‘Gaslighting’ the British public may be Rishi Sunak’s last remaining hope

Politicians are always on the look-out for a demotic turn of phrase that shows they are in touch with the common folk. Mrs Thatcher famously called Neil Kinnock “frit”, which was a bit too colloquial for anyone brought up outside of Lincolnshire.

Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, has gone for the metropolitan mot du jour “gaslighting”, which is currently tossed around with gay abandon without anyone having much of a clue what it means. The BBC reported Ms Reeves’s attack on the Government using this apparent insult as though we would all know what she was talking about. She said ministers were “gaslighting” the public by claiming that better economic news will sway voters.

“We won’t have turned a corner until working people feel they are better off,” she said. “Because the state of the economy is about much more than lines on a graph. It’s about the state of our high streets, the security of work, and the money in people’s pockets.”

The word derives from the 1938 play Gaslight in which a man attempts to make his wife believe that she is going insane. He causes the house’s gas lights to dim, but tells his wife they are fine, making her doubt the evidence of her own eyes. Essentially, it means deception and manipulation, but that is not really what the Government is doing. It is pointing to better economic figures expected this week and inviting the public to accept they are the harbingers of better times to come, hoping that voters show their appreciation in the ballot box later this year.

True gaslighting would be to fiddle the figures and claim they are something they aren’t. That, I suppose, is Ms Reeves’s point. A slew of economic statistics this week is expected to show another fall in inflation, possibly even below the Bank of England’s target of 2 per cent. Given that prices were rising at close to 10 per cent just a year ago, that is a big and welcome change that will feed through into interest rates and borrowing costs, if not this month then soon.

GDP figures on Friday are expected to show that the country has officially come out of recession, though the OECD reported yesterday that British households are still suffering the longest drop in living standards in the G7 as the economy fails to keep up with population growth.

Despite last week’s drubbing for the Tories at the local elections, Rishi Sunak can see better times ahead and his critics seem to have backed away from any attempt to remove him before the election. The Prime Minister is sufficiently emboldened to begin making a political case against a possible “coalition of chaos” of the sort that helped David Cameron win in 2015.

“The Labour Party is heading into a general election with no plan and a hung parliament at the end because of it,” Mr Sunak said. “Keir Starmer propped up in Downing Street by the SNP, Liberal Democrats and the Greens would be a disaster for Britain.” Since the only coalition this country has had in recent years was led by the Tories, and successfully governed for five years, this is not an entirely plausible line of attack. Moreover, the decline of the SNP – unless it is halted by the new leader John Swinney – will be a big help to Labour.

The observant will have also spotted that this was an acknowledgment by the Prime Minister that he was unlikely to win the election, a reflection of reality, perhaps, but surprising nonetheless. Leaders of majority governments are reluctant to concede defeat six months before polling.

Mr Sunak’s biggest challenge is to arrest the drift of his own voters to Reform, without simultaneously alienating undecideds who have hardly warmed to Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and who could be won back. As in 1997, there is a tactical vote going on to support any candidate who will defeat the Tory.

As the pollster Sir John Curtice pointed out, last Thursday Labour’s support increased most (at the expense of the Liberal Democrats) in wards where they started off second to the Conservatives, while the Liberal Democrats advanced most (and Labour did less well) in wards where they were the principal challengers locally. This is why the Conservative Party lost nearly one in two of the council seats it was trying to defend.

So will good economic statistics help the Tories avoid the meltdown being predicted even by ex-ministers like Suella Braverman? This is where the paradox of false expectations takes hold.

Mr Sunak is relying on his “plan for growth” being so apparent by November that voters forget the past 14 years and either give the Tories another term or decline to dish out a hammering.

Yet it does not work that way. The 1997 election defeat, the worst for the Conservatives since 1906, followed a long period of economic improvement. It took place in the fifth year of sustained growth, with output more than 8 per cent higher than at its previous peak in 1990.

By the time the country went to the polls in May 1997, GDP growth was running at 3.5 per cent, living standards were rising, consumer spending was rampant, unemployment had fallen substantially, and the UK had a greater proportion of its people in work than any other major European country. Mr Sunak would kill for figures like that and yet the Tories still lost.

By contrast, in 1992 the Conservatives had been in office for 13 years, Labour was ahead in the polls, the economy was mired in recession, unemployment was more than three million and the housing market was ravaged by a wave of repossessions and negative equity caused by rising interest rates. And yet the Tories won even though Labour sought then, as now, to project an image of fiscal and monetary rectitude. Indeed, it was John Smith’s shadow budget, intended to demonstrate prudence, that exposed Labour to the Tory “tax bombshell” attack ad.

If there is a lesson to be drawn, it is that the country keeps a-hold of nurse in bad times for fear of finding something worse. If Mr Sunak is pinning his hopes on an improving economy rescuing his premiership, the experience of the two elections in the 1990s suggests he would be better off telling voters that things are bad and can only get worse under Labour. He could always gaslight them into believing it.