Sunak is spinning hopes of a hung parliament – but it won’t work this time

Rishi Sunak is clutching at the thinnest of straws in claiming the results of last Thursday’s local elections point to a hung parliament.

After disastrous results for the Conservatives, the prime minister needed all the ammunition he could get, and gratefully received some from a Sky News projection of the “national equivalent vote” showing Labour would be 32 seats short of an overall majority if the local results were repeated at the general election.

Sunak’s message is in part intended to help the Tories keep their flagging spirits up. If his party thinks it has an outside chance of preventing a Labour majority, it might postpone its ideological battle over the Tories’ future direction until after the election.

The PM’s main reason is to replay one of his party’s greatest hits: warning voters that not backing the Tories would result in a Labour-led “coalition of chaos”.

Sunak told The Times: “These results suggest we are heading for a hung parliament with Labour as the largest party. Keir Starmer propped up in Downing Street by the SNP, Liberal Democrats and the Greens would be a disaster for Britain. The country doesn’t need more political horse trading, but action. We are the only party that has a plan to deliver on the priorities of the people.”

The tactic worked at the 2015 election, when David Cameron, ironically after five years in coalition with the Lib Dems, warned that a minority Labour government headed by Ed Miliband would be “put into power” by the SNP. Tory adverts portrayed Miliband in the jacket pocket of Alex Salmond, the former SNP leader, claiming Salmond would “call the tune”.

To Labour’s intense frustration, the media lapped up the story. As Miliband admitted to me later, Labour was slow to realise the potency of the Tory attack. Cameron won a majority.

Labour still bears the scars from 2015 and is unlikely to repeat its mistake. “No coalitions, no pacts” has been the message under Starmer. Pat McFadden, the party’s campaign coordinator, rejected the idea of a post-election deal with the SNP with a simple “no” at the weekend, though SNP figures claim Labour is less emphatic in private.

Sunak’s ploy is less likely to work this time because Starmer is in a stronger position than Miliband was. While voters might not love Starmer in the way they admired Tony Blair – I think the local elections point to a comfortable Labour majority rather than a 1997-style landslide – people believe Starmer has changed his party and trust it on the economy. They were not so sure about Miliband.

The Tory message is also less credible today given the chaos in the SNP. Salmond was an established, strong figure. John Swinney, confirmed today as the SNP’s new leader, is not as well known outside Scotland.

Sunak’s move is built on a very wobbly base. In 2015, the two main parties ended the campaign neck and neck in the opinion polls, but today Labour enjoys a consistent 20-point lead.

But, as my colleague John Rentoul has argued, the Sky study is in the “just a bit of fun” category of psephology because many people vote differently at local and general elections. It was noticeable that John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University, who calculated a “projected national share of the vote” for the BBC, did not translate his figures into Commons seats.

“We did feel maybe it wasn’t necessarily the most reliable piece of information,” he said today.

The Sky projection assumed Labour would have only its current one MP in Scotland, where no elections were held last week. The latest opinion polls suggest Labour will be the largest party north of the border with 28 MPs. Sky also probably underestimated the general election impact of Reform UK, the successor to Ukip, which contested only one in six council seats.

The “coalition of chaos” line might strike a chord with some potential Tory voters if the polling gap closes, though the Tories hoped that would happen at the turn of the year and there is still no sign of it.

One unintended consequence of Sunak’s warning might be to underline Starmer’s message to his party to avoid complacency. Talk of a hung parliament might encourage people who voted Green or Lib Dem in the local contests to back Labour at the general election to “get the Tories out”.

Ironically, before the Sky analysis threw the Tories a fraying lifeline, Sunak’s party was drawing up a plan to warn wavering 2019 Tory voters: “Don’t let them [Labour] get a landslide.” The Tories have suddenly changed their tune.

Their original plan was based on a more accurate reading of the public mood – and, unfortunately for Sunak, reveals what most Tory MPs really think about their party’s election prospects.