Is Labour ready for a general election – and for power?

Labour ought to be ready for the election. It is already more than four-and-a-half years since the last one. Keir Starmer bravely insists that he is ready. Labour officials say that the manifesto is ready to be printed, which it may be – but there are quite a few loose threads that the party thought it had more time to sort out.

This is hardly surprising, considering the huge change in the party that has happened in that time, from Starmer’s election on a Corbyn-lite programme, to something close to full-throttle New Labour.

Indeed, the Labour leader is currently in the middle of a series of meetings with trade union leaders to discuss the finer points of the party’s employment rights policy. There are many in the leader’s office who think that the work of revision is not finished, which could set the scene for a fractious meeting of party and union bigwigs to agree to the manifesto.

I am told that Starmer had no idea that the election announcement was coming, until the speculation started to run out of control this morning. But he looked confident enough, and ready to swap places with Rishi Sunak at Prime Minister’s Questions today. He even crossed the floor before the session started to shake Craig Mackinlay’s bionic hand when the Conservative MP, who has had a quadruple amputation, took his seat on the government side. It was a generous gesture that borrowed some of Mackinlay’s limelight.

Perhaps Starmer is hoping that some of Mackinlay’s fighting spirit will rub off on him: the Conservative MP for Thanet South plans to stand in the election, and says he hopes his recovery has shown his constituents he has the qualities needed to continue representing them.

Starmer’s personal opinion-poll rating has risen in recent months, while Sunak’s has been falling. Indeed, almost the only good reason for Sunak to call the election now is that “Things Can Only Get Worse”, which was not what D:Ream sang.

Calling an election before everyone expected is about the last card that Sunak can play. One of the few levers that a prime minister has is control over the date of an election – a power that was restored to No 10 when the Fixed-term Parliaments Act was repealed two years ago. The longer that Sunak didn’t call an election, however, the less important that power became, as he became increasingly boxed into a few dates in October, November or December.

He did not want to be trapped as Gordon Brown was, after he failed to go for the “election that never was”, or James Callaghan, who always regretted teasing the Trades Union Congress in 1978, telling them he would not hold an election that autumn by singing “My Wife Won’t Let Me”.

Sunak has defied most people’s expectations. I certainly assumed that he would want to be prime minister for as long as possible, and that he would, in particular, want to be prime minister for at least two years, which would take him to 25 October. If he had lasted that long, he would have overtaken Anthony Eden in the league table of shortest-serving prime ministers.

So he has succeeded in taking Labour by surprise – but it is hardly a knockout blow. Labour may not be completely ready, but it will be, more or less, by tomorrow morning.

And the advantage for Labour of going early is that it puts an end to the growing complacency induced by 20-point poll leads stretching for the whole of the past year. Just by coincidence, a new analysis of the true size of Labour’s lead was published today by James Kanagasooriam, the analyst who first identified the “red wall” seats that were the key to understanding the 2019 election.

He used this month’s local elections to suggest that Labour’s popular vote is “much lower than national polling estimates”, and is probably around 12 points. However, assuming no big shift in public opinion, he concludes: “We believe Labour is still on course for a large parliamentary majority, thanks in large part to the highly efficient nature of the party’s current vote distribution. We estimate that Labour needs a 5-7 per cent vote-share lead to win.”

Will Labour’s lead shrink that much? It doesn’t seem likely.