Bill Carmichael: Labour fail to exploit Tory weaknesses

Then came this week’s train crash interview on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour – prang! In case you haven’t heard it, Corbyn was so catastrophically inept that he managed to make Diane Abbott look like an intellectual giant at the very top of her game.

I have written before how Labour leaders seem to be constantly caught by surprise by the one blindingly obvious question journalists will inevitably ask about a new policy – how much is it going to cost?

And so it happened this week on the launch of Labour’s plans for free childcare although, as the adults amongst us know, there is nothing in this world that is actually “free”.

Someone, somewhere will have to pay for it. Question number one: “How much will it cost?”

Cue rabbit staring at the headlights. Never in a million years did Corbyn and his team envisage such a devilishly difficult opening question.

“Er… it will obviously cost a lot,” was the best Corbyn could manage.

“You presumably have the figures?” asked the interviewer, Emma Barnett.

“Yes I do,” snapped Corbyn as he frantically tapped away at his iPad and flicked through Labour’s manifesto.

After a few excruciating minutes of waffle and bluster Barnett, perhaps out of pity, offered to tell Corbyn the cost of his own policy. At least she had done her homework.

“What’s your estimate of it?” replied Corbyn. And so we ended up with a journalist telling a politician how much the policy he was launching would cost.

A postscript to this incident is that Barnett was subjected to such a heap of misogynistic and anti-Semitic abuse from left-wingers on Twitter that Corbyn was forced to intervene to try to curb it. Such is the state of the modern Labour Party. Not that Theresa May and the Conservatives have exactly covered themselves in glory during this campaign either. It began with May and other Conservative leaders robotically repeating the phrase “strong and stable” like a stuck record at every available opportunity.

The theory behind this tactic is that you have to repeat something a billion times before it penetrates the thick skulls of “low information voters”. The problem is that it drives the rest of us mad and it made May sound phoney and detached.

Then came the disaster of the Conservative manifesto and the U-turn on the plans for adult social care. On paper, this no doubt looked reasonable. With an ageing population, we are heading for a social care crisis and the simple truth is we are going to have to pay more to deal with it.

May’s mistake was in treating the electorate like grown-ups and giving the hard facts to us straight, while Labour takes the easy route by constantly promising people lots of “free stuff” which will be paid for with a good shake of the magical money tree. As a result the polls have tightened dramatically.

A YouGov poll this week predicted the Conservatives would lose so many seats that they would not be able to form a government, even in alliance with the Lib Dems. Okay, so the pollsters have a poor prediction record over recent years – so perhaps we will have to wait until the real poll in less than a week’s time.

My opinion is simple. If we are stupid enough to elect Corbyn, Abbott and John McDonnell – three politicians who were actively supporting the IRA when that organisation was murdering children on Britain’s streets not so long ago – we deserve everything we will get.

But looking at May’s lacklustre campaign, the more grown-up figures in Labour must be kicking themselves. In this election the Conservatives have been there for the taking and more astute political performers would have ruthlessly exploited the clear Tory weaknesses.

Imagine that instead of Corbyn’s incompetent rabble we had a sensible and Yorkshire-flavoured Labour front-bench team, led by Prime Minister-in-waiting Yvette Cooper and including Dan Jarvis, Alan Johnson, Hilary Benn, Rachel Reeves and Mary Creagh.

In those circumstances, I think there is a strong chance Labour would be heading for a resounding win next week. But, as it is, expect a comfortable Conservative victory.