It looks as though the two main issues on which the Tories intend to fight the next UK election, whenever that is (the precise date is in the gift of the prime minister), are (1) cross-Channel refugee immigration – ‘Stop the Boats!’; and (2) the so-called ‘Culture Wars’. Both are what you would expect of extreme Right-wing parties; but the Conservatives used to offer better than that. I’m thinking of Disraeli, Lord Salisbury, Harold Macmillan, RA Butler, Edward Heath, and latterly the much-missed Kenneth Clarke; but that entire ‘centrist’ tendency is now banished to the political wilderness, leaving Labour to occupy the ‘moderate’ ground the Tories have vacated.

You can see why the Tories are highlighting ‘the boats’ and ‘culture wars’. There’s nothing else for them. After fourteen years in office (five of them in coalition), their only positive achievement has been ‘getting Brexit done’; which used itself to be an ‘extremist’ position, and is losing its appeal currently. Otherwise they are widely perceived to have presided over fourteen years of failure to deal with the country’s real problems, topped off by five years of rancorous divisions, egregious scandals, those Covid ‘parties’, and farcical leadership. So now they can only – as Hillary Clinton once put it – ‘punch low’.

Hence the negativity that seems to be about to characterise both major English parties in the coming campaign. The Tories have now (this morning) unleashed another negative attack weapon, reaching back into their arsenal to revive the old ‘Labour anti-semitism’ smear again. We’ll see how that fares when it comes to the election. In the meantime, Labour has a whole array of negative targets – some of them referenced in the previous paragraph – to train their guns on. It could be too easy for them, if this releases them from the need to campaign with more positive policies. In that case this could be the most negative general election – on both sides – we have seen for years.