Election campaign trails: How party leaders are upping the ante as poll day looms
This week the party leaders made their final pleas to voters. The Labour and Lib Dem leaders visited some of their most ambitious targets so far, while the prime minister took a scattergun approach, fighting for votes in even some of the safest of Tory seats.
Watch their journeys this week in our animated map below.
This campaign is being fought on new electoral boundaries, with many constituencies undergoing significant changes since 2019.
For the purposes of this analysis, we use notional results based on calculations by Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, honorary professors at the University of Exeter, which estimate the 2019 election seat results if they had taken place on the new constituency boundaries.
Crunch time
We’re fast approaching election day. In their closing gambits, the Conservatives have been trying to claw back straying voters and convince undecided ones, while Labour have endeavoured to stick to the script and avoid any missteps.
The Conservatives are fending off a potential Labour landslide and are fighting on multiple fronts, while both leaders are wary of losing votes to smaller parties or apathy where people believe the result is already a foregone conclusion.
The big picture
It’s been a long five weeks for the Tories, whose campaign has been mired with several high-profile embarrassments: from Sunak’s D-Day gaffe to the growing sleaze scandal surrounding insider betting allegations at Westminster.
This hasn’t helped their attempt to narrow the polls, and the campaign has remained deep in defensive territory throughout. The prime minister has visited seats with an average 25% Conservative majority.
Nearly 9 in 10 (88%) of Sunak’s 51 constituency visits have been to seats his party is defending. Fourteen of those are places where the Conservatives’ closest rivals are the Lib Dems, and the remaining 34 in places where Labour is the strongest challenger.
In contrast, 84% of Starmer’s 44 constituency visits have been to seats Labour are targeting. All but four of them have been places the Tories are defending.
Labour’s challenge has been to generate enthusiasm for a Starmer government. On average, the target seats he has visited need a 10.5 point vote swing to become Labour gains – just above the figure that Tony Blair achieved in 1997.
Labour must achieve higher than this – a record swing of 12 percentage points from the Conservatives – to secure a majority, however, and Starmer has been visiting seats that require a vote swing as high as 18 points.
The Labour leader has mostly steered clear of the primarily Conservative vs Lib Dem battlegrounds in the south, but has ventured to parts of the South East that only Blair has previously managed to conquer.
Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey has seemingly been having the most fun on the campaign trail, with a series of attention-grabbing stunts including photo ops on rollercoasters and dips in the Thames.
All but one of his 40 campaign visits have been to seats the Lib Dems are targeting, including one Labour-held and one SNP-held seat, with the rest of his time spent targeting Conservative-held seats.
How does the ground battle match the digital one?
Looking at data from Who Targets Me, Sky’s partner for our Online Campaign Team, we’ve now got a pretty full picture of how the main two parties have using political advertising on social media.
The Conservatives have consistently trailed Labour both in terms of spend and in the number of adverts posted (you’d expect those to correlate).
But there doesn’t seem to be any coherence to the current campaign – not even a strategy of retrenchment, as Tom King from Who Targets Me notes: “it appears there is no directive, and every seat is sorting itself out.”
Labour has maintained its blanket coverage. And the tone of its adverts is very different.
They tend to focus on Labour and its central message: 22 per cent of all of the more than 5,500 adverts they’ve put up have contained the message “Change”.
The Conservatives have been a lot more negative. 83 per cent of their adverts mention Labour – and only 1 per cent mention their own leader Rishi Sunak. It’s definitely a rearguard action.
Hiding in plain sight
One theme that has been shared across the two main parties’ campaigns is their reluctance to send their leaders to the public or large crowds.
Rishi Sunak has been to see small crowds at many business locations, and the micro-management of his audiences was revealed early in the campaign when at one event it transpired that supposed members of the public were Conservative councillors.
Sir Keir Starmer has played on his football links, visiting two stadiums including Northampton Town this week, but has likewise mostly stuck to closely managed events.
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One leader who hasn’t been afraid of crowds is Reform’s Nigel Farage. Starting his campaign on a pub bench in Clacton, this week he had something of a homecoming in Newton Abbot where 1,500 spectators came to see him speak on Monday. The town was the location of UKIP’s headquarters in their heyday.
Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, has also had a much more public-facing campaign in his various campaign stunts.
The Greens are the only ones to have really made use of celebrity endorsement. This week they won the vocal support of two Hughs – chef Fearnley-Whittingstall and actor Grant.
Upping the ante
The types of seats the Labour and Lib Dem leaders have visited have been markedly different this week.
Sir Keir Starmer has been to increasingly more ambitious targets, visiting Leicestershire North West this week which requires an 18-point swing for Labour to gain, the highest on his trail so far.
