Everybody thinks Labour will romp to an election win, but the Budget showed why Rishi Sunak can cause a major upset

WHEN I was at journalism college, one of my fellow students wanted to make a quick £100 on a sure-fire bet to supplement his £800 grant.

He went to the bookies and discovered that Steve Davis was beating Dennis Taylor 7-0 in the 1985 World Snooker Championship and was now an odds-on 8-1 hot favourite to win the Title.

So, he put his whole grant on him to win, to net his £100 profit.

And then Davis lost 18-17 after both players repeatedly missed the final black ball, in the most exciting snooker match of all time.

My friend spent the rest of that term living in a tent in the local park and working in McDonald’s at night, mainly to get free burgers so he didn’t die of starvation.

The moral of the story? The problem with absolute certainties in life is that they sometimes turn out not to be certain.

That’s why Sir Keir Starmer should be a worried man today.

On the face of it, he and his Labour Party are romping inexorably to a landslide win at the next general election.

As the Spectator notes in its new issue, Labour has led the Conservatives in the polls for more than 480 days and enjoys a current average poll lead of around 21 points.

But as the Spectator also notes, in the run-up to the 1992 election, the Conservatives had been trailing Labour for 530 days with their lead reaching 25 percentage points in the spring of 1990.

 And in a stunning turnaround, ‘Boring’ John Major ended up defeating cocky Neil ‘We’re all right!’ Kinnock.

 I’ve got a growing feeling we could see something similar happening again.

The reason can be encapsulated in one word: competence.

Since the catastrophic 44-day reign of reckless economic terror by Liz ‘Lettuce’ Truss and Kwasi ‘I don’t know what I’m doing’ Kwarteng spooked the markets, tanked the pound, sent mortgage rates surging, and left Britain facing financial Armageddon, their replacements Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Chancellor Jeremy Hunt have demonstrated a calm, efficient proficiency for their jobs that has increasingly impressed me.

Watch Piers Morgan Uncensored weekdays on Sky 526, Virgin Media 606, Freeview 237, Freesat 217 or on Fox Nation in the US

It’s not that they’re reinventing the government wheel so much as they’re putting the wheels back on a Conservative political wagon careering out of control towards electoral oblivion.

Yesterday’s budget wasn’t spectacular.

But it was reassuringly uncontroversial.

Nobody freaked out after they saw it and even Starmer and his shadow cabinet struggled to be very convincing in their woolly-worded critiques.

The first-hand reactions I got from personal friends, always a good test of a new budget, were very encouraging for Sunak and Hunt.

A new mum hairdresser was ecstatic about the expanded free childcare plan, a GP was equally pleased with the abolition of the pension savings limit before punitive taxes kick in, and mates who drive a lot for work and/or like going to the pub were thrilled with the decisions to halt a planned hike in fuel duty and 11p slashing of the price of a pint.

But the almost universal response I heard was relief that a) we may not be heading into recession after all and b) there finally seemed to be some grown-ups running the country again.

Of course, after all the blustering rule-breaking fork-tongued blather of the Boris Johnson tenure, which rapidly undid all the 80-seat majority parliamentary power he had when he won the 2019 election, and the dreadful Truss debacle that followed, the bar for ‘grown-up’ was historically low.

But I felt this same sentiment with Sunak’s smart compromise deal with the EU over the intractable Northern Ireland border issue which may finally ‘get Brexit done’ as Boris kept pledging to do but never actually did, and with the way Hunt moved so fast over this past weekend to help facilitate HSBC buy up the UK arm of broken Silicon Valley Bank UK for just £1 – which will save thousands of jobs.

Even diehard woke Tory-loathing lefties like TV presenter Richard Bacon felt moved to tweet about the HSBC deal: ‘That’s pretty impressive.’

Meanwhile, Starmer’s big problem remains that nobody’s quite sure what kind of Britain he really wants if he takes power, and many voters fear he’s a socialist progressive wolf in moderate disguise. 

Labour makes a lot of grandiose ‘we’ll fix everything!’ promises, but they’re very reluctant to put any meat on the detail bone.

And they keep tying themselves in absurd knots over issues like gender identity.

Is Britain really ready to elect a man as Prime Minister who won’t even say what a woman is for fear of offending people?

We’ve just seen First Minister Nicola Sturgeon lose her job after she defended the sending to a women’s prison of a male rapist who claimed to be female to get an easier sentence, and fresh prey.

The vast majority of Britons don’t go along with this all this ridiculous woke garbage, because they know so much of it makes so little sense.

They also recognise that both Sunak and Hunt work hard, conduct themselves in a manner befitting high office, and seem to put the interests of the country before their own self-interest.

The problems they face are huge.

But if they continue like this and get a bit of luck that lets them ride a wave to proper economic recovery over the next two years, they could yet pull off another 1992-like election win.

And if they do, it will be because they understood the No1 voter requirement of any government is to be competent.