Allister Heath
There are two viable ways to respond to an existential threat in the state of nature: fight or flight. You either destroy your predator, or you run away. You don’t just stand still, wave a white flag and wait for the end. The same is true in the political jungle, and yet the Tories’ nervous systems are now so dysfunctional that they have produced neither of the rational physiological responses to the terrifying likelihood of a Labour landslide.
Rather than launching the fight of its life, the Government’s reaction has been to freeze, to keep making the same mistakes, to double-down on the same flawed strategy, to do little and to say even less; as political death wishes go, this one takes some beating.
Wouldn’t it at least make sense to try not to lose the election, and to declare total war against the Labour Party, the Left-wing lawyers, the socialist civil servants and the woke Blob? Would it not be a good idea to seek to regain the initiative or to mould the news agenda? Such an obvious approach is apparently too arduous, too politically incorrect: it’s less controversial to roll over and accept defeat. The Tories cannot even organise a proper putsch: Sir Simon Clarke’s half-hearted attempt at ousting Rishi Sunak was never going to succeed. Clarke is right that the Tories’ current strategy guarantees an electoral massacre – almost all Conservative MPs privately agree – but his colleagues won’t remove the Prime Minister. Apart from anything else, a successful coup requires a leader in waiting who could gain the support of enough MPs while promising significant improvement in the polls.
The Tories are so divided between their three warring factions – the woke Lefties who wouldn’t be out of place in the Liberal Democrats, the centrist careerists, and the squabbling Right-wingers – that they would find it impossible to agree on a successor, let alone to back the sorts of policies that the public might actually want. Sunak’s greatest mistake is an analytical one. He doesn’t understand that Britain’s centre-Right electorate – in common with its counterparts in other Western democracies – has changed dramatically. Potential Tory voters used to be broadly supportive of authority and opposed to Left-wing attempts at disrupting the status quo; today, they are largely insurgents who feel under pressure from a hostile Leftist elite and who believe the economy and society to be broken.
Republican primary voters are now certain to reselect Donald Trump; on the Continent, eurosceptic parties are on the rise everywhere, fuelled further by an eruption of farmers’ protests across Europe. Old centre-Right parties are dying or have entirely reinvented themselves, and populist politics continues to gain ground. The British electorate thought that it was voting for change in 2016 and 2019, but was severely disappointed. Its appetite for radicalism hasn’t waned. It is preparing to punish the Tories for their betrayal, but it hasn’t fallen in love with Keir Starmer, a central figure in the Left-wing, business-as-usual establishment it has come to despise.
British centre-Right voters want competent leadership, but above all radical change. They are desperate for politicians who break the mould, who defy the establishment. They are extremely angry at the state of Britain, and at the record of all the political parties. They are, in other words, and whether we like it or not, on the hunt for a British Trump. To be clear, I don’t mean somebody who cannot tell the truth, or who cannot accept defeