Amid dire polling, Tories turn to tax cuts for survival

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Good morning. I’m pleased to be able to include something the FT’s data team have been working on for a while — our new opinion poll tracker. 

The particularly cool bit, and the part I’m most excited to show you, is the way that our poll tracker depicts a “normal-sized opinion poll error”: giving us a visual depiction of the usual uncertainty about whether the polls are right or not. 

But even a normal-sized opinion poll error wouldn’t change the fact the Conservative party is on course for a heavy defeat as it stands. Might further tax cuts shift the balance? Some thoughts on a striking intervention from Jeremy Hunt, while Jonathan Vincent, our in-house political data scientist, explains our poll tracker in more detail below. 

Responsible Budget?

The party’s top strategists can hardly admit that they are doing anything other than fighting to win the next election (even if the underlying mission is about minimising losses).

If one of Rishi Sunak’s aides went around telling all and sundry “let’s face it, the party is doomed”, then there would be stories in the papers about how even Downing Street thinks the game is up and Conservative MPs would panic. Self-destructive weeks like the one the Tory party has just endured would become even more frequent than they are already.

But in his column this week, Chris Giles proposes a fun and prescient way to gauge whether Sunak really thinks he can win: how he uses any extra wriggle room which may be provided in the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecasts (these will…