What does Labour’s poll boost tell us about their election hopes?

The sleaze scandal looks to have chipped away at Tory support – but Keir Starmer and the Labour Party still face numerous obstacles to forming a one-party government, writes Sean O’Grady

Starmer has seen the Tories lurch from crisis to crisis in recent weeks (Reuters TV)

As with the economy and the statistics on health, a combination of Covid and Brexit have created freakish conditions in recent years, rendering the usual measures of success or failure pretty useless. The sharpest recession on record and the greatest public health emergency in a century combined to create a kind of fog around the recent past, let alone the present and future. Much the same goes for opinion polls and even the election results in recent years, such as the radically different 2017 and 2019 general elections, where the older, traditional issues have been overlaid since by Brexit, more latterly Covid, and various “culture wars”. The old concept of a centre ground in politics gave way to an era of polarisation. As the Conservatives secured a larger share of the “working class” vote than Labour, many old assumptions have had to be re-examined.

Now, though the baleful effects of Brexit will be felt for decades and the pandemic is far from over, there are grounds to think a more normal pattern of politics is perhaps reasserting itself. A little. That is certainly the view of a chap named Isaac Levido, who has been advising the Conservatives about psephology since the 2019 election. He recently briefed the cabinet on current trends, and offered the view that Covid was as if a freak wave had indeed passed across the political ocean bed, but which has now passed. The downsides of the Cummings and Hancock scandals, the high death rates and the upside of the vaccine rollout have faded, and old fashioned concerns are starting to worry the voters once again – inflation, jobs, and public services. No doubt sleaze and incompetence doesn’t impress anyone, and the prime minister’s personal ratings have declined, but the most salient issues are decades old. That said, the recent tragic deaths of people in the English Channel and media coverage of migration will also push the issue up the agenda.

As to the polls themselves, the sleaze scandal does seem to have nudged public opinion and made politics between the two main parties more competitive, with some modest Labour leads recorded on the way to a more even showing, with each party around the mid-30s.