that the government will struggle even to prevent the number of people crossing the Channel in dinghies from rising year on year. The weekly numbers are not looking good, and some sources suggest that ministers have given up expecting any removals to Rwanda.

Indeed, progress on all of Sunak’s five priorities seems stalled. NHS waiting lists rose in the latest figures, and the split votes of unions on strike action suggest that the pay deal may go through in the end, but not without further losses of morale and continuing staff shortages.

Even the easiest of Sunak’s targets to hit, the halving of inflation, is not going to feed through into people feeling better off until very late in the electoral cycle. Indeed, there is a danger this year of ministers claiming that inflation has dropped, while voters complain that the prices they pay haven’t gone down.

The election, therefore, is likely to be a contest of mitigated negatives. Sunak hopes that an easing of the economic pain in the months before next October will suppress memories of the biggest drop in living standards since the Great Frost of 1709. Starmer hopes that “time for a change” will be enough to wipe out people’s doubts about him, a politician who seems to have changed his mind about everything.

It ought to be better known that any outcome between a Labour lead of about 11 percentage points and a Tory lead of 3 points is likely to mean a hung parliament, according to Peter Kellner’s calculations.

Therefore, it seems that election speculation should not be asking whether we are now in a pre-1992 or a pre-1997 situation, but whether, after the election, we are likely to be in a post-February 1974 or a post-2010 situation. The correct answer, I think, is 1974, because I don’t see the Liberal Democrats forming a coalition government again, even if they have the numbers to make a stable pact between Starmer and Ed Davey.

We ought to be discussing the Scottish National Party, and whether a sharp operator such as Stephen Flynn, its new leader in the Commons, could use his leverage in a hung parliament to start the fightback from the party’s woes.

We ought to understand Northern Ireland’s politics better, because the votes of its MPs might matter again, as they did in 1974-79, and indeed in 1996-97 (the dying days of John Major’s government, when he lost his majority) and 2017-19 (the dying years of Theresa May’s government, sustained by a confidence and supply deal with the DUP).

We ought, in short, to be paying more attention to a hung parliament and the prospect of a second election in 2025.