It’s Brexit that will win it for Mrs May

The electoral truce prompted by the Manchester terrorist atrocity is over. Monday night’s appearances by Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn before a television studio audience set the tone for the last week or so of the campaign. The Prime Minister intends to hammer home the message with which she began: that the country would be placed in peril if the Labour leader was installed in Number 10 just as Brexit negotiations begin with the EU.

She developed the theme in a speech in Wolverhampton yesterday, seeking to stabilise a campaign that wobbled after the publication of the Tory manifesto and the rapid U-turn over social care costs. Mrs May is on far firmer ground when focusing on the immediate challenge she and the country face: getting a good deal for Britain as it charts a new course outside of the EU.

For now, nothing else matters. Get Brexit wrong and all the talk of helping the less well-off, reducing inequality or capping elderly care bills will be dashed on the rocks of political and economic uncertainty. Mrs May ostensibly sought this election to strengthen her hand in the forthcoming talks but has been dragged off course by the inevitable cut and thrust of the campaign. In Mr Corbyn she is facing an opponent happy to throw promises around with total abandon, hoping to shore up his electoral base by spreading other people’s money as widely as he can.

Labour has made so many pledges that Mr Corbyn cannot even remember how much they all cost: on BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour yesterday he was reduced to saying that the provision of universal nursery care would cost “a lot”.

It is tempting to see the Labour campaign as a shambles; and yet, from Mr Corbyn’s point of view, the more outrageous and reckless he is, the more people take notice. Confronting an opponent prepared to say anything to anyone with no coherent plan for government is difficult since it risks alienating voters at whom the spending pledges are aimed.

So Mrs May and her campaign advisers have returned to first principles. In less than a month, the EU’S negotiators will be waiting in Brussels for the British Brexit team to arrive and for the talks to get under way. This will be one of the great moments of recent British history. The idea that it might be entrusted to Mr Corbyn should be enough to get voters out in numbers sufficient to ensure a good Conservative victory next Thursday.