Matthew Taylor, Tony Blair's chief political adviser, now CEO of the Royal Society of Arts and one of the most interesting political thinkers around, takes a pessimistic view of his party's chances of winning another term:
The underlying realities are reasserting themselves. Labour has been in office for eleven years, the economy is a disaster area and the Conservatives have been pretty successful at detoxifying their brand. All this suggests a reasonably comfortable Conservative victory at the next election with Labour’s best hope being that the vagaries of the electoral system mean this doesn’t quite turn into an overall majority.
I think this is correct. The media and commentariat's hunger for changes in the story means that they exaggerate short-term effects and underplay the "underlying realities", which rarely change. The British situation reminds me of those moments, during the late summer of 2008, when John McCain drew level or crept ahead of Obama in the polls. Suddenly Obama went from being a dead cert to the verge of humiliating defeat. In reality, that was just noise. The fundamentals - two terms of a massively unpopular Republican president, a failing economy, an unpopular war, and Obama's superior campaign organisation - meant that McCain never really had a serious chance of victory. However well Gordon Brown performs during this crisis, it is almost impossible that he can overcome the fundamental problems Taylor outlines. Certainly, to have any fighting chance the government has to move on from its current stance, even if it is - or was - bearing fruit. Conventional warfare, as Taylor suggests, will only end in Tory victory.
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