Gary Lineker is the Tories’ secret weapon

The furore over his tweets made sure that workingclass voters noticed the small boats policy

Gary Lineker has proved more useful to the Conservative Party than Jeremy Hunt in the last two weeks. Lineker’s tweeting and suspension ensured every workingclass target voter heard their policy announcement on small boats, while the Budget was an electoral non-event.

In two focus groups of workingclass Conservative targets on Wednesday night, every single person had heard of the Government’s small boats policy. The overwhelming majority supported it. Such “cutthrough” is extremely rare, and participants freely admitted this was down to Lineker.

When the Government announced the policy, it knew the greatest political challenge was getting working-class voters to see the policy at all. Even the biggest Westminster announcements pass by unnoticed. The Government will have hoped that vocal opposition from Left-wing figures would propel the announcement towards the top of the news agenda, but Lineker’s suspension gave it the attention that Downing Street could only dream of. Polls have indicated an immediate bounce in Government ratings.

To these voters in Wolverhampton and Rotherham, the Government was right to say there are no alternatives to firm action on boats. They cannot see how existing policy tools can reduce crossings. They think everything else possible has been tried. Their attitudes are entirely typical. Recent focus groups and polls have showed the same thing from working-class voters: surprising relaxation about “legal” migration, even in significant numbers, but opposition to “illegal” migration through channel crossings.

These voters support continued migration but want to know that the Government actually has “control” over borders. Interestingly, however, while the working-class voters in our groups disagreed with the substance of Lineker’s tweet, they thought he was within his rights to say what he thinks.

They were uncomfortable with the BBC restricting his freedom of speech, and still like the guy they remember before the political campaigning.

If the row on boats caught the imagination of working-class voters, the Budget was an electoral irrelevance. Learning the lessons from the Truss Budget, the Government went “safety first”. Their Budget before the election next year will likely be stuffed full of “retail policies”; this one was about repairing the economy.

With this in mind, most workingclass voters in our groups supported the Budget, but with little genuine enthusiasm. While they obviously supported the continued subsidising of energy bills and the fuel duty freeze, these moves were just expected: their removal would have caused anger. The changes to pension payments were

If the row on boats caught the imagination of working-class voters, the Budget was an electoral irrelevance

seen primarily as help for the better off, although they recognised it would help doctors.

What have we learnt over the last couple of weeks? Above all, that the Government needs to generate rows on issues target voters care about. Yes, policies need to be popular, but they need to secure enough coverage so that voters actually notice them. I would guess the small boats announcement and the Lineker row are worth something like 3-5 points in the polls, while the Budget was worth 1-2 points. With the Government trailing by 20 points, it needs to display more than basic competence.