Rishi Sunak is pinning his hopes of an election victory this year on the 23 per cent of “don’t knows”. These are people who voted Conservative in 2019 but are unsure about doing it again.
It might help the undecideds make up their minds by setting a little test. This was originally devised by American economic psychologists and suggests whether your politics are towards the left or the right.
A hardware store buys shovels for £10 and sells them for £15. The owners are happy with their £5 profit margin. But when a heavy snowfall comes they put the price up to £20. Is that fair?
I’ve tried this out on both Tory and Labour MPs. The Tories say it's down to supply and demand and in a free market such a price hike is reasonable. Labour MPs tend to condemn it as excessive profiteering and say it should not happen.
Rishi Sunak is pinning his hopes of an election victory on undecided voters
PA
There you are. Fair or unfair? Now you have some idea where you should place your cross on the ballot paper when polling day comes.
I have not been able to try this on Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho, but she appears to be a closet Labour voter if her comments are anything to go by.
The Government is considering dropping the “boiler tax” they planned to introduce in April which would see manufacturers fined £3,000 for each heat pump they failed to sell under green installation targets designed to replace 600,000 environmentally unfriendly devices by 2028.
Some have increased the prices of their existing products by up to £120 to pass the cost of these fines onto customers, a practice Ms Coutinho branded as “price gouging.’ Just like those £20 shovels.
Talking of shovels, Keir Starmer is in search of his own ace of spades. He needs a Tony Blair style swing to Labour to be sure of being prime minister, and he is clearly getting help from some New Labour old hands.
I spotted Peter Mandelson gliding through the Commons the other day when his place is in the House of Lords. And Blair’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, appeared, somewhat furtively I thought, from the direction of the Labour leader’s suite of offices.
The advice they need to give Starmer is how to come up with some eye-catching polices which don’t cost any money. Blair had a ban on fox hunting, independence for the Bank of England and abolishing hereditary peers up his sleeve.
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Sir Keir Starmer is in search of his own ace of spades
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A point eloquently made by former Europe minister Denis MacShane, whose diaries of this period, 'Labour Takes Power', have just been published.
Blair also had his 1997 pledge card, five promises on a slip of cardboard no bigger than a credit card with which he asked the electorate to judge him in his first term.
They looked more ambitious than they really were, so meeting the targets was not too onerous but it was a good wheeze.
There would be class sizes of under 30 for five to seven-year-olds, fast track punishment for young offenders to halve the time from arrest to sentence, and cutting NHS waiting lists by 100,000, a sizeable figure then but a drop in the ocean now with nearly eight million people unable to get their ops.
Blair also said he would get 250,000 under 25s off benefits and into work and gave a commitment to low inflation and a strong economy. Vague though this last one was, he did manage to keep national debt below 40 per cent compared to 98 per cent now. No wonder he was able to go on to win a second and third term in office.
Sunak has been encouraged by pollsters YouGov who say that while only four in 10 voters who backed the Tories in 2019 still would, the "don't knows" are uncertain over jumping ship to Labour.
The one in 10 who are now sure they will go over to Keir Starmer’s camp falls short of the 16 per cent who defected to Tony Blair in 1997 - which means Starmer has a lot more persuading to do.
YouGov identified the undecideds as tending “to be female, around retirement age, homeowners (without mortgages), and more prominent in the South of England.”
Not a great demographic for the Labour leader. As these voters already own their own homes they are not going to be swayed by promises of building more affordable ones, one of Labour’s flagship policies.
Nor, without mortgages, are they excessively troubled by high interest rates. And if they’re savers they will welcome them.
If Starmer drops his pledge to spend £28billion on a green industrial revolution to create 500,000 new jobs, as seems increasingly likely, it will leave a huge hole in his economic growth plans.
He will need to shovel in some fresh ideas to fill it to win over those crucial “don’t knows”. And Sunak is banking on him not being able to do it.
It means Tory hopes of electoral triumph are not quite less than a cat’s chance in hell.
But with Labour consistently sitting on a lead of 20 plus points in the polls, it will have to be a particularly robust cat in a hell with a very temperate climate.