That’s also been the trend for Sir Ed Davey. In the final week of campaigning, he’s visited seats where the Liberal Democrats need a swing of 17 points on average to gain, up from 12 points in the previous week.
The prime minister has been less consistent. Indicative of the broad coalition of voters that Johnson built and Sunak has to defend, his visits have spanned from the most marginal defences to what should be the safest of majorities.
Popular places
Over the last 37 days, the three English main party leaders have made 135 visits to 119 unique constituencies. That’s more than 18% of the UK’s seats covered by Sunak, Starmer and Davey.
The seats with the most visits, at three apiece, are Redcar in the North East, Wimbledon in London, and Sunak’s own constituency Richmond & Northallerton in Yorkshire.
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Redcar, visited twice by Sunak and once by Starmer, is a Conservative defence where the Conservative minister candidate is looking vulnerable to Labour.
Davey has his sights set on the highly marginal seat of Wimbledon in London, which the Lib Dems have never won before. He’s visited twice, while Sunak has been to the Conservative defence once on the campaign trail.
And the prime minister has visited his own constituency three times, most recently this week. He defends a 46.9% majority but some MRP polls say there’s a chance he’ll lose it.
Dr Hannah Bunting is a Sky News elections analyst and co-director of The Elections Centre at the University of Exeter.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
Sky News can reveal that the government has rowed back on a national compensation scheme for victims of child sexual abuse, despite it being promised under the previous Conservative administration.
Warning – this story contains references to sexual and physical abuse
A National Redress Scheme was one of 20 key recommendations made by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), but a Home Office report reveals the government has scrapped it because of the cost.
Marie, who is 71, suffered alleged sexual, physical, and emotional abuse at Greenfield House Convent in St Helens, Merseyside, between 1959 and 1962, and is still fighting for compensation.
Greenfield House Convent, where Marie says she was abused
As soon as she arrived as a six-year-old, Marie says her hair was cut off, her name changed, and she experienced regular beatings from the nuns and students.
She claims a nun instigated the violence, including when Marie was held down so that her legs were “spread-eagled” as she was sexually abused with a coat hanger.
Merseyside Police investigated claims of abuse at the convent, but in 2016, a suspect died before charges could be brought.
Marie has received an apology from the Catholic body that ran the home; she tried to sue them, but her claim was rejected because it was filed too long after the alleged abuse.
Marie, 71, is still fighting for compensation for the abuse she says she suffered as a child
In February, ministers said the law would change for victims of sexual abuse trying to sue institutions for damages, which was a recommendation from the IICSA.
Previously, people had to make a civil claim before they were 21, unless the victim could prove a fair trial could proceed despite the time lapse.
Campaigners argued for the time limit to be removed as, on average, victims wait 26 years to come forward. Changes to the 1980 Limitation Act could lead to more people making claims.
Peter Garsden, President of The Association of Child Abuse Lawyers
Civil cases ‘can take three to five years’
But Peter Garsden, president of the Association of Child Abuse Lawyers, worries that when it comes to historical abuse where the defendant is dead, institutions will still argue that it is impossible to have a fair trial and will fight to have the case thrown out of court.
Mr Garsden said it takes “between three and five years” for a civil case to get to trial.
He warned that claimants “can end up losing if you go through that process. Whereas the Redress Scheme would be quicker, much more straightforward, and much more likely to give justice to the victims”.
Victim awarded £10 compensation
Jimbo, who was a victim of abuse at St Aidan’s children’s home in Cheshire, took his case to the High Court twice and the Court of Appeal three times, but, after 13 years, all he ended up with was £10 for his bus fare to court.
Despite the Lord Justice of Appeal saying he believed that the abuse had occurred, Jimbo lost his claim because of the time limit for child sexual abuse claims to be made.
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Neither Marie nor Jimbo is likely to benefit from the removal of the time limit for personal injury claims, which is why Mr Garsden is calling on the government to implement a National Redress Scheme for victims of sexual abuse, as recommended by the IICSA.
Hundreds of millions paid to victims
The governments in Scotland and Northern Ireland have set up compensation schemes and paid hundreds of millions of pounds to victims.
In 2023, the then Conservative government said a similar scheme would be organised for England and Wales.
But the Home Office admitted in its Tackling Child Sexual Abuse: Progress Update that it “is not currently taking forward any further steps on the IICSA proposal for a separate, national financial redress scheme for all survivors of child sexual abuse”.
“In the current fiscal environment, this recommendation is very difficult to take forward,” it added.
For victims, the scheme was the last chance of compensation for a lifetime blighted by abuse.
“The money is about justice and about all the other people who have had to suffer this abuse,” Marie said.
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