Tackle crime

Recorded crime is up by 14 per cent in England and Wales: robbery and rape both by 29 per cent, knife crime by 21 per cent. A fall in online fraud might be responsible for better crime survey figures, an alternative measure which reflects people’s experience of felonies, but the rise in “high harm, low volume” crime is, in part, the fruit of bad policy. If police are stuck at their desks obsessing about historic abuse allegations or monitoring “hate crime” on Twitter, they are not out on the beat. If criminals believe that burglaries will be ignored, they will commit more of them.

Labour deserves some of the blame: it is in London, where Sadiq Khan is mayor and shares responsibility for policing, that half the 20 per cent national rise in gun crime has taken place. But voters punish whoever is in Number 10 for such tragedies, and the Tories, who offer no compelling counter-narrative, are allowing a charge sheet to grow against them. Yesterday, education figures suggested a rising number of secondary schools are under-performing. And the NHS is overloaded.

The good news is that unemployment has fallen to a four-decade low. But, as Lord Ashcroft, the pollster, recently observed, there’s a risk that while succeeding on the economy, the Tories lose on the details of everyday life. In 1945, the country credited Winston Churchill with winning a war but threw him out of office because they wanted better hospitals and schools. At the next election, there’s a chance that a reputation for economic competence won’t spare Conservatives from defeat over quality-of-life issues, including those they normally excel at, such as educational excellence and fighting crime. They have to turn their attention to things that matter most in daily lives.