Sherelle Jacobs:
Enslavement to yesterday’s logic could see the Conservatives squander the chance to make history
The Westminster bubble still has not twigged that we teeter on the edge of the most thrilling realignment in modern history. It is too distracted by a red herring – the polls that wildly flap between a chaotic hung Parliament and a Tory majority. In this high-stakes election, the rush to dissect each fresh, contradicting opinion tracker – and, yes, foam at the drip of support back to Labour – is understandable. But in our quasireligious fixation on the polls, we are in danger of missing something crucial: the Conservatives’ enslavement to the cult of yesterday’s logic. Specifically, the Tory strategy is disastrously stuck in the past, even though the Lib Dem implosion has blown up its playbook.
With a week still to go, the polls shouldn’t be taken as a prediction so much as a warning that, in cautiously “sticking to the script”, the Tories are, counter-intuitively, taking a whopping gamble. Their “safety first” game plan is as follows: creep ahead by taking enough seats across the rust-belt to make up for a smattering of losses across Remainia. Meanwhile, let the Lib Dems split Labour’s vote. But Remainers are now ditching the Rainbow Despot, Jo Swinson. Her narcissistic presidential campaign has failed to distract from the lurid immorality of her policy to revoke Article 50. Which renders the original Tory strategy obsolete.
And yet, in the Tory camp, there is a chilling reluctance to believe anything has changed. One detects a hint of wishful thinking in their jawclamped insistence that the Lib Dems might yet fare better against Labour than indicated in recent polls. Still, a sliver of panic has started to set in. The trouble is that it is stirring the Tories into a last-ditch effort, not so much to change their strategy as to turn up the volume.
The plan as we enter these final days seems to be to shock and awe the South with glass-shatteringly shrill premonitions of economic chaos under Labour – and hammer home that a vote for Jeremy Corbyn would be an operatic act of self-harm by the bourgeois intelligentsia.
The latter strand of the Tories’ approach is inspired by their delight at the depth of Corbyn’s unpopularity in the Midlands and the North. As one senior Tory put it to me, he is no longer the heartlands’ “blue-eyed grandpa”, so much as the “Christmas Grinch” – with every day that passes, from Derby to Doncaster, he is more loathed. So too are his hardcore supporters, whose deranged tactics – from distributing knitted Corbynista dolls to graffitiing Tory constituency offices – have disgusted locals.
The problem with pumping out vague anti-labour slogans that worked elsewhere with ever-greater intensity is that the South is a different country. There, the Tories can beat the drum of Corbageddon all they like – Remainers have heard it all before. Such voters are not yet unreachable, but the Tories’ inability to change course betrays a jarring lack of emotional intelligence. It’s not so much that aggressive anti-left campaigning can’t be effective as that they urgently need to refine their message.
That means taking on specific wack-job policies more aggressively. As Corbyn courts the national press to make dramatic attacks on the Americanisation of the NHS, the Conservatives should be holding press conferences on the idiocy of nationalising everything. And then there’s the “vision thing”. Pushing Boris Johnson as a cherubic beacon of positivity is not enough, particularly in constituencies where people regard him as a lying devil.
Instead, the Tories need to push more ambitious policies. One undecided millennial voter who is agnostic on Brexit and not particularly tribal told me this week that she is leaning towards Labour because it is the “change party”. Where are Dominic Cummings’ blueprints for a tech-driven Narnia to counter Labour’s retro-analogue version of the future?
A more sophisticated line of attack in the South would give the Tories more confidence to blast through the Red Wall in the North. Final-week panic about their weakness in London and surrounding seats risks holding the Conservatives back in the Labour heartlands. This is a disaster, because if the Lib Dems fail to split the Labour vote, the Tories need to win even more seats to make up for this.
Candidates in the North East in particular are starting to crackle with excitement that Sedgefield (Tony Blair’s old seat), North Durham and even the gruffly socialist Redcar may be up for grabs. That the PPCS for these were chosen early in the campaign is a sign that, on the ground, the Tories mean business. But the anaemic national campaign could yet botch things. Mr Johnson’s panicked refusal to welcome the US President with open arms for this week’s Nato summit – for fear it would put irk Remainers – was a missed opportunity to play the real trump card of this election: the unpatriotic Corbyn’s destructiveness to Britain’s standing.
The natural party of government is probably still on course for a majority of sorts. It is a tragedy, however, that they are allowing this historic opportunity for a landslide be bogged down by sloppy Tory mediocrity.
follow Sherelle Jacobs on Twitter @Sherelle_e_j; read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion