The UK's political season kicks off in two stages: At the beginning of September, when MPs return to Westminster, and then a month later at their party's annual conferences. These are high-profile events, somewhere between trade fairs and campaign congresses, with staff from the Conservative and Labour parties spending months preparing them.

Rishi Sunak's advisors are set to focus on how to change the Tory Prime Minister's image from technocrat to visionary at their Manchester conference, held at the end of September. Keir Starmer and his shadow cabinet will finalize the British left-wing party's program before presenting it to party members in Liverpool in early October. All MPs have the 2024 general election in mind. The Tories have only a faint hope of clinging on to power after 14 years of rule, with the Labour Party looking forward to returning to Downing Street after a long period on the political outskirts.

If polls are to be believed, the game is already over. Since the fall of 2021 and the partygate scandal, which led to Boris Johnson's resignation, Labour has been leading the Conservative Party. Over the previous 12 months, the gap has fluctuated between 15 and 20 points. After the Johnson scandal and Liz Truss's disastrous tenure that followed, Sunak may have reintroduced seriousness and pragmatism to Downing Street, but he has failed to reverse the trend.

Nevertheless, the Labour leadership remains nervous. Elected representatives and party members keep repeating that victory is not a foregone conclusion. Starmer's extreme caution reflects that anxiety. At 61, the former director of public prosecutions for England and Wales, who entered politics only eight years ago, confessed as much in a surprisingly candid interview at the end of July, during the Tony Blair Institute days: "People are inhaling the polls, but that is a mistake. (...) To get from where we landed at the end 2019 to a one-seat Labour majority [in the House of Commons in 2024], is going to take a bigger swing than in 1997 [Tony Blair's Labour triumph]," said Starmer.

Four years ago Labour recorded its worst results since 1935 after presenting particularly left-wing policies, including nationalization and massive public investment, leaving them with just 202 MPs in the House of Commons. That failure was attributed more to the personality and proposals of its then-leader Jeremy Corbyn than to the talents of Boris Johnson, who capitalized on Brexit and gave the Tories an 80-seat majority.

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