Will this newly refreshed red-blue battle prove to be the real deal?
Rhetorical lines have been drawn this week, but real choices and arguments loom, and the bouncy feeling around the place may not last, especially when it comes to finding cash for the prime minister’s big promises.
Downing Street sources acknowledge privately that bringing down the welfare bill in the way that Alan Milburn envisages, with his report expected, but not confirmed, to come before the Budget, will need billions spent up front, money the government might struggle to find.
Similarly, to build the council houses Burnham desires to cut the housing benefits bill will need big cheques.
It’s one thing promising those Labour friendly dreams. It’s another, perhaps at the party conference, to answer the much harder question of how the government plans to pay.
It won’t be easy for a mid-term prime minister to find money in the short term that might only produce savings in the years to come.
But Burnham’s Labour are happy to talk about the economy and how they want to help hard-up families, still citing the chaos of Liz Truss and keen to underline the early steps the prime minister has taken to ease the pressure.
With borrowing costs and the country’s debt seriously sky high, the Conservatives are pleased to sketch out a classic left-right argument too.
It’s also true they have both been enjoying the moment of real pressure on their opponents in Reform, who have slipped back in the polls, besieged by claims and counter claims about party funding.
Although this weekend’s mega donation illustrates that Nigel Farage still has the capacity to bust political conventions. The money from the crypto billionaire, Ben Delo, is completely off the charts for our politics.
“To put £36 m in context, one man has donated a sum bigger than Labour’s entire 2024 election budget, bigger than the Conservatives’, and about six times what Reform actually spent,” a senior figure told me.
“It’s the kind of donation that could change how politics is funded in the UK.”
During the last general election campaign Labour raised about £9m, the Tories, Reform and the Lib Dems all less than £2m.
These extra millions give Farage enormous and immediate spending power, and there might be more to come. Although you can bet the other parties will cry foul over the scale of this big money coming from men with deep pockets, not least because Delo was given an unconditional pardon by US President Donald Trump over violating the Bank Secrecy Act.
It would be daft for either of the two main parties to assume this apparent return to traditional two-party politics is here to stay. But it is strangely new to be in a moment when both Labour and the Conservatives are broadly content.
As the new prime minister’s universe settles, a key Labour figure observed: “We’ve had the amuse–bouche and it was very tasty. What happens next?”
