There are strong and serious reasons why this new Conservative optimism is neither deserved nor set in stone
Month on month, opinion polls normally only move by fairly small amounts. In the world of political polls, three points up or down is a big excitement, while a four or five point shift is borderline sensational. When a poll number rises by a dozen points over a two-month period, therefore, it is right to take serious notice. When the beneficiaries of such a poll boost are David Cameron and George Osborne for their management of the economy, as is the case this week, it is hardly surprising that the Conservative mood right now is so chipper. In a world in which "it's the economy, stupid" still inescapably remains the guiding star for strategists of all political parties, the new Guardian-ICM finding that support for Tory economic management has risen from 28% to 40% in a few short weeks looks like Christmas in August.
It is unlikely that Tuesday's news from the housing market will have done much to wipe the smiles off Conservative faces either. The latest monthly survey of estate agents shows that house prices are up for the fourth consecutive month, as home buyers return to the market, lured in part by the chancellor's schemes to encourage first-time buyers. The result is the fastest rise in house prices since before the financial crash in 2008, concentrated in but not confined to London and the south-east, with the renewed appetite for property helping to fuel the perception that an economic corner has been turned. The perception may be a false one in very many ways, but this is unlikely to worry Messrs Cameron and Osborne, who will be looking for even greater polling dividends from the signs of a return to a familiar possessive individualist feelgood factor as the election nears.
In the short-term, the Conservatives may well get some of those dividends. It would be very foolish to dismiss the possibility. If nothing else, the belief among Conservative MPs that a new chapter has begun will make party management easier this autumn. By the same token, any Tory advance will cause further Labour anxieties, increasing the pressure on Ed Miliband to send out stronger signals of what a Labour government would do, even though his party remains uncertain as to what those signals should actually be.
But there are strong and serious reasons why this new Conservative optimism is neither deserved nor set in stone. On Tuesday, for instance, hard on the heels of the housing market news came the announcement of a 4.1% rise in rail fares from next January. For many commuters, a lot of whom live in marginal seats, that will mean an extra £200 or more a year on already over-large travel costs at a time when their real wages are continuing to fall and any rise in their housing asset value remains theoretical rather than actual. Ministerial claims that a corner has been turned will sound hollow to thousands of middle-class families who face another fall in their real incomes in 2014.
Nor, in the wake of the financial crisis, can politicians lazily assume that the cost and standard of living will be the only yardsticks by which they will be judged. That may have been true a generation ago. It is less true now – and it certainly ought to be. This new generation of voters has learned the hard way that a house price bubble is not the bedrock of economic prosperity and security that many of their 1980s forebears believed before they started thinking about their old-age care and health needs. This era's priorities are for more affordable house-building and for a more soundly based, less inflationary, housing-finance system to go with them. Mr Osborne's schemes have made this less not more achievable.
All this is part of the challenge facing Ed Miliband and Ed Balls this autumn. It is not a hopeless task, even on the figures in this week's poll. Only one voter in three currently embraces the Tories. So the spike of Conservative optimism has a shallower base than the current noise level suggests. Most of the others, presumably, would be open to a credible alternative – if Labour can now supply one.