James Forsyth reviews the week in politics
Having to work on a Sunday is a chore — doubly so when that Sunday is Valentine’s Day. But there were plenty of worker bees at Labour headquarters on Victoria Street last Sunday, devoting themselves to the passion of their life: hounding Conservatives. They came to rebut a document that the Tories had just released on how Britain has grown more unequal under Labour. Late in the afternoon, all their Valentine’s dreams came true: they found a mistake.
Somehow the Tories had managed to claim that 54 per cent of girls under 18 got pregnant in the most deprived areas of the country when the actual figure is 5.4 per cent. To make things worse, this was not just a decimal point in the wrong place in one table, but a mistake that appeared three times in a document containing a foreword by David Cameron. It was a painful reminder to Conservatives of what one campaign veteran calls the ‘institutionalised incompetence’ of parts of Conservative campaign headquarters — and was spotted by a newly reinvigorated Labour attack team.
For all Labour’s problems, it still has a formidable election-fighting machine: one driven by visceral hatred of the Tories. They are convinced that the Conservatives are not just wrong but wicked — and they delight in causing the enemy pain. ‘I bet we ruined at least a couple of Tory staffers’ Valentine’s night,’ one remarked to me. (They did.) These feelings have been intensified by Labour’s sense that they are up against a Tory operation that is awash with cash; that they are now the underdogs. They have internalised Lord Mandelson’s injunction to view themselves as insurgents fighting an army. Like most insurgents, they have come to believe that whatever tactics they use are justified by the fact that they wouldn’t win in a conventional fight.
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