Good morning. At Kettering Buccleuch Academy yesterday, Keir Starmer fielded questions on whether Arsenal will win the league (yes), his favourite subject at school (music), and whether he owns a pet (he has a cat called Jojo). He made a gaggle of high school students laugh at his avuncular anecdotes and advice – which is no mean feat. His promise to hire more dentists even prompted spontaneous applause from one enthusiastic sixth former.
Starmer is improving as a politician. That is not necessarily a compliment. But it is helpful for Labour during a general election. Nonetheless, his appearance at the school yesterday masked an uncomfortable truth about this campaign.
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Ten minutes’ drive from the school, in the Northamptonshire village of Geddington, Rosie Wrighting, a 26-year-old former Asos buyer who wears Adidas Sambas and is standing for Labour, was knocking on doors in this Tory-held seat. Geddington sits within the Kettering constituency, a semi-rural marginal that has been Conservative since 2005. The polls suggest it’s a close race between Wrighting and the incumbent, Philip Hollobone. In 1997, Labour won it by 189 votes.
Geddington is a Hot Fuzz-esque model village where the vicarage actually contains a vicar. King Edward I used to hunt in the area, and erected a stone monument to his dead wife outside the Star Inn. Beside one front door, rhubarb reached up to a thatched roof. This is not your traditional Labour seat. Wrighting compared notes about the village fete with residents. “I need to feed [the kids] and get them to a cricket match,” one hurried, undecided mum told the canvassers.
Some in Geddington have voted Tory all their lives. But, Wrighting told me, “there is apathy here”. Most residents we spoke to won’t be voting Tory again. But the alternatives don’t inspire them. One man confided in me that although he was “fearlessly liberal” he thought the local school was turning his kids into weak automatons. “And I’m the one who will have to spend time with them!” He wanted low taxes for small businesses, and LGBTQ rights for all. When I asked him to describe Starmer in a word, he paused, grimaced and said: “not negative”.
The picture was different in the kebab-shop-strewn town centre of Kettering. Shirtless kids rode around on electric scooters. One 16-year-old barista in a coffee shop was unenthused about Labour’s plans to lower the voting age. A few people I spoke to on the high street said they wouldn’t vote because the politicians had failed. They were angry even to be asked. A former nurse, who watches GB News every day with her husband, is leaning towards Reform. She’s not a “racialist”, she assured me, but she didn’t like the number of Turkish shops in Kettering.
While Starmer was taking questions in the school and the canvassers in Geddington were incanting that Labour had “changed”, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) released a withering appraisal of the shallowness and dishonesty with which both parties were courting the public. Paul Johnson, the IFS director, said the refusal to engage with the need to cut taxes or raise spending in the short term means people will vote into a “knowledge vacuum” next Thursday, adding “as the population ages these choices will become harder, not easier”.
Labour claims economic growth will solve all its problems. But the risk here is that should the party be forced to raise taxes or cut spending – or if it fails to rebuild the country in the way it has promised – then it will drive people into the arms of Reform. At the same time, all those Tory voters who “lend” their votes to Labour – as many Labour voters did for Boris Johnson in 2019 – will grow angrier and more disillusioned. Labour is poised to win countless Tory seats, where people will expect something for their vote. And if Labour wants to keep its promises not to raise taxes, as Wrighting promised on the doorstep, then public services could take the hit. The backlash would be swift and painful. In Kettering and Geddington lies the crux of Labour’s problem.
Freddie’s picks
Katie looks at the broader consequences of the Dagestan terror attacks.
David Gauke is sceptical that Nigel Farage will take over the Tory party.
Nick reviews an inconsequential, if unnerving, appearance from Sunak and Starmer at the Sun last night.
Paul Johnson analyses the parties’ manifestos (Institute for Fiscal Studies).
Mailshot
NYT: Assange arranges to plead guilty in exchange for release
Reuters: Trump handed plan to halt US-Ukraine aid unless it talks peace with Russia
Guardian: Afghan girls accuse Taliban of sexual assaults after arrests for “bad hijab”
FT: How the Conservatives lost touch with England’s prosperous south
Caitlin Flanagan: The greatest speeches of all time, and what Biden said
Daniel Yergin: Trump may have a petrol problem
Anne Applebaum: Tabloid methods won’t work in Washington
Tejal Rao: Why do we love The Bear so much?
Charles McElwee: A reading life
Ben’s take
When I do charts like these I like to send them to my friends and ask what their main impressions are. What do they come away thinking? One of my friends summarised it correctly: there’s no correlation.
Where is the Prime Minister campaigning? Safe seat, marginal seat and long-shot seat. He is going all over, all out, attending events and knocking on doors in the super-safe and the super-marginal. This weekend, Sunak visited my neighbouring seat of Chester South and Eddisbury. Rock-solid Conservative in 2019, the polls now point to it being decided on a coin toss. And flanked by a smattering of Conservative activists pulled in from neighbouring seats, plus the local councillor, the PM hovered in the village of Malpas and spoke with voters for 30 minutes before being whisked away by police escort, no doubt up to his Richmond seat in Yorkshire.
There is no correlation to where the PM is going. And counter-intuitively that might imply there is no takeaway to be had from this data. But the takeaway is this: everywhere is under threat. The polls look right. And it’s all hands on deck to save even the safest of Conservative shire seats.
And with that…
Let me know what you think about today’s Morning Call by hitting reply.
My thanks to George Monaghan, Barney Horner and Ben Walker.
Have a great day,
Freddie — @freddiejh8
If Rishi had a police escort, they were probably going to a betting shop - to bet on the Labour majority.
Great 👍 stuff