On 13 December 2019, the morning after Boris Johnson’s landslide, an historic fifth term in office for the Conservatives seemed all but assured. You could probably have counted the number of people who really thought Labour could return to government in a single parliament on the fingers of your third hand.

Today, Sir Keir Starmer’s path to Downing Street looks almost equally assured. Boris Johnson’s premiership collapsed last summer, having squandered its political capital on a string of self-inflicted scandals. Liz Truss’s kamikaze sprint for tax cuts somehow went even more badly.

Far from improving, their poll situation could get a lot worse

Meanwhile developments in Scotland, where Nicola Sturgeon has passed the torch to the hapless Humza Yousaf and since been arrested by the police, has triggered a slump in Nationalist support that could bring dozens of Labour’s former strongholds back into play.
Rishi Sunak, meanwhile, became leader of his party in perhaps the weakest personal position in modern history, defaulting into office when Truss imploded and in the process abandoning most of the stall he set out to the membership the first time round. So vital was it to reassure the markets that the grown-ups were back in charge that he didn’t even appoint his own chancellor.

As a result, nobody feels they have committed themselves to Sunakism, whatever that might be. He was elevated with one mission: to turn the polls around and win the next election. But can he? The auguries aren’t good.

Some Conservative MPs like to talk about the polls in terms of a mid-term slump. But “mid-term” is stretching it when the party has been in office for 13 years (as long as New Labour ever got). And while governments do tend to recover somewhat before an election, that past is not an indicator of future returns.

Things could very well get worse. Inflation, which corrodes the buying power of household incomes and departmental budgets, shows no sign yet of going away. In order to combat it, the Government is having to pick unpopular battles with popular public-sector workers in the NHS.

Worse, the Bank of England’s contribution — hiking interest rates — risks striking a really dangerous blow against the Conservative coalition. Every month, hundreds of thousands of households reach the end of their fixed-term mortgages and have to renegotiate, locking in much higher monthly payments for years to come.

A cold-blooded strategy might therefore be to concentrate resources on the so-called Blue Wall

Some Tory strategists recognise the danger that, far from improving, their poll situation could get a lot worse. Thus, the recent chatter about going to the polls this year, before the mortgage crisis really starts to bite. Doing so, of course, would mean losing the extra year for the polls to recover.

All of which suggests that a prudent strategy for the Conservatives would be to plan for defeat. And the Government, arguably, is doing just that. When Jeremy Hunt postponed £30 billion of spending cuts to 2025/26, that was not the action of a chancellor who expected to be the one who had to make them.

But at a political level, it is much harder to do. No political leader can admit that defeat is likely without weakening their own position; Sunak is in an especially tricky spot because his leadership lacks any broader ideological mandate or purpose than winning.

Even if CCHQ did explicitly pivot to a purely defensive strategy, there’s then the thorny question of geography. How bad an election can the Party admit it is expecting? How far back do they dig the trenches? Which regions do they focus on?

One especially sensitive area will be the Red Wall, those once-safe Labour seats that flipped to the Conservatives in 2019. Addressing the annual conference of the Northern Research Group of Tory MPs a couple of weeks ago, the Prime Minister told the hall that any path to another election victory ran through their seats.

That may be so. But if victory is not a realistic prospect, what then? On current polling, the Conservatives would lose nearly all of them. A cold-blooded strategy might therefore be to concentrate resources on the so-called Blue Wall, historically safe Tory seats in the South which are now vulnerable to Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

Yet with a fragile majority and restive backbenchers, Sunak can’t afford to simply abandon his party’s northern defences. Nor does he show any sign of doing so: his focus on illegal Channel crossings and stoppinfg the boats is aimed squarely at those voters.

Sticking to his guns like that is a high-risk approach. As Dr Patrick English of YouGov noted on the ConservativeHome website, the Conservatives are acutely vulnerable in much of the South. Despite the UK’s ageing population, the Blue Wall is trending younger (and less Tory), as workers who have been priced out of London spill out into the leafy shires of the Tory heartland.

If the Prime Minister can’t cut through to those millions of voters who backed Johnson in 2019 — and the polls don’t suggest he is managing it so far — his strategy risks falling between two stools, committing to a doomed campaign in indefensible territory whilst neglecting urgent, winnable battles closer to home.