Labour’s brand has been strengthened during this

All the opinion polls, including our ComRes poll today, agree that Jeremy Corbyn has closed the gap with Theresa May since the Prime Minister announced the election on 18 April. This is good for democracy, in that a one-sided contest and a foregone conclusion would fail to test the choices facing the nation.

Our poll finds that Mr Corbyn’s ratings have improved on every subject surveyed over the past two weeks, while Ms May’s have mostly declined. She is still favoured, overall, as the better candidate for the office of prime minister, but Mr Corbyn has significant advantages on the NHS, on the interests of “hard-working families” and indeed of “people like me and my family”, and now on protecting “older people who are becoming more dependent on the social care system”.

This last reflects the unforced error of the Conservative manifesto: the plan to make pensioners to use the value of their property to help pay for care visits in their own home. This appears to be the other side of the coin of the Prime Minister’s exceptionally close political operation. The discretion of her tight group of advisers allowed her to spring the surprise of announcing the election, which was, we reluctantly concede, highly effective politics. But the reluctance to consult more widely on the manifesto allowed the social care mistake to slip through. It may have been justifiable policy but it was poor politics.

There is a pattern here. As the election campaign has progressed, it has become clearer that Ms May is not as good at politics as some of her admirers thought she was. Her “strong and stable” mantra was already inviting ridicule for its banality when her U-turn on social care exposed its hollowness. Her repeated insistence on Monday that “nothing has changed” was one of those moments that has cut through to people not much interested in politics, and not to her advantage.

Equally, the campaign has exposed the unexpected strengths of the Labour Party and of Mr Corbyn. The premature leak of Labour’s manifesto would have been a media-management masterstroke if it had been deliberate. It allowed more detailed scrutiny of policies that turned out to be largely popular, as well as allowing some minor mistakes to be corrected at the last moment.

It seems that, despite the unprecedented divisions in the party, the Labour brand remains resilient and the party’s core vote is larger than was often assumed. Much of the movement in the opinion polls has presumably been that of Labour doubters returning to the fold as the moment of choice approaches. In addition, Mr Corbyn, having been battle-hardened in his party’s civil war for two years, turns out to be better at campaigning than his opponents, both Labour and Conservative, expected. In particular, the contrast between Ms May as she faced Andrew Neil, possibly the nation’s most formidable interviewer, on Monday, and Mr Corbyn on Friday, reflected well on the Leader of the Opposition.

All that said, Ms May retains a substantial lead in our ComRes poll and all the polls taken together suggest that she is well placed to increase her majority in 11 days’ time. But at least this election is beginning to look less like a ritual to be gone through and more like a genuine choice to be decided.