There is a board game politicians play which is neither Snakes and Ladders nor Risk or, as the unkind might imagine, Trivial Pursuit. It’s called Expectation Management.
The board comes out at election time, and the rules of the game are to deliberately underestimate your party’s result so that when it is better, or at least no worse, than the prediction, a stunning victory or minimal damage can be claimed.
Reform put it about that they would be delighted with 1,000 gains. Veteran pollster Peter Kellner says any fewer than 1,700 would be bad and just 1,400 the pits.
Labour has priced in 1,500 losses and losing Wales, which would be diabolical usually, but only if they are down 2,000 seats will MPs and activists consider it truly awful.
At the time of writing, awful was on the horizon. Labour lost Hartlepool and when that happened in 2021 Keir Starmer considered resigning.
The town’s Labour MP, Jonathan Brash, has already demanded on GB News that he do so again. But the PM remained defiant. “I’m not going to walk away,” he said.
But voters walked away from Labour in droves. In Tameside, Greater Manchester, Angela Rayner’s backyard, Labour lost 16 of the 17 seats it was defending to Reform.
In Cabinet minister Lisa Nandy’s Wigan seat, all 22 Labour council places went to Reform. These are Labour heartlands which have lost heart in this government.
The Tories are also going backwards and losing control of true-blue Hampshire, which will hurt. The Greens and Lib Dems are doing ok, but Nigel Farage’s Reform is clearly emerging as the big winner today.
Labour’s popularity is now akin to an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz | Getty Images
These elections are like the American midterms. A definitive verdict by the voters on the performance of this government in its first two years and a pointer towards the nationwide poll in either 2028 or 2029.
Mr Farage chose to stand outside Havering Town Hall, now under Reform control, to declare: “The best is yet to come.” He can now realistically dream of making a similar speech outside No10.
Labour’s popularity is like an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz. All at sea and tough to turn round, especially while enemies keep firing rockets at you.
Once the narrative of making mistakes takes hold, it is difficult to reverse, and Keir Starmer set this story running from the start with freebie clothes and snaffling pensioners’ winter fuel payments.
What on earth was he thinking? The golden rules of politics are not taking stuff you haven’t paid for and never messing with the elderly.
He should have bought his own clobber and got only richer pensioners to pay back winter allowances in tax, which is what he eventually did.
But the narrative for getting it wrong meant that the many things Labour got right such us e nding fire and rehire and zero hours contracts, banning no-fault evictions and lifting the two-child benefit cap got lost in all the negative noise.
The Tories are ruthless about getting rid of their leaders, and if Mr Starmer were one of them, he’d be collecting his P45.
But what Labour is best at is inertia, and that may allow him to keep his job. Only if Cabinet ministers get together and tell him to go will he be likely to fall.
It will not be until tomorrow when all the votes are counted that Keir Starmer can finally assess just how perilous his position is.
And he may yet need to rummage around for another board game – the one containing a Get Out of Jail Free card.