Think Sunak’s finished? Here’s how he thinks he can take the fight to Starmer

Work on the Conservative manifesto is “more developed than anyone realises”, according to sources speaking to Katy Balls, The Spectator’s well-informed political editor.

This may be spin intended to counter recent reports that the government had been so distracted by firefighting that no one had given any thought to what the Tories might offer at the election.

But Balls’s sources did provide the names of ministers who are supposedly working on the document – Oliver Dowden, Michael Gove, Claire Coutinho and James Cleverly – and the special adviser in charge, James Nation, deputy head of the No 10 policy unit. They also said that the main themes of the manifesto are to go “very big” on tax and – even less surprisingly – to “focus on policy areas where they view Labour to be weak”.

It is not hard to work out what some of these policy areas might be. One of them came up in Keir Starmer’s interview with Jeremy Vine this morning. The Labour leader didn’t want to talk about Europe in any detail, being much happier to wrap himself in the mantle of Tony Blair – to whom he talks “a lot”, he said, on the day Owen Jones announced that he had left the Labour Party. But when Vine put it to Starmer that he wanted Britain to be “closer” to the EU without rejoining, he drew out a definite “Yes”.

Given that the median voter doesn’t think Brexit has been handled well, and tends to think that cooperation with our neighbours is better than conflict, it is not obvious how useful Europe will be to the Tories as an election issue, but they have to use whatever material is to hand.

Tax cuts are a more obvious battleground. I understand that Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, feels that Jeremy Hunt has now been pushed by the prime minister into another “fiscal event” in September – in that it would be difficult for the chancellor to announce that what will be in effect the third Budget this year will not go ahead. “They have let expectations management run away with them,” says a Labour official.

Reeves expects a further cut to national insurance, either to take effect before the election or as a promise for afterwards – daring Labour to match the pledge. Spoiler alert: do not read on if you do not want to know what will happen next. Reeves will match any promise the Tories make. So far, she has resolutely refused to fall into the rather obvious Tory trap of opposing tax cuts, no matter how fiscally irresponsible they are.

There was, admittedly, a glitch last week when Labour MPs failed to vote for the national insurance cut that had been announced in the Budget, after James Murray, the shadow Treasury minister, said in the Commons: “The official opposition will support the national insurance reductions before us.” I am told that Labour was taken by surprise when the Scottish National Party forced a division, as Labour were expecting the measure to go through unopposed, but they should still have voted for it. The Conservatives tried a social media campaign, proclaiming “Labour fail to support tax cuts”, but it didn’t seem to engage anyone’s gears.

Even so, tax cuts could work in an election campaign, not because of any big difference of policy between the main parties, but because the voters know that the Tories cut taxes when a Labour government would not have done, and that this will apply in the future too. It is a classic “shy Tory” issue, that might even work with under-50s, among whom open support for the Tories is as fashionable as Zimmer frames.

The third manifesto issue is Rwanda. Many Tory MPs who believed the prime minister when he described the bill to declare Rwanda a safe country for the purpose of removing asylum seekers as “emergency” legislation are baffled by the slowest game of ping-pong ever. After last night’s Lords’ reversal of the Commons’ reversal of the Lords’ amendments, it now seems that the bill will not be coming back to the Commons until 15 April, after the Easter recess.

I am told that this is partly because the Home Office is not yet ready to put any asylum seekers on planes to Kigali. A plane with a crew willing to fly it has not even been identified yet.

But the cynic might observe that, if the government is going to succeed in getting flights off to Rwanda, it is in its interest to wait until just before the election. Then the party can cut through any arguments about whether the policy will succeed in deterring small boats from crossing the Channel.

Starmer repeated his line to Vine today: “Rwanda is a gimmick, and it’s a gimmick that’s not going to work.” His argument is a plausible one: “There’s only 300 people that are going to go and 130,000 people in the system.” A tiny chance of ending up in Rwanda is not going to put people off coming across the Channel.

But if the flights have only just started by the time of the election, it will be too early to say whether or not they are having a deterrent effect. Sunak could argue that once the numbers start to grow, it really will discourage the small boats.

That is the Tory manifesto, then: Tax cuts, Rwanda and Labour will take us back into the EU. Is Labour ready?