Sunak faces a bumpy slide towards oblivion in 2024 – but there are ways he can put up an election fight

The prime minister has confirmed that there will be an election this coming year – so how will he play it?

To add to the cacophony of predictions for the year to come, I offer the following: Jeremy Hunt will not cut inheritance tax in the Budget on 6 March. He will take Norman Lamont’s advice and cut income tax, with the gains tilted towards those on lower earnings.

Lord Lamont, the author of the Budget that helped John Major win the 1992 election, told The Daily Telegraph: “The largest number of people should benefit from whatever is possible.” He made the obvious point that an inheritance tax cut “benefits a small number of people”, and said: “I don’t really buy the argument that it’s much hated by everyone.”

The election will be fought on the centre ground, and a reduction in inheritance tax is too easily portrayed as a tax cut for the rich, because that is what it is.

So my second prediction is that this will be the year of Starnakism. I tried to promote the word a year ago, as a tribute to the cross-party Butskellism of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was named after Rab Butler, Harold Macmillan’s deputy prime minister, and Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour leader, to describe the consensus politics of that era. I may have been ahead of my time, but this year Starnakism’s moment will finally arrive.

Rishi Sunak has problems on the so-called right of his party, but he has realised that appeasement is fruitless. He has decided to fight for the centre ground. Many Conservatives still yearn for unfunded tax cuts despite last year’s real-world demonstration of their folly, but there is little appetite among persuadable voters for taking risks with the public finances.

As for the other cause championed by Sunak’s critics within the Tory party, immigration poses problems for the opposition as much as for the government. Keir Starmer appears to be moving towards the Conservatives on this issue, signalling that he is considering processing asylum claims outside the UK.

The release of the Tony Blair cabinet papers for 2003 shows that this was a preoccupation of the Labour government as much as of its Tory successor. However, there remains a fundamental difference between what Blair considered (but never did) and the present government’s Rwanda policy. Blair considered what Starmer is looking at now, namely setting up centres outside the UK to process applications for asylum in the UK. The Tory policy is to remove asylum seekers to Rwanda so that they can apply for asylum in Rwanda. That is one fundamental difference between the parties that will remain in 2024.

My other predictions are that the election will be on 12 December 2024, exactly five years after the last one, and that this will allow for one more “fiscal event”. It will be called the autumn statement, but it will be another Budget in all but name. It will be a last chance for Sunak and his chancellor to take advantage of any last-moment changes in the forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility.

In Hunt’s brief time as chancellor, OBR forecasts have swung between giving him £20bn more than he expected to £20bn less, so if the Tories get lucky they could have a significant pre-election giveaway.

(This is not, by the way, to endorse the silly cry of “OBR forecasts are all over the place; they should be abolished”: forecasts change when facts change, and the OBR remains the best way of defending the sustainability of the public finances.)

From all this, we can predict the shape of the Tory election campaign. It will be run by Isaac Levido, the Lynton Crosby acolyte who steered the 2015 and 2019 campaigns. He is likely to follow the same sort of story arc that I came across in the Blair papers released this week. Among them is a handwritten comment by Blair on a note from David Miliband about election planning on 18 October 2000: “I still like the challenges and choices and the unifying theme of having laid the foundations, now let us complete the job.”

That message is complicated by Sunak having to defend 14 years of Tory government, rather than Blair having to defend the four years of his first term, but Levido will follow the first law of journalism: “Simplify and exaggerate.”

Some more predictions: Sunak will stuff the junior doctors’ mouths with gold. He has to settle their strike or he might as well give up now. He has to get NHS waiting lists heading in the right direction by the end of next year.

Sunak, Hunt and Levido will try to scare people with the prospect of a Labour government losing control of the public finances. Again, that is difficult, given the recent Tory record, but the argument will go like this: the economy has taken a double blow from coronavirus and the world energy crisis; things are getting back on track; don’t take a risk with Labour’s naively grandiose net zero plans.

Expect to see billboards and Facebook pages plastered with posters of “Labour’s £28bn bombshell”. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, has said her plan to borrow an extra £28bn a year for green investment is “subject to” her fiscal rules, which means that it could be £28bn or it could be nothing. On Tory posters, it will be £28bn, leading to higher interest rates and higher inflation.

For someone who warns his shadow cabinet every week against complacency, Starmer seems complacent about the state of the party’s green policy. No one knows what the plan that isn’t really £28bn is for, while the party remains committed to an unrealistic and expensive target of decarbonising all electricity generation by 2030 which, in December next year, will give them just five years.

None of this is to say that Sunak is likely to avoid defeat. Indeed, his party is so unloved and so much out of sorts with itself that it is easy to see how 2024 could just be one long bumpy slide into oblivion. But there is a strategy there that could pose more of a threat to Labour than the very online political classes think. Especially when “being good on TV” is so important in election campaigns: there Sunak could still have an advantage.

The Conservatives are probably doomed in 2024, but they will put up a fight, and Labour’s response could make the difference between a big election win and a narrow one.