The best game in Downing Street used to be to spot the phrase “Tony Blair’s worst week”. It wasn’t difficult, as it appeared somewhere every week. Things looked bad from the outside but, down in the bunker, the walls were coming in slowly. And now, years later, the worst week has actually arrived, cunningly disguised as the best week for an age.
There is no doubt that, on the face of it, Labour has had a good campaign. Even taking the average of the opinion polls, rather than one extreme example, it has cut the Conservative lead in half. Its projected vote has stabilised and then risen. Credit is due to Jeremy Corbyn too, who has performed far better than I ever expected. He has looked and sounded comfortable in his skin, in stark contrast to a prime minister who is brittle when she is not absent. To take a single example from Mr Corbyn’s campaign, his opening remarks at Wednesday night’s TV debate were a crisp and clear summary of his themes. I have written such statements before and I would have been very pleased to put my name to that one.
Perhaps this surge is the early stage of a revolution. The apparent axioms of British politics have been revealed as contingent before. Labour once looked impregnable in Scotland and now it lies a distant third. Every bigwig in the land argued for Britain staying in the European Union but we are in the departure lounge.
However, it is still much more likely than not that a diminished Theresa May will be returned to office on June 8. Labour is not actually winning, though you would never know it from the reaction in the party to its surge. Therein lies the secret of why this could have been Labour’s worst week in years.
The prevailing, unspoken, assumption among Labour MPs before this election began was that it would be a condensed education in political reality for their membership. The Tories would throw a lot of mud, most of which would stick. Mr Corbyn would collapse under pressure and the electorate would deliver a damning verdict. All of that may yet happen but it no longer matters. The surge has changed everything because it is now so much harder to argue that Mr Corbyn’s brand of politics is not viable. Even if the result shows that it is not in fact viable that case is now lost, for the time being, in the Labour Party.
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It is important to clarify the nature of Mr Corbyn’s politics. His opponents have been keen to portray him as wildly left-wing and a friend of ancient terrorists. To his supporters, the charge of being left-wing hardly means anything. Mr Corbyn is not selling ideology, he is selling hope, with all its promises attached. If he were ever to get anywhere near power the disappointment would be crushing but, for the moment, this is the bubble he is blowing. Mr Corbyn has broken with seven years of austerity politics in which Labour was half-tough and the Tories pretended to be fully tough. He is offering a third way, which is to forget all about it and wish for something better.
There is always an audience for ending nasty things and replacing them with nicer things and Mr Corbyn is appealing to it. The pivotal question, on which most of the polling variation rests, is the extent to which young people will turn out to vote. If they do in larger numbers than ever before, Mr Corbyn’s vote, not to say his vanity, will be flattered. Labour is also the beneficiary of the falling away of the Liberal Democrats and Ukip, as two-party politics — bewilderingly — reasserts itself. This collection of flimsy reasons probably does not add up to a substantive Labour surge, still less an actual victory, but that does not matter. For the Corbyn wing of the Labour Party, which always had a low threshold for success, 39 per cent in the opinion polls they don’t usually believe in is greater than all expectation.
If all this hope turns out to be forlorn, as it probably will, then two consequences follow for the prospects of the party. The first concerns the perennial fight about whether it is possible or not to win in Britain from a position on the left of the Labour Party. The assumption of everyone who endured Tony Blair’s worst weeks, all of them spent in 10 Downing Street, was that no such victory was possible. We thought this for the simple reason that it had never been done, and still has not. Ed Miliband tried and failed, and Jeremy Corbyn is trying again.
The conditions are propitious for Labour. The Conservatives have been slow to realise that Britain is close to the end of its tether with austerity. A government elected in 2015 has torn itself in two and its new prime minister has been exposed on the campaign trail. It is, or should be, a winnable election. If Labour fails to win it, then it seems reasonable to conclude that a victory from the left is a hopeless endeavour. After the surge, no such conclusion can even be entertained and the prospect of removing Mr Corbyn in the event of a defeat has become more remote.
The second consequence is that Labour MPs are going nowhere. The best conditions for the creation of a new party were a catastrophically small Labour vote on June 8 and Mr Corbyn staying on regardless. The preferred outcome for most MPs has always been a decent Labour vote share and a graceful resignation from Mr Corbyn. What they may get instead is a larger vote than envisaged, which makes them reluctant to walk away, but no prospect of removing the man who has won it. They will be, in the word that one of them used to me, trapped. The only option is to sit and wait until the fatal illusion, that Labour can win from its left, dissolves. Given that they will be saddled for the foreseeable future with a manifesto most MPs don’t believe in, the wait could be a long one.
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That is why this week might, in the fullness of time, appear to have been an act of accidental strategic genius by a lucky Conservative Party. Labour might be in a position from which no victory is possible, oblivious of this fact but with the memory of its transient popularity to back up its conviction that, one day, hope will win.
This might just have been the week in British politics in which a new party became both considerably more necessary and vastly less likely. The Labour Party is in a trap: it was Mr Corbyn’s best week and the party’s worst.