The message from Grant Shapps was startling – don’t risk giving Labour a ‘super-majority’.
For a governing party to warn that the Opposition was heading for a landslide victory might seem counter-intuitive, especially with half the election campaign still to run.
But the message from Mr Shapps was deliberate. A ‘massive majority’ leaving Sir Keir Starmer with ‘unchecked’ power would be ‘very bad news’ for the country, he said.
Rishi Sunak later insisted that he had ‘absolutely not’ thrown in the towel and was still seeking to win. But the decision to switch the Tory message to warn about the dangers of handing untrammelled power to Labour has been signed off by the PM himself.
Indeed, he effectively launched it the previous day at the Tories’ manifesto launch, urging voters not to give a ‘blank cheque’ to a party whose leader was offering a ‘blank sheet of paper’ to the electorate.
The reason for the switch in strategy is simple: Nothing else is working, and time is getting tight.
Private polling for the Conservatives in recent days has uncovered a dangerous fatalism among the electorate.
Many voters believe Labour will win regardless of how they cast their ballots – and there is therefore no harm in backing Reform, the Liberal Democrats or even the Greens. If that mood continues, the Conservatives could remain rooted at their current low level of around 20 per cent support.
In Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, that would see the Conservatives reduced to fewer than 100 seats, even if Reform fails to win a seat.
In 1983, the Alliance party got 25.4 per cent of the vote and yet won just 23 seats. Unless the Tories can push their poll rating into the high 20s, they could face a similar fate.
Sir Keir would have no effective opposition in Parliament. The Tories would be reduced to a powerless rump, with millions of centre-Right voters left with no effective representation in – a dangerous position for any democracy to find itself in.
Elsewhere, the analysis delivered a brutal verdict on all the eye-catching policies in the Conservative manifesto. A Tory insider said that while voters liked many of them on an individual basis, they had had ‘no impact’ on the party’s headline rating because people did not believe they would ever happen.
The only message cutting through is the warning that Labour can’t be trusted on tax.
In 2017, Labour was 20 points behind in the polls and the party appealed to the electorate not to give Theresa May a landslide majority.
In the end, Mrs May did not get a majority at all. But it is hard to know how much was due to the Labour tactics, and how much was down to her disastrous campaign strategy.
It is a high-risk strategy. But with the polls refusing to budge, it may be the best bet the Tories have got.