Westminster is a place of consensus, orthodoxy and prevailing wisdom. At any given moment, there is the Narrative, the story that everyone – or close to everyone – believes, or pretends to. The Narrative can ignore objective facts, but also change quickly when finally confronted with realities too big to overlook.
I reckon the last big shift in the Narrative happened sometime on the Monday of Tory conference in October. In a few hours, it dawned on a lot of people that not only was the Liz Truss premiership doomed, but the Tories were very likely to lose the next election.
Since then, journalists, lobbyists, civil servants and even unworldly think-tankers have been treating Labour as a government-in-waiting. The shift in the Narrative affects participants too: that was about the time a lot of Labour MPs also started to take their own chances of power seriously.
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