The Queen, the election and Royal Ascot

The guidance is that a crowded diary means there isn’t time to rehearse.

But I hear other forces were at play. The Queen wanted to be at Royal Ascot the rest of that week so wasn’t about to throw away her betting slips and race back for the usual Wednesday state opening which could otherwise have happened on 21st June.

The government wasn’t mad keen on waiting until the next week and 30th June for the traditional Wednesday State Opening of Parliament because that would limit the amount of time there was to start work on Bills ahead of the Summer recess and look like they were getting on with the job.

One source suggested it would also limit the options for an early, Summer Budget, something which was still in play as a possibility, even though the Chancellor said only in March that the country had been subjected to too many fiscal events in recent times and the government would be cutting back to an annual one in the autumn.

All of which might sound like hubris from the Tories when not so much as a postal vote has been cast.

But Labour MPs are talking of anyone with a majority under 9,000 being under threat and one Labour former Cabinet minister said that Labour MPs who held less than 45% share of the vote in the last general election were under threat.

Chatting to voters in South London this lunchtime I found them surprisingly unsure which political leader’s slogan was “strong and stable government in the national interest.” Quite a few thought it might be Jeremy Corbyn’s slogan. But when you asked people how they see Theresa May, quite a few say “strong”.

Deborah Mattinson, who worked on every Labour general election campaign from 1987 to 2005, focus grouped swing voters throughout the last election. She remembers towards the end some of them saying that they were sick to death of hearing the Tory slogan “long term economic plan.” When she returned to the voters to ask how they’d ended up voting (most of them Tory) and why, she said they often replied: “Ah, well the Tories are the ones with the long term economic plan aren’t they?”

We also met one older voter who said he wouldn’t be voting for Tim Farron because he was “always going on about gay sex.”

Elections can be a very cruel business.