Rishi Sunak may have shunned the opportunity of a big speech to kick off an election year, but he nonetheless managed to eclipse Sir Keir Starmer’s set-piece January address this week.
The UK prime minister’s studiedly offhand remarks about the timing of a general election, made on the fringes of a visit to a youth centre in Mansfield, trumped the Labour leader’s new year speech when it came to making the top of the political news bulletins on Thursday.
Sunak’s insistence on a “working assumption” that there will be no polls until the “second half of this year” is designed to forestall his opponents’ attack line that not going to the country in the spring amounts to “bottling” an election.
The PM will attend another public event in the north-west on Monday where he is expected to make brief remarks, but his decision not to host a high-profile occasion to sketch out his vision for the UK may be viewed as a lost opportunity by many of his MPs. They are mindful that their party continues to lag an average of 18 points behind Labour.
But in the immediate term, “Sunak has stolen Starmer’s thunder,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. But he warned: “While Sunak got people talking about him and an election date, that’s not really going to change the fundamentals.”
His strategy contrasts with that of the leaders of many of the UK’s other parties.
Starmer gave a half-hour speech laying out his plans for “Project Hope” before a media Q&A and a round of interviews with broadcasters in Bristol on Thursday.
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey the day before donned an orange high-vis jacket in front of a lorry in Surrey to frame himself as the head of a “Tory removals” service.
Richard Tice, leader of Reform UK, meanwhile, in London hosted a press conference — complete with slideshow branding Sunak and Starmer the “socialist twins” — and toured the studios of broadcasters.
It is perhaps no surprise that Sunak eschewed a big-picture new year speech, given that his address in the first week of January last year has been identified by critics as one of his biggest mis-steps in office to date.
Setting out his five priority pledges — halving inflation, increasing the size of the economy, cutting debt, slashing NHS waiting lists and stopping small-boat crossings — was an ill-fated gambit. By the end of December, only one of those self-imposed tests had been met — the target on inflation.
An ally of Sunak insisted there was “no constitutional rule” or any specific convention forcing a leader to give a significant speech in January, but said the PM still had an important message to convey this week about the cut in National Insurance contributions that kicks in on Saturday.
The prime minister will come under growing pressure to commit to further tax cuts when Tory MPs return to Westminster on Monday and start to look ahead both to the March 6 Budget and the party’s election manifesto.
The Christmas recess saw a tense public debate with Conservatives in so-called “red wall”, traditionally Labour, seats calling for reductions to income tax and their colleagues in the wealthier shire heartlands demanding cuts in inheritance tax.
Tories on the party’s right flank are also adamant that Sunak has to fulfil the commitment he made to them last month to “tighten” the emergency legislation on his Rwanda removals policy, amid concerns it will not in its present state assuage the courts’ concerns about the government’s flagship plan to deter small boat crossings. Hardline rightwing MPs in the New Conservatives faction will host their first meeting of the year on Monday evening.
Waiting until the autumn for an election may mean the incumbent enjoying a brighter economic backdrop, given some economists are now predicting that mortgage rates may continue to fall to such an extent that some homeowners facing the end of two-year fixed rates may not see a rise in home borrowing costs later this year.
Starmer, meanwhile, will be banking on voters opting for change at the ballot box. Speaking at a science park in north Bristol on Thursday, he road-tested various election messages about “change” and “hope”, insisting he was happy to fight the Tories on the economy.
Sometimes satirised as a stodgy, uninspiring technocrat, Starmer sought to dismiss that characterisation as he promised a new “Project Hope” for Britain.
“To truly defeat this miserabilist Tory project, we must crush their politics of divide and decline with a new Project Hope,” he argued. And Starmer denied he would be reluctant to take part in televised election debates with Sunak. “Bring it on,” he declared.
But he tried to balance optimistic rhetoric with a warning that a new Labour government would not face easy choices, with no promise to turn on the spending taps given the tight public finances. Britons “need credible hope, a frank hope, a hope that levels with you about the hard road ahead”, he said.
Starmer admitted that trust in politics had been damaged, not least by the legacy of various Tory governments since 2010, including “the sex scandals, the expenses scandals, the waste scandals, the contracts for friends, even in a crisis like the pandemic”.
And in oblique criticism of his predecessor, the hard-left Jeremy Corbyn, he said Labour was now a changed party and “no longer in thrall to gesture politics”.
The Lib Dems, meanwhile, are seeking to run a tightly focused election campaign targeting constituencies where they stand a good chance of unseating the Conservatives, predominantly in the south-east and south- west of England and in London.
While they will largely seek to fight localised campaigns, even if this leads to some contradictory policy proposals in areas such as housebuilding, at the national level they will focus on two policies: tackling sewage and reducing NHS waiting lists.
The anti-immigration Reform party has pledged to have candidates in every constituency in England, Scotland and Wales this year. Currently averaging about 9 per cent in opinion polls, the group is threatening to eat into the Conservative’s 2019 vote share.
Reform leader Richard Tice will stand in Tory-held Hartlepool in the north-east of England and the party will focus predominantly on red wall areas. It will also target Tory strongholds on the south-east coast where the arrival of small boats carrying migrants is a salient issue.
The party has selected nearly 500 candidates and maintains it will not enter into an election pact or step aside in Conservative seats as it did in 2019.
Though Reform has garnered media attention, much of the focus has been on whether former leader Nigel Farage will make a return with the party in this year’s election.
