Open Road

Wednesday May 20th 2009

Hello. I am from the Conservative party

“You must be kidding.” No, really. “Well, if you were Labour I would throw you off my property.”

It’s more fun than usual on the doorsteps these days. What are the lessons? Non-voter numbers are soaring. Two types of people are determined to vote: those who don’t want Labour to get in again and those who don’t want the BNP to do well.

Gordon Brown waited for something to turn up, and unfortunately it has. Positive messages are unlikely to galvanise the electorate now. Labour’s only hope now is to create fear, partly of the BNP, but that will be a small factor in a General Election. If Labour is to have a 1992 style victory it is going to have to mobilise those deep wells of Tory hate that still exist. The problem is that there aren’t enough of these in the key marginals any more.

Calm, decisive Dave is winning the air war and the punters are likely to create a great deal of Labour activity attrition in the ground war. My prediction: Tory activists are going to be round the streets every week for a year. Labour activists will crawl out of their dugouts in May 2010 to meet a public bemused by shots of Black Wednesday on the TV.  If they are lucky the voters will be feeling sorry for them. If nothing else has “turned up.”