The famed strategist Helmuth von Moltke once said that “no plan survives contact with the enemy”, and this is as true of politics as war. Even if a party goes into a campaign with a carefully prepared grid (and there’s little sign of that), over six weeks it will be at the mercy of both the other side and, even less predictably, outside events.

Will last night’s shooting in Hackney, in which three adults were injured and a child left in “serious condition”, prove to be the sort of bolt from the blue that campaign strategists dread?

It surely ought to be; with Rishi Sunak’s decision to try and frame the election on the vague idea of ‘security’, how can the safety of the public not be front and centre?

But we haven’t heard much from either party on law and order yet, beyond Labour’s promise to adopt a ‘Blair-style approach’ to policing the streets.

It’s no mystery why the Conservatives aren’t putting the spotlight on crime. In the weeks before Rishi Sunak called the election, we learned that the shortage of prison places has become so acute that ministers have extended an emergency scheme to release inmates 70 days early.

Worse still, leaked guidance to chief constables revealed that they are being advised to pause so-called “non-priority arrests”, which mostly seemed to mean those where the police hadn’t got round to doing basic work like checking CCTV.

That comes on top of a growing trend of judges handing down lenient sentences because they know there isn’t the capacity to jail everyone they send down — when they even get to trial, that is, because years of underfunding have seen courts pushing back hearings for years.

On paper, this should be an open goal for Labour. The core problem driving many of these problems is the Government’s failure to build new prisons, both because the Treasury hates spending money, but crucially because even the most hardline Tory MP tends to fiercely oppose any new jail in their constituency.

Sir Keir Starmer could pledge to build a raft of new rural prisons in Conservative (and Liberal Democrat) seats, and score a quick win by reversing insane decisions such as Ken Clarke’s closure and sale of HMP Lancaster, which is currently a tourist attraction.

As yet, however, he hasn’t because as a raft of Tory MPs go, the problems of building in Britain won’t go with them.  Nor does it seem likely that Starmer’s MPs will want to see scarce public funding diverted into law and order if it means their preferred spending programmes lose out; and that’s before we even get to the Left’s ideological discomfort with proven police tactics such as stop and search.

Both leaders may also be helped by the press. It’s a sad fact that shocking crime stories have become so common as to be part of the background noise of British news, meaning even an individually shocking story such as last night’s is less likely to stand out.

Moreover, the problem is so widespread that there isn’t a single, obvious campaign demand that might induce the papers to focus on it.

One can well imagine how much the Hackney shooting might have been amplified if, for example, this country had not already banned handguns: multiple days of inside-spread coverage, thundering editorials, the works. But we did (for all the good it did), so now a shooting is just another story.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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