The opening leg of the campaigns has been fairly unequal, in terms of content and pace. There are clearly some very different strategies at play here, each of which will doubtless shift gears in the weeks to come. Election campaigns are like a dance, in that sense, moving around each other as they ebb and flow.

If you’re thinking waltz or tango, guess again.

So, what’s what on day 12?

Conservatives

The Tories, taking bold action, went on what a charm offensive looks like if you’ve got NPD and untreated tertiary syphilis. They started strong, with National Service, which polled exactly how you’d expect it to. That is to say, deeply unpopular with anyone young enough to either have or be planning to have children, but warmly welcomed by the older demographics. Especially the weird subgroup of Boomers that didn’t fight in the war or do national service themselves, but have somehow convinced themselves otherwise.

Then there was the extra lock for pensions, which didn’t help mitigate the “fuck anyone under 50” vibe. Based on just these two announcements, I’m assuming they’re keeping the repeal of stamp duty and bringing back hanging for nearer polling day, for maximum impact.

These are, obviously, stupid policies. If the election weren’t already lost, I doubt they’d dare so much as mention them. They certainly aren’t to be implemented. Although, from a party that seems loathe to pass any legislation whatsoever if it can possibly help it, maybe that’s a given.

What’s more interesting, to my mind, is the stuff they’ve spoken about since. The stuff which is clearly intended to be a bit more down to Earth. To deliver this important message, they got Michael Gove – who had just announced his retirement – to Do A TikToks that felt a lot like something by Larry David.

In it, he outlined three key policies:

1. People caught fly-tipping will get points on their driving license, in addition to a fine.
2. It’ll be easier for landlords to evict tenants accused of persistent anti-social behaviour.
3. Private firms contracted to repair pavements will be fined if they don’t do a good job.

That mess and noise and those shitty pavements, right? And people say the Conservative Party are out of touch? Bah! What’s more relatable than mess and noise and shitty pavements? Next policy prediction: the quality of in-flight meals.

Unfortunately, there’s a few awkward questions that immediately come to mind, in response to these highly innovative pieces of revolutionary policy. These are:

1. How did these problems become so rife over the past decade?
2. Why are the prisons and probation services so overwhelmed these crimes can’t be dealt with properly?
3. Where will these now homeless hooligans and scrubs all go?
4. What sort of hopelessly corrupt, disinterested cretins have been paying private firms millions of pounds to do a bad job and then doing nothing about it?

Suffice to say, these are not questions the Tories really want answered. I can’t help but wonder why, then, they prompted anyone to ask them.

Labour

Would it even be an election if Labour didn’t break out in a bad case of spontaneous tankies? I’d argue not. Thankfully, this time round, most people don’t care.

That hasn’t stopped the national press trying to make them care, mind, so we’ve been treated to a whole week of headlines about whether Diane Abbott has been forced out and whether Faiza Shaheen’s constant need for attention can ever be sated. Laura Kuenssberg has been in a state of high agitation, naturally, running her own solo Conservative election campaign with inversely proportionate amounts of gusto and integrity.

To be fair, the internal conflict isn’t a great look and was somewhat avoidable, so a demerit to the Starmer campaign office on that. But it really isn’t a big deal and I doubt the majority of people will even register what is, essentially, the cosmic microwave background of Labour bickering. Abbott is 70, so hardly had a long future with the party anyway, even if she hadn’t spent the last however long suspended.

Anyway; the hard left of the party – notably, the SCG – have had a rough run of things and Starmer seems keen to ensure that streak remains unbroken. If the remains of the Corbyn clique want to line up and finish themselves off in the name of Ideological Purity, nobody in the grown-up wing of the party is going to stop them.

This is partly because the centrists faction have only recently wrestled the party away from the hard left, but mostly because an election campaign requires a high degree of discipline. The left of the party are pathologically incapable of that, regularly putting their personal crusades and/or screaming victim complexes before any sense of unity or – apparently – desire to actually win an election. The Abbott affair seems to have blown over for everyone but the click-hungry press, but I imagine Shaheen will keep flogging tickets to the Me Me Me Circus for as long as the Grift Gods allow it. She can be safely ignored.

This leaves only one other real piece of news from the past week, on the Labour side: the Great British Energy project. This is an underrated plan to launch a nationalised clean energy company, presumably fronted by Mel & Sue. The goal is to stabilise our energy security, introduce greater price competition in the energy market, and actually do something to stop us cooking ourselves to death.

Unfortunately, due to being underrated, it probably won’t move the polls much. I’m assuming they picked it first because 1) it is quite hard to criticise and 2) they’re saving the stuff that’ll garner more attention for nearer election day.

Lib Dems

Simply amazing. Not the policies themselves which, as I’ve said elsewhere, are all Pretty Fine, but sweet baby Jesus the campaign. It turns out that Ed Davey – or, at least, his campaign team – possess bona fide marketing genius. While the Tories have been busy trying to scare everyone about Labour, and Labour have been busy trying to scare everyone about Labour, the Liberal Democrats have managed to bring levity, humility, and actual engagement to the table.

