Political Cabinet on Tuesday was a fascinating occasion, as I say in The Sun, and not just because Andrea Leadsom took the opportunity to tell Theresa May she had a wonderful smile. The Cabinet were given a detailed presentation on the state of public opinion—and bits of it made for grim reading for them. David Mundell, the Scottish Secretary, summed up the mood of the meeting when he told Theresa May, to chuckles, that his first impression from all the data was that she shouldn’t call an election anytime soon.
The problem for the Tories is that the voters are wary of their values and fed up with austerity. A Remain-voting Secretary of State tells me that they were surprised to find that concern about public services appeared to have done more damage to the Tory brand than Brexit.
The intriguing question is why has a public that accepted the case for deficit reduction in 2015, so turned against it just two years later.
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