Stormzy, scones and the soul of the nation: Week 4 on the campaign trail

From the NHS dossier to Labour’s plan to plant 200 trees a minute to how to apply jam to a scone, there’s been more than plenty for a hungry election scribe.

This particular stage in the campaign is known by the Tories as “wobble week”, and while they are yet to experience a wobble on the scale of the 2017 debacle, the past week hasn’t been plain sailing either. Michael Heseltine became the latest Tory grandee to come out in support for the Liberal Democrats, while several celebrities came out for Labour, including Lily Allen, Ken Loach and Stormzy. Not amused by Stormzy’s description of Boris as “sinister”, Michael Gove told him to stick to rapping, only to be told himself that he is “crap at both” politics and rapping by the Shadow Culture Secretary, Angela Rayner. Kinder, gentler politics.

Of course, there was also the row over the 451-page dossier which Jeremy Corbyn made public on Wednesday, claiming that it was conclusive “proof” that the NHS is going to be “for sale” under a future Boris administration. The Tories categorically deny this and, in fact, the documents themselves do not prove this allegation, as you can see here.

While the NHS is usually wobbly ground for the Tories, it was on the economy where they took a surprise hit. Last week, Labour’s spending plans were deemed “not credible” by the Institute for Fiscal Studies; this week, they gave the Tories the same dressing-down, pointing out that it is “highly likely” that they will spend more than is set out in their manifesto. As a result, Sajid Javid’s warning that “the Cost of Corbyn” would be £1.2 trillion didn’t really land.

If anyone had a wobbly week, though, it was Labour. First came their last-minute policy announcement of a compensation program for so-called “Waspi women” (a Google search hazard if there ever was one), which will add roughly £58 billion to their borrowing plans. Then came the intervention from Tony Blair, who encouraged voters not to vote Labour. And then Corbyn’s PR stunt with a young bricklayer backfired when said bricky admitted that he’s a Boris supporter. This was all on Monday.

Things went from bad to worse when the Chief Rabbi wrote an op-ed in the Times strongly criticising Corbyn’s record on anti-Semitism, stating that the “soul of the nation is at stake” in this election. This came just hours before Labour launched its “Race and Faith” manifesto and, despite being given four opportunities to apologise to the Jewish community in an interview with Andrew Neil later that day, Corbyn repeatedly failed to do so.

Indeed, if you thought last week’s debates were scrutiny, then think again. Neil was like a criminal barrister tying a defendent in knots. An increasingly tetchy Corbyn failed to provide convincing answers to questions ranging from his Brexit policy to scrapping the married tax allowance to whether, as prime minister, he would give the order to kill a terrorist. Leaked messages from Labour campaigners described the interview as “truly horrific” and, sure enough, the hashtag “corbyncarcrash” started trending on Twitter. Then again, at least he turned up.

The most concerning news for Labour came late on Wednesday evening with the release of polling for the Times, which forecast the Tories would gain a majority of 68 seats. More importantly, it predicts that they will make significant inroads into Labour’s “Red Wall” in the North and Midlands, winning the seats of Dennis Skinner, Tom Watson, Caroline Flint, John Cruddas and Mary Creagh. That’s a blow to Old Labour, Blue Labour and New Labour alike.

Never one for conventional wisdom, Dominic Cummings wrote a blog warning that the election is “much tighter” than the polls suggest (though the Times’s polling model did accurately predict the election outcome two years ago). More importantly, both Labour and the Lib Dems decided to change strategy this week. The former intends to focus more on Leave areas, while the latter shifted its emphasis from stopping Brexit to stopping Boris.

This clearly is a Brexit election — revocation on the one hand, and ambiguity on the other, are not selling. Yet, after the events at Channel 4 last night, Cummings’s caution is not misplaced. Having refused to take part in C4’s climate change debate, both Johnson and Farage were replaced with ice sculptures. Of course, this is the second TV appearance which Boris has turned down, as he continues to dither and delay over whether to go toe-to-toe with Andrew Neil.

In short, this is shaping up to be one of the most interesting elections in British political history. We are past the campaign’s halfway stage and now head into the penultimate campaign week with more TV debates, Andrew Neil interviews and new battle lines. And don’t forget that Donald “Rocky Balboa” Trump is dropping by next week, for the Nato summit in London. He always tends to calm things down.