Labour soon got over its surprise, leaving the Conservatives reeling in shocked disarray

The defining image of the last general election was Boris Johnson driving a digger emblazoned with “Get Brexit Done” through a fake wall made of polystyrene bricks. This proved to be a presentiment that he was about to demolish a load of Labour seats before going on to do the same to standards in public life.

Rishi Sunak made an early bid to provide the enduring visual metaphor of campaign 2024 when he presented his hunched and drenched back to the cameras after making his announcement on Downing Street. I have never seen, and I’ve witnessed quite a lot of them, a prime minister launch their appeal for re-election in such a dismal fashion. Even incumbents who know in their bones that they are fated to lose usually manage to invest the moment with some authority and dignity. Mr Sunak resembled a drowned ferret during a speech that was rendered near inaudible because he proved unequal to the fight with pelting rain and a protester’s boom box blasting out New Labour’s 1997 victory anthem. Every wag at Westminster chortled: “Things can only get wetter”. If your central electoral pitch is that you are the man with a plan, best to have someone on your staff who knows how to erect a covering or hold an umbrella.

As he demonstrated at the launch of his pledge cards, the Labour leader has succeeded in de-risking perceptions of his party

Who scares wins. That has been the motto of many, often successful Conservative election campaigns. Fear may not be an edifying strategy for securing power, but the Tories have repeatedly demonstrated that it can be highly effective. Time and again, they have persuaded voters that Labour is just too risky to be trusted with government. The “red scare” of 1924, whipped up with the aid of the fraudulent Zinoviev letter, brought an abrupt end to the short life of the first Labour government. The “tax bombshells” dropped on Neil Kinnock in 1992 exploded his dreams of becoming prime minister. Tory claims that Ed Miliband would wobble atop a “coalition of chaos” helped to floor that Labour hopeful in 2015. The big scare has often been a winning formula for the Tories.

So it was pretty much inevitable that Rishi Sunak would press a quivering finger on the fear button. Not least because he is so short of any other ideas for making the general election look competitive for his party. He’s previously tried marketing himself as Mr Stability, Mr Delivery and Mr Change. None of these iterations has put a dent in Labour’s headline poll ratings. They insistently place Sir Keir Starmer’s party about 20 points ahead of the Tories. In his most recent attempt at a relaunch, an exercise he performs almost as often as he changes his undies, the Tory leader tried another costume. This time he cloaked himself in the garb of Mr Security. In what Downing Street puffed as a big speech, the prime minister tried to chill the country’s bones with the warning that Britain is entering a very dangerous period. His ostensible subject was the threat from “an axis of authoritarian states”. His electoral purpose was to try to build an argument that voters will be safer sticking with him than taking a punt on Labour.