OPINION - Forget Rishi Sunak launching the Tory manifesto, he is making a deeper strategic shift

The Conservative campaign, as Rishi Sunak said several times in his BBC interview last night, “is about the future”. Spoiler alert: no one needs a soothsayer to predict that. The only question is the size of Labour’s majority and scale of the Tory wipe-out. So the Conservative campaign is switching rapidly into defensive mode, reinforcing formerly safe seats with visits from senior ministers, as the prospect of falling below 200 seats in Parliament haunts despairing tacticians.

Both Sunak and a Conservative social media onslaught this week are tacitly acknowledging the wooden spoon prize on July 4 is to limit the size of the Starmer majority and the impact of Nigel Farage’s Reform. A vote for anyone who’s not a Conservative candidate is just making it more likely that Sir Keir Starmer will become prime minister, was Sunak’s thrust last night — a “poison pill” argument.

That assumes that Reform-inclined folk dislike Sir Keir more than they hold the present Government in contempt. But, like many of the “ultra” supporters voting for Right-wing parties with gusto across Europe in EU parliamentary elections, they are often as driven by punishing the Tory Government they feel has failed to be hardline enough on immigration, crime, “wokery” and quitting the ECHR, as they are by keeping Labour out.

One problem Conservative central office has to resolve in the coming week is that the campaign has looked ill-organised from the off, resulting in avoidable accidents like the D-Day debacle and party chairman Richard Holden’s monstering on Sky News over being parachuted into a Southern safe seat from the North-East.

Nil desperandum — or maybe just a bit less desperandum: the message from Isaac Levido, the unflappable chief strategist, to demoralised campaign teams on Monday was that manifesto week offers a reset, with a range of tax cuts totalling £13 billion being announced today for “earners, parents and pensioners”, as well as a cut in national insurance, which Chancellor Jeremy Hunt was unwilling to sign off on at the last Budget. Somehow, the sums have been forced to add up, as sums often do in the fuzzy maths of an election campaign.

Sunak is expected to unveil plans for another 2p cut to national insurance as the PM channels the legacy of the Thatcher/Lawson years, when a clear distinction from Labour on tax gave the Conservatives the edge on that — and home ownership. So the aborted “help to buy” plan will be dusted down — but best tested up against the reality that until more houses are built, prices will remain unaffordably high in the South-East and there is a vast shortage of property under the £400,000 threshold of the scheme. Landlords will be incentivised towards longer lets, a belated recognition by Tory policy-makers that appeal needs to extend beyond homeowners to “generation rent”, which often extends well into the mid to late-30s in and around London.

The manifesto Rubicon is also a chance for the parties to chuck out policies that could be liabilities. Labour has been pressed hard on the affordability of its spending plans and senses a weakness here, so a new gambit tried out by the shadow paymaster general Jonathan Ashworth yesterday is simply to ask the question back: Labour’s sums are fantastical, then something similar must also be a problem for Sunak’s tax cuts and NHS investment package too. The wise viewer might conclude, like Kaa, the astute snake in The Jungle Book movie, that you “can’t trust anyone” on this matter.

There is one thin crumb of comfort for Tories, namely that Sir Keir is now so likely to be the next prime minister, that he also has a large target on his back. Levido’s recipe tends to default to familiar themes, hence the latest social media messaging from Sunak on “criminals [who]… should be shown no mercy” and a hastily convened commitment to raise police numbers. Tory aides believe Sir Keir’s anecdotes about being director of public prosecutions are too convoluted to cut the mustard as establishing, as one puts it, “a Lefty human rights lawyer as the Terminator”.

So Sunak will narrow his focus on luring older and more prosperous voters back from flirtation with Labour on “safety first grounds” on tax — and appeal to the folk memory of Thatcher-era Conservatives as being tougher on violent crime, an issue which is rising in voters’ concerns. It’s a traditional salad at a threadbare feast: but the best ingredients the chefs in Sunak’s kitchen cabinet have left.

Anne McElvoy is an Evening Standard columnist and hosts the Power Play podcast for Politico