Chris Mason: We stand on the threshold of a landmark election

The general election campaign is all but over.

In the last few weeks, recent precedent suggests up to one in five voters have already voted, by post.

Tomorrow, it is the big moment for everyone else.

It is six weeks to the day since Prime Minister Rishi Sunak got a drenching in Downing Street and this roadshow of persuasion began.

So, what has changed, what hasn’t changed and what does this tell us about where we find ourselves?

The stand-out fact at the heart of this campaign is that for all the noise and hullaballoo over the past month-and-a-half, the colossal gap in the opinion polls between Labour and the Conservatives has barely budged.

Conservatives, from the top down, are braced for defeat - and a potentially catastrophic one at that.

Labour, poll after poll after poll suggests, are miles ahead.

Sir Keir Starmer and his Labour team have been quietly preparing for government, while wracked with a paranoia about complacency.

Nothing the prime minister has attempted, both during his conventional time in office and then during this campaign, appears to have made much difference to his political fortunes.

The Conservative Party is adept at chameleon-like reinvention – after all, we’ve seen a succession of Tory prime ministers defining themselves against the record of their immediate predecessor.

But that strategy began to collide with its own contradictions.

Was Rishi Sunak seeking to own the long Conservative stint in office, or distance himself from it?

How many of the myriad challenges the UK faces could realistically be blamed on any other party?

The past 14 years of Conservative-led government add up to a stint in office shaped by two referenda - Scottish independence and Brexit - and the international shocks of Covid and the war in Ukraine.

The referenda recast our domestic politics and our relations with our nearest neighbours.

One propelled the Scottish National Party to unprecedented heights, altitude from which it expects to tumble tomorrow.

The other - leaving the European Union - convulsed the continent, the country and, in particular, the Conservative Party, emboldening, chewing up and recasting the Tories in ways still visible now.

The cast of Conservative MPs elected in 2019 was an improbable coalition, sent to Westminster by an electorate collectively desperate to see the Brexit impasse end and the UK’s departure from the EU delivered.

That done, the Jenga-like combination of northern English Tories - many of whom wanted more state intervention in the economy - and traditional small-state Tories, often in the south, quickly proved very wobbly indeed under Boris Johnson’s chaotic leadership.

And while most people don't pay attention to politics most of the time, even the least engaged – here and around the world – noticed the UK, that longstanding bastion of political predictability, churn through three prime ministers in a matter of a few weeks in autumn 2022.

In this context, I suspect the history books, shorn as they are of the daily noise of news, may be quite kind to Rishi Sunak: a man who brought an element of political and economic stability to the UK after the absence of either, confronting political headwinds that precedent suggested would be almost impossible to withstand.

But stopping other countries laughing at us and managing a sluggish economy at best – after nearly two decades of pitifully weak economic growth, traced back to the economic crisis of 2007 and 2008 – was never likely to be a general election-winning formula.

And there is another thing: no party has ever won five general elections in a row in modern times.

That is the brutal truth of history, from Rishi Sunak’s point of view, that he walks towards tomorrow.

But there is another brutal truth, from Keir Starmer’s point of view too: Labour lose far more elections than they win, including ones people might expect them to win.

Labour has lost four general elections in a row.

While some might have expected them to have a wobble or a panic at some point in this campaign, particularly if it looked like the Tories were catching them up, Labour have been as disciplined as they have been careful, studiously protecting what they hope is a consistent enough lead to point not just to victory, but a comfortable one.

They talk a lot about their planned "missions" in government.

Their mission in opposition has been to reassure; to show recent Conservative voters they can be trusted not least with the economy and national security.

They have tried to pull off the balancing act of sounding like a government in waiting without sounding complacent; setting out what they’d like to do without implying getting to do it is guaranteed.

They know too that if they do win, they will inherit bleak public finances and a restless electorate – a wave of optimism and goodwill seems unlikely, however sizeable any majority.

And even a big majority doesn’t make some things easier.

Sir Keir Starmer acknowledged to me this week in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire, that Labour would let prisoners out early because the jails are full, just as the Conservatives have done.

Alongside those stubbornly sticky opinion poll leads for Labour, the other big fact of this long campaign was the arrival, after characteristic teasing, of Nigel Farage – as both a candidate and the new leader of Reform UK.

The Conservative Party’s grinning nightmare personified, his party’s uptick in the opinion polls matching the uptick in the blood pressure of so many Tories.

And I note a new name in politics, who I reckon might be worth keeping an eye on: Zia Yusuf.

Mr Yusuf is a hugely successful thirtysomething tech entrepreneur who has donated hundreds of thousands of pounds to Reform UK.

This and him being Muslim is interesting in its own right, counterintuitive as it might be to some that he would back Reform.

But to listen to him at a giant rally in Birmingham at the weekend was to hear Reform’s political case in a markedly different register to that of Nigel Farage.

No less passionate or full of conviction – not least in his view that immigration is out of control – but a different tone.

A future political leader I found myself pondering, if he maintains his appetite for politics.

Next the Liberal Democrats, where if services to absurdity were the route to electoral success, they would be heading for a landslide.

Leader Sir Ed Davey’s midlife crisis just so happened to coincide with a general election campaign, and no end of zany capers followed.

In the clamour for our attention, the Liberal Democrats have always struggled, elbowed out of the limelight by Westminster’s giants, the Conservatives and Labour, and for much of the last decade dislodged from third place in the Commons by the Scottish National Party.

Sir Ed’s stunts have certainly caught the eye, and he can point to his difficult life, losing both parents to cancer as a child and being the father of a disabled son, to claim that messing about isn’t inconsistent with being serious-minded and aware of the struggles of many.

The Lib Dems are chipper: they are confident they can capitalise on what they are certain is a disdain for the Conservatives in parts of the country which are not enamoured by Labour.

It looks likely, given how they privately estimate they might do and how privately the Scottish National Party fear they might fare, that the Liberal Democrats can overtake the SNP to become Westminster’s third biggest party.

If this happens, it would push back the strength of the political case for another Scottish independence referendum and embolden the platform from which the Lib Dems would speak – guaranteed as they would be, for instance, to be able to contribute to Prime Minister’s Questions every week.

And then there is the Green Party of England and Wales.

How might they fare in parts of Brighton, Bristol and Suffolk, for a start, where they are throwing considerable efforts?

Let’s see.

In other words, politics could be reshaped beyond the biggest parties, as well as between them.

We stand on the threshold of what looks like a landmark general election.

But time is running out for folk like me talking about all this stuff.

Soon it will be over to you to decide how things look on Friday morning.