It has now been 3 weeks into the 6-week British general election campaign and so far it seems that the Conservatives are doing everything that is likely to push their support base towards Reform. The campaign got of too a very bad start with some bad missteps but it is tuning into downward spiral of completely crushed morale. I still think things could well tighten up in the next week or two but so far everything is in the opposite direction.

Rishi Sunak skipping large portion of the D-Day memorial in Normandy turned what should have been an easy trip into an unmitigated blunder on a monumental scale, and the dust was barely settled when Penny Mordant admitted “taxes had risen to a record level” under them. This was the first time I thought that a Canadian-style wipeout was more than wishful thinking from the British left.

A manifesto centred around £17billion of tax cuts funded by the usual suspects of smashing welfare and cutting civil servants was a damp squib because it had zero credibility and was clearly written in a state of panic. The few bits in there that actually target people outside of the Conservative party faithful really look like afterthoughts.

It looks like the SNP are in no fit state to run a proper campaign so I no longer consider Scotland a possible wild-card. For them this is an existential election and if they really do end up losing two-thirds of their seats Scottish independence will be firmly off the agenda for a very long time. They were the only thing I thought could stop a big Labour win.

The real killer is the Conservatives now talking about a Labour landslide, most notably with Grant Shapps talking about trying to stop a “supermajority” which is something that is not a concept in British politics. Maybe they are hoping that a lot of Labour support does not bother to vote, but that is Last Chance Saloon tactics.