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Labour is poised to launch a snap general election campaign as soon as next week as Rishi Sunak weighs up when to go to the polls, party insiders say – but some remain worried about whether Sir Keir Starmer is ready for the final fight over who gets the keys to 10 Downing Street.
With the Conservatives trailing the Opposition in opinion polls by as much as 20 percentage points, the conventional wisdom in Westminster is that Labour is overwhelmingly likely to win.
But the Prime Minister’s ability to choose the timing of the general election is seen as one of the few trump cards Mr Sunak is yet to play.
This week he repeated his mantra that the election is likely to be in “the second half of the year” – meaning it could be as early as July or as late as November or even December.
One rumour doing the rounds within Labour is that Mr Sunak could shock the nation by setting the election date early next week – before the local elections on Thursday 2 May – to put an end to speculation over his own leadership, which is likely to reignite if the Tories take heavy losses in the locals.
A Shadow Cabinet minister asked: “Why would they wait around to lose hundreds of seats and have all their leadership drama start up again?” On that timeline, the general election would probably take place some time in June.
Senior party figures dispute any suggestion that Labour would be caught off guard by an early election. Out of Labour’s top 250 targets, there are still around 40 seats where the party has not yet selected a candidate, according to the journalist Michael Crick, who has been monitoring selections by all parties. A top strategist told i that fewer than 10 of those were in the seats needed to take a Commons majority.
“If there are vacancies when the election campaign starts, we’ll just impose some candidates,” a member of the Shadow Cabinet suggested. “It’s what always happens.”
Sir Keir is understood to believe that the party has been ready to go to the polls for some weeks, after he told them they must be prepared for the general election to happen on the same day as the locals.
A senior Labour insider said: “For months we’ve been telling everyone to be ready for 2 May. So we are now ready to start our campaign whenever it comes.”
A shadow minister confirmed: “We were aiming for May so we would be ready by then. And I still think there’s a good chance it will be June or July.” They added: “Everything has become so much more professional since Sue Gray [Starmer’s chief of staff] came in. We’ve been in campaign mode since the last election but we’ve now sorted out volunteers, organisers, things like that.”
A source involved with the campaign admitted the party will never be “100 per cent” ready for an election, but said that it will be able to select candidates in every seat, complete a manifesto by week two of the official campaign – when it traditionally publishes – and already has freepost leaflets designed and ready to go, having asked candidates to already submit the messaging they want to put out.
Key shadow Cabinet figures have been seconded to party HQ for most of the week, and the Opposition is currently running three concurrent “grids”, or plans for what needs to happen – one for 2 May local elections, one for an autumn general election, and one for a six-week short campaign in case there is a snap election.
The source said: “We’d always want more time. But when you sit your A-levels, are you 100 per cent ready? You do the work and that’s as ready as you’ll ever be.”
A shadow minister told i: “We have a twinning system up and running, which means each of us are paired up with one or two candidates standing in seats near us, who we take under our wing. At the moment, we’re spending a lot of time campaigning, so they are seeing the business end of it.”
But even as they insist they are ready to face voters immediately, many in Labour confess they would prefer to wait for later in the year. A Shadow Cabinet minister said: “Every month that goes by our data gets better and better. The main metric of whether you win a marginal seat is number of voter contacts, so the longer we wait the more we get.”
There are also remaining holes in the party’s policy offering, and insiders confirm that the more time they have before the election the more they will be able to fill in the missing gaps. A frontbencher said: “The problem we have is that unlike the Government, we don’t have thousands of civil servants ready to back up all the work we’re doing. So people accuse us of not having fully detailed policies – we can’t access the Whitehall machine!”
Formal submissions for the manifesto have long been closed. A senior Labour MP said: “If someone has a fantastic idea then obviously Rachel [Reeves, the shadow Chancellor] and Keir will listen, but basically everything has been decided. Everything has already gone through Rachel’s team for full costing.” But there are still policies – including on childcare – that have not been fully fleshed out.
There remain questions over whether the party has enough on-the-ground volunteers to knock on doors in swing seats and win over floating voters.
In the 2017 and 2019 voters, pro-Corbyn pressure group Momentum mobilised tens of thousands of mostly young activists – many of whom have quit the party in protest at what they see as Sir Keir’s lack of ambition. A source from the Labour left said: “There is a lot of frustration and disillusionment. The more progressive base is reluctant to pound the streets with some of the material the leadership want them to put out.”
And some MPs remain worried that Labour’s lead, though large, has not grown as the party has set out more details of its policy programme – laying the ground for a potential nasty surprise, such as a Commons majority which is too small to push through any radical plans.
One told i: “I’m worried we’re not doing enough to shift that last block of voters that we may need. Yes, we have enough support to win, but do we have enough to do the things we really want to do in power?”
