I spoke to a member of a vanishing breed: a seasoned Conservative MP and former member of the Cabinet who still thinks the Tories have a decent chance of winning the 2024 general election. Having survived the second reading of his Rwanda migration Bill, he said, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak might be close to an historic turning point when the fortunes of his party might be about to improve, rather than decline still further.
“If he gets the Bill through both Houses in early January, you might just see the first migrant flights to Rwanda by early spring,” he said.
“Then would come a budget where the Chancellor could find himself with an extra £35 billion to spend and spend it he will.
“You’re talking to someone who’s fought more elections than you’ve had hot dinners. I can remember 1986, when we lost a real heavyweight, Michael Heseltine, and Thatcher’s ratings were through the floor. We went on to win a 102-seat majority the following year.
“I also remember 1992, when everyone was certain we would lose and we piled up the biggest popular vote on record. The problem with a lot of my colleagues now is that they just don’t know how to fight.”
I remember the 1987 and 1992 elections too and that of 2017, when Theresa May to be heading for a landslide victory.
So any assessment of the road ahead in what is almost certain to be a general election year (technically and legally, Sunak could hold out until January 2025) needs to come with stringent caveats.
Current polling does strongly point to a convincing, maybe overwhelming, Labour win. Most surveys have put Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour some 20 points ahead for many months. It also now seems inevitable that the party will reap a substantial of seats in Scotland where in the last three elections has been a Labour black hole.
Other Tories I know seem preoccupied with their party’s future after a defeat. On the right, there is talk of a “wipeout” a Labour victory even bigger than the 179-seat majority won by Tony Blair in 1997.
Some claim that the chances of the Tories winning have become so vanishingly small that their best hope is to get rid of Sunak early next year by defeating the Rwanda Bill when it comes back for its Third Reading, even though this would mean installing a fourth PM since 2019.
Under a more right-wing leader, they argue, defeat would still be inevitable, but if she and the two names they mention here are both women, Trade and Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch and former home secretary Suella Braverman, the present seepage of support to the hard-right Reform Party would stop, allowing the Tory vote to rise as high as 35 per cent.
This, they suggest, would give the Conservatives a realistic chance of limiting Starmer’s premiership to one term.
A big unknown factor for 2024 is the performance of the Liberal Democrats. Recent polling has suggested they are nowhere close to lift-off from their current 11 per cent vote share, although they have done well in by-elections, especially in the South.
On current form, they may well increase their tally of 15 MPs, but a return to the heady days of 2010, when they won 57 seats and joined a coalition government, seems improbable.
Meanwhile, it is clear that all the main UK parties are making efforts to appeal to Jews. The reason is simple: they are aware that in several constituencies, our votes may be decisive.
The most visible signs of this emanate from Labour.
The party knows it lost the confidence of many Jews during the Corbyn leadership, and that to win some of its target constituencies, it needs to get it back. Take, for example, Finchley and Golders Green, which happens to have the country’s highest proportion of Jewish voters at 21 per cent.
The Conservative Mike Freer (who isn’t Jewish, but has proven himself a staunch friend of the community) has represented the seat since 2010. But although his 2019 majority was 6,562, almost four times its size two years earlier, he may be vulnerable.
Running against him for Labour is Jewish barrister Sarah Sackman, widely seen as a very capable candidate who has strong local roots: she stood in the same seat in 2015 and plays an active role in its Masorti New North London Synagogue.
In 2019, the Labour vote was squeezed by the then-Lib Dem MP Luciana Berger, who had left Labour over its antisemitism and polled 17,600 votes.
On the day she was selected last year, Sackman told me that Starmer “understood from day one that Labour would not deserve to be heard either by Jews or the electorate as a whole unless we were serious about tackling antisemitism”.
Of course, she was right, and since the Equality and Human Rights Commission gave the party a clean bill of health earlier this year, the party leadership has gone out of its way to proclaim the progress it has made.
Last week, on the anniversary of the 2019 election, Starmer made a speech about why Labour, not the Tories, were now the only party fit to govern.
For once, he didn’t mention antisemitism. But that same day, shadow science, technology and innovation secretary Peter Kyle did, at a speech at Barnet College: “It is especially fitting to be here during Chanukah and say again to our Jewish communities, who have faced soaring hate crime and antisemitism over the last few weeks, that we stand with you as allies,” he said.
Kyle, who fought antisemitism vigorously in the Corbyn era, also attended the national march against antisemitism in November.
There are other constituencies with large Jewish electorates that will be fascinating to watch as we enter election year.
One is Hackney North (12 per cent Jewish), where the long-serving incumbent Diane Abbott, who has lost the Labour whip for suggesting that Jews did not suffer racism, is still said to remain popular with the large Charedi community that has long supported her.
Another is Bury South (10.1 per cent Jewish), where MP Christian Wakeford crossed the floor from the Tories to Labour and has since been among the most vociferous supporters of Israel.
Which brings us to the question of Gaza and whether the result of the general election is likely to make much difference to Britain’s relationship with Israel and its possible role in brokering some kind of post-conflict settlement.
Currently, the policy of Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron and his Labour shadow David Lammy are more or less identical: to deplore the Hamas attacks in the strongest possible terms, to express support for Israel and its right to self-defence, but also to call for more humanitarian aid to Gaza’s people, an end to the building of Israeli West Bank settlements, and the opening of serious negotiations aimed at a two-state, lasting peace.
The leaderships of both main UK parties, together with the US and other allies, seem certain to become more insistent in their demands that Israel wind down its offensive in the coming weeks, a trend begun in an article written by Cameron and his German counterpart Annalena Baerbock.
The eight shadow ministers who left Starmer’s front bench in November over his refusal to demand an immediate, permanent ceasefire do not like his position.
But the larger Starmer’s majority, the less he will have to take their views, and those of others further left, into account.
If there is a task to which he and those closest to him have applied themselves with discipline, it is the selection of parliamentary candidates.
A Starmer landslide would result in a parliamentary party whose political centre of gravity is far close to his own than the group he currently leads.
As you would expect, the Labour Party has strong links with Israeli Labour and its outgoing leader, Merav Michaeli. Similarly, the Lib Dems are close to Yair Lapid, the leader of the Knesset opposition and his party Yesh Atid.
Of the three main parties, the Lib Dem position on the conflict is the most distinctive.
As the Lib Dem leader Ed Davey and foreign affairs chief Layla Moran explained to me last week, they condemn Hamas unequivocally, insist it can play no part in Gaza’s future or in talks aimed at a lasting peace, but at the same time they say they want an immediate ceasefire.
I’m not sure how those demands can all be met: how can you exclude a barbaric terror group such as Hamas without the use of force?
Moran, who is partly of Palestinian descent, insisted “you cannot do it militarily”, arguing that instead, ways must be found to “put a wedge between Hamas and the Palestinian people”.
She also said that Hamas was not just an organisation but an ideology, so that “you could raze Gaza to the ground, and they would still be there”.
Attractive as these aspirations are, it remains to be seen whether they will win the Lib Dems many Jewish votes.
