Why do they always wobble on a Thursday? In 1987, the Conservative campaign was rocked by a poll, published on a Thursday, that showed the Tory lead over Labour down to a meagre four points. For the first time, Margaret Thatcher thought she might actually lose. Watching was an aide, Michael Dobbs, who would later write the television drama House of Cards. “She was more than furious. She was almost frothing,” he recalled, describing the day that is forever carved into the Tory annals as Wobbly Thursday.
The memoirs of the future may describe 9 April 2015 the same way. Thursday was the worst day so far in what has been a shaky start to the Conservative general election campaign. The morning brought an attack on Ed Miliband by the defence secretary, Michael Fallon, over Trident, suggesting that just as the Labour leader had stabbed his brother David in the back, so he would betray Britain, bartering away the country’s nuclear deterrent in return for enough Scottish National Party support to put him into Downing Street.
The reaction, even from Fallon’s fellow Conservatives, was akin to that of the little girl who let her head fall to the desk during a storytime photo-op with David Cameron. Tories despaired at a move that saw them retoxified as the nasty party – not 24 hours after they had been defending the super-rich tax avoiders formerly known as non-doms. To round off this day from hell, a trio of polls arrived showing Labour with a slight but unmistakable lead.
Of course the original Wobbly Thursday was followed a week later by a landslide Tory victory. The wobble turned out to be no more than that. It was a blip. The same may be true this time, too. After all, two more polls appeared a few hours later showing the Tories with a nose in front. And, in contrast with 1987, this wobble came a month before polling day. The Conservatives have plenty of time to regain their equilibrium.
And yet the fundamentals are very different now – and not in a way that will encourage the Conservatives. In 1987, thanks in part to an economic boom and an opposition still divided between Labour and the Liberal/SDP Alliance, the Tories were out in front throughout. The four-point lead that sent Thatcher into a fury would bring shrieks of delight at Conservative headquarters today.
The current numbers are dispiriting indeed for Cameron’s party. Stay like this and, even if the Tories win the greatest number of both votes and seats, they will be locked out of Downing Street. They could team up with the remnant Liberal Democrats, Northern Ireland’s DUP and a couple of Ukippers and still not reach the magic number. To retain power the Tories have to add three or four points to their vote share. They need liftoff.
And they’ve been waiting for that moment with great patience. Lynton Crosby reportedly told Conservative MPs to expect it after Christmas. Then it was scheduled for February. Then March. Then after Easter. Easter Sunday came and went, and still the mythic number has not risen. If anything, it’s got slightly worse as Miliband’s personal ratings – whose poverty was meant to be the Tories’ insurance policy – have started climbing, even on one poll overtaking Cameron’s for the first time.
The result is that Conservatives are getting twitchy. For now, MPs are holding their nerve, in a state of mind that might be described as pre-panic. One told me he and his colleagues will remain steady just so long as there’s something with a bit of “wow factor” in the manifesto launched on Tuesday. Taking a break from door-knocking, one confided that “long term economic plan” is just not cutting it. The phrase is too bureaucratic, too devoid of optimism: two in three voters think it means more austerity. They’re hoping that, just as no one expected George Osborne’s pension liberalisation in the 2014 budget, the PM and chancellor will spring another dramatic surprise in the party programme – on the lines of the £8bn NHS funding increase promised by Osborne today.
The Tory foot soldiers want something sunnier to sell. If they don’t get it on Tuesday, and if the polls stay static, a full panic is pencilled in for next weekend.
Others lack even that patience. The Tory press is always a good guide to the party’s unrestrained id – and look at what they’ve been up to. Friday’s Mail and Telegraph claimed to have uncovered the secrets of Red Ed’s “tangled love life”. In fact, all they revealed was that before he was married, Miliband had, as the Times columnist Janice Turner put it, “dated a bunch of hot, clever and successful women”. It was hard to see how that might hurt him with voters.
Combined with the Fallon salvo, all this suggests confusion in the Tory tribe. They’ve lost their confidence over how exactly to condemn Ed Miliband. Is he a useless dweeb or a ruthless, power-hungry cad? In the 1990s, the Tories and their Fleet Street outriders couldn’t decide whether Tony Blair was Bambi or Stalin. In the space of a few days, the Conservatives of 2015 have turned Miliband from Wallace into Poldark.
That’s partly because he has refused to follow his part in the script. He was meant to have folded by now, to have crumbled under the pressure and turned into a gaffe-prone wreck. Instead, he has proved more resilient than they – and perhaps the voters – expected. Whatever else the public thinks of him, they are surely beginning to recognise that he has some steel and an improbably thick skin.
The failure of these attacks to penetrate is leading to desperation, especially in those parts of the press that, thanks to Miliband’s stance on media regulation, are determined to keep him out of No 10. Both the Trident and ex-girlfriends stories smack of Tory operatives frantically stabbing at the old buttons and pulling at the familiar levers, only to find they no longer work.
Lynton Crosby has, by all accounts, delayed his deadline. He now says the key moment will come in the final week. Not because that will bring some game-changing TV appearance orpolicy announcement. It will simply be the imminence of polling day. “The clarifying moment is the fact that you’re about to vote,” says Rick Nye, director of the Populus polling organisation.
The Tories are betting everything on the voluminous evidence that the sound and fury of an election campaign rarely matters, that when voters take a hard look – at the economy and at Ed Miliband – on 7 May, just enough of them will switch, giving the Conservatives those three or four extra percentage points they need. If they are right, this year’s wobbly Thursday will soon be a forgotten footnote. If they’re wrong, it may well be remembered as the turning point.
