Blog
Matthew Taylor
One measure of a political party’s trajectory is how it deals with its electoral vulnerabilities, those weaknesses in its appeal that show up in opinion polls and focus groups. Confident parties on the way up confront the problems, weak parties on the way down brush the bad news under the carpet. That’s why the Conservative conference seemed to me to be more successful than Labour’s. The Tories went to Manchester knowing that a key vulnerability was the charge of a lack of substance, but after a week of announcements, including George Osborne’s public spending hit list, the charge had been buried. The opinion polls suggest the Conservatives may have lost a couple of percentage points for their candour but, when it comes to the real choice next spring, this may prove a price worth paying.