Do people care what they have to say on river pollution? No at all. But they do care about seeing Ed Davey careen at high speed down a hill whilst riding a bike. Do you they want to know what Sir Ed has to say about children’s mental health? No, because the very fact it needs saying means most of the country don’t care about children’s mental health (yes, I know). But they 100% do want to see him hurtling down an inflatable water slide.

What the Lib Dems have recognised, I think, is twofold.

First, as you’d expect, there’s a ton of noise from all the parties at the moment. If you want to cut through that to get people’s attention, you need to make them want to give you their attention. It’s a basic marketing principle and I think the Davey campaign is doing an excellent job of leveraging it. People will listen to your boring policies if you’re saying them while you do something insane.

Second, the Liberal Democrats absolutely stuffed themselves in 2019. They took themselves far too seriously, thinking they could turn anti-Brexit sentiment into a parliamentary majority. It was never, ever going to happen and it smacked of a rather off-putting lack of self-awareness. This year, what we’re seeing is far more of a “look, we know we won’t be in government, but this stuff is important and we want you to know there’s a party that supports it” message. And I think that’s good.

But, yes, it is plausible they’ll try to milk this too much and end up looking not serious. I hope that doesn’t happen, but it could. Down that road lays things like Count Binface becoming their candidate for Mayor of London, which fall into the category of things I’d love to see for all the wrong reasons.

More likely, though, is they’ll perform slightly better than predicted in polls and pick up a tidy clutch of additional seats. And, if that happens, I’ll be happy to have seen it as an outcome for a so-far wholly up-beat, positive campaign, because I’d forgotten those could happen.

The Rest

There’s not really been much from the others.

Reform are likely waiting until nearer polling day to announce their policy – Still Being Mad At Europe – because that’s what Uncle Nige dictates. I also assume they’ll try and fend of Tory attempts to woo their base via the usual awfulness one-upmanship that is the lingua franca of the far right, but so far they’ve done roughly nothing. It might be tempting to hope it stays that way, but I’d urge you to resist; that way, disappointment lies.

The Greens are aiming for the biggest ever loss of candidate deposits. They’re standing in nearly every single constituency, despite the fact they’ve got slim-at-best prospects of ending up with more than one seat. As their vote is therefore very localised, this means the polls suggest extremely low Green vote counts in all the others. Ergo, loss of deposits. I’ve seen figures around £250,000 of losses doing the rounds, which feels about right. Not sure how I’d feel if I were a party donor, but then I don’t really understand the Green Party mindset in general.

Probably the biggest news from the And The Rest category is the SNP. In the last few days, it has come to light that they left £450 million of EU funds unspent for so long that they’ve now expired and must be returned to Brussels. Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum – but especially if you’re part of the pro-independence movement – this is a fucking disgrace. It makes the party look like it has been so busy hot-boxing its own farts for the past six years that it hasn’t been doing the parts of its job that actually benefit the people who vote for it.

If this doesn’t get reflected at the polling booth, I’ll be amazed.

And, Now, The Polls

Oh lord. We’ve had a few. Here’s the highlights, but the headline view is this: Labour landslide, no sudden blue wave, I’ve booked the 5th off work in anticipation of how hard I’m going to be celebrating.

This is very gratifying for two reasons. One, I want to see the complete obliteration of the Tory Party down to the atomic level, preferably further. Two, I’ve been saying for a while that I think the narrowing of the polls has already largely taken place.

I won’t cover all of them, but here’s a few of the bigger ones.

YouGov did suggest a bit of a narrowing very early on (only the first two days), but they’ve been one of the outliers in terms of how huge a Labour lead they’ve been showing. Even then, the changes are within the Margin of Error (MoE – get used to seeing it) so are probably best understood as “no change.”

Then there was a big one – 12,000 people – from Redfield & Wilton. This covered the middle of the week and showed Labour’s lead growing, albeit still within MoE. But definitely no meaningful narrowing in response to the Tory blitz of Big and Brilliant Policies (For Ages 65+).

Then there was one which I find hard to interpret as anything other than a desperate bit of propaganda by the Tory-owned JL Partners. Thankfully, it was quickly picked apart once they released their assumptions – anyone who said “don’t know” really meant “Conservative” – meaning any interruption to the Rivers of Salt at CCHQ was brief at best. I’m not linking to it, because the only sources are Xitter and the podcast they’re trying to promote, neither of which I want to drive traffic towards. In summary: it showed a 3% narrowing in favour of the Conservatives.

Finally, there was the double-whammy of polls over this weekend.

Friday was the Electoral Calculus / FindOutNow poll – deliciously, commissioned by the Daily Mail. This was devastating for the Conservatives, predicting them winning a paltry 66 seats. That’s 410 fewer than it predicts for Labour. This was an MRP poll covering most of last week, so high quality and indicative of how people have reacted to the campaigns so far.

The following day, Opinium dropped their own updated poll. This covered up until Friday (31st), so is the most up-to-date snapshot we have. It was teased by one of Opinium’s analysts with a tweet saying “Jesus wept”, which presumably means they think he was a Tory. They’re another pollster who has been giving a far smaller lead to Labour, which only makes the 4% swing in their favour all the more incredible.

There are 32 days left until polls close. At this rate, there may not be a Conservative Party left on day 33.

Here’s how you can help that happen.