Labour enters the last few days of campaigning with optimism - but fears are creeping in over complacency
1 July 2024, 22:38
One of the first sights that confronted me as I stepped onto Labour’s battle bus at 7am was Rishi Sunak’s face on a pillow. Alongside him were the words: “Don’t wake up to five more years of the Tories.”
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Every journalist on the bus was gifted one of these slightly scratchy pillows by Steve Reed, who will be running the Environment Department by the end of the week, if the polls are to be believed.
The gimmick was revealing for two reasons. Number one: Labour is genuinely worried about complacency. Number two: the Labour campaign are all in a pretty good mood.
On my day out with Keir Starmer’s campaign bus, we travelled to Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. Stopping off at a football club, a pub garden and a barn.
One constituency borders David Cameron’s old seat of Witney. Another has been Tory since 1974. And the third holds a Tory majority not far off 20,000.
All three of Starmer’s destinations are true blue Tory heartland seats.
Even a Labour candidate couldn’t quite believe his eyes, remarking as he introduced his leader that he would never have believed this seat would be in contention.
Starmer, though, boasted: “There are no ‘no-go’ areas.”
“I want to come to places like this, places that we wouldn’t normally win because I think it’s important we see the task of earning every vote as one that is across the whole of the country.”
He added: “I haven’t in any constituency, this one included yet, encountered anybody whose response to me has been ‘things are pretty good, I really like it, I just want more of this’.”
However, the scars of four previous general election defeats are seared into the memories of Labour campaigners. As one aide put it to me: “The mood is good but we are not being complacent. We have been burned so many times by Labour losing that no one is counting their chickens.”
Despite their immovable poll lead, party strategists are genuinely concerned that voters may not turn out for them on the day. On the one hand, they point to voters taken in by Tory warnings of a super majority.
On the other, they say they speak to voters who plan to stay at home or vote for a smaller party, because they think Labour will win regardless.
I haven’t found anyone who thinks Keir Starmer won’t be Prime Minister, but I have picked up fears about the size of his majority, even suggestions that there could be a hung parliament.
So for the next few days - we will hear countless repetitions from Labour that “if you want change, you have to vote for it”.
One other thing I noticed today was how often Starmer said, with a smile on his face, that Labour’s is a positive campaign - a shift in emphasis from criticising his opponents.
I’m told it was always the plan to go into the last few days with an optimistic finish.
To try and pitch himself as a clean break from what Labour call the “downbeat” Conservative campaign and government.
With three days to go, let’s see if the smile lasts.
