ne by one, they tumble. Oriel College, Oxford, finally voted to remove its statue of the Victorian imperialist Cecil Rhodes this week. On the same day, football reopened with players wearing Black Lives Matter logos, and taking a knee in moving solidarity with the worldwide protests against police brutality. We can see social change unfolding right before our eyes, yet the government seems curiously determined not to read the room. “I take the knee for two people: the Queen and the missus when I asked her to marry me,” said Dominic Raab, when asked if he would do it. For good measure, the foreign secretary added that he thought the gesture had something to do with Game of Thrones. But if this government’s instincts are firmly on the wrong side of history, unfortunately that doesn’t always mean being on the wrong side of the electorate. Dominic Cummings doesn’t have time to conduct all his focus groups personally these days, but Downing Street is continually – some Tory MPs would say obsessively – testing itself against public opinion nonetheless. No 10 barely breathes without calculating the electoral impact, particularly on those “red wall” seats where lifelong Labour supporters turned Tory in order to get Brexit done. Will they be infuriated by Raab’s ignorance of the gesture’s history, his description of it as symbolising “subjugation”? Or might they just agree, as many longstanding Tories will, with the dogwhistle message that it’s time to get up off their knees and stop apologising? Either way, arguing about it draws us helpfully away from issues the government finds much harder to explain away, and I don’t just mean the thousands of lives lost to coronavirus. The data now suggests an emerging public consensus that Boris Johnson mishandled the Black Lives Matter protests, just as voters think the previous Conservative administration fumbled its response to the Grenfell Tower tragedy and let down the Windrush generation. No wonder Downing Street would rather pick a fight over Winston Churchill – or anything else that puts Labour’s young, liberal urban supporters at odds with its base in northern towns – than dwell on subjects that make its own side embarrassed and uncomfortable. We are seeing a concerted effort to shift the government back on to safer ground, by which it means anything that divides its opponents. This week’s sudden decision to fold the Department for International Development back into the Foreign Office may sound as if plucked from thin air. But it’s effectively a pivot towards what government would have been doing this spring if it hadn’t been fighting a pandemic: namely shoring up support among those new Tory voters whose support is still very conditional. The Vote Leave camp inside government has itched for years to curb overseas aid, and knows full well it’s a “wedge” issue. While many Labour supporters will be outraged by the idea of scrapping DfID just as the pandemic hits the world’s poorest people, the message that charity begins at home will resonate with some, particularly the recent converts on whom Johnson’s majority relies. Dumping plans to let people self-identify as trans, as briefed to the Sunday papers? Cummings was running that one through focus groups last autumn, and knows it divides Labour voters. Defending Churchill’s reputation, while threatening jail sentences of up to 10 years for damaging war memorials? It makes Johnson a laughing stock on Twitter, but you should see the fury in some Labour MPs’ inboxes about the defacing of the Cenotaph. More than half of Labour voters want Churchill’s statue to stay up, whether or not they believe he held racist views. Just because something is popular with the government’s target voters, that obviously doesn’t make it right, or mean that it couldn’t become unpopular surprisingly quickly. Given time to unpack an issue and think through consequences they hadn’t foreseen, voters can and do change their minds. But in politics, being one step ahead of the public mood isn’t always as rewarding as it should be, even if you’re right. (Ask Rory Stewart, the Cassandra of the Conservative party, whose passionate calls in early March for ministers to take coronavirus more seriously look prophetic now but didn’t save him from the political wilderness.) And the Cummings strategy is all about encouraging people not to think, just to feel. Culture wars get so bitter because they hinge on something intensely personal: an individual’s sense of themselves. They’re purpose-built to engage hearts over heads, while goading opponents into such a rage that they can’t not rise to poisoned bait. But a trap is still a trap. If this government is positively begging for a fight on one particular square of turf, it’s usually been chosen for a reason. None of this dooms Labour to four glum years of swallowing its principles, or pandering to reactionaries for votes. The populist Donald Trump playbook doesn’t seem to be serving even Trump that well, now that the majority of Americans agree the Black Lives Matter protests have raised issues of substance. Things could easily backfire on Johnson, too. But not unless Labour is relentless in focusing on those issues of substance – especially the ones where Tory voters are uncomfortably split – rather than getting sidetracked by catchy debating points that divide their still shaky electoral coalition. An easy way to see how it’s done is to watch David Lammy calmly brushing off questions about Churchill, before turning the conversation back to subjects such as the Windrush or Grenfell scandals, where broad public opinion is on Labour’s side. (Only one in five voters think the government handled the Grenfell tragedy well; an overwhelming majority thought Windrush migrants should stay in Britain.) Keep the focus on that, and Labour has a chance of building the winning coalition of supporters that Ed Miliband describes in the Guardian this morning. Downing Street’s clumsy response to footballer Marcus Rashford’s brilliant campaign for extending free school meals into the summer holidays, meanwhile, suggests it’s vulnerable when caught by surprise. Reliant on Cummings, it may not be listening enough to its MPs on the ground. For most people, throwing billions at a pandemic but denying food to hungry children simply made no sense at all. Two-thirds of the public, including a clear majority of Conservative voters, supported Rashford over their government. These may be small dots in themselves, but join them and a bigger picture emerges. Johnson and Cummings have between them built a campaign machine to be feared; but that’s very different from running the country, a process in which real people suffer real hurt. Keep the focus on that, and Labour has a chance. But let Downing Street fall back into campaigning mode, gleefully trolling its opponents over statues and symbols and anything else that could be turned into an enraging Daily Telegraph column, and the prime minister breathes a sigh of thoroughly undeserved relief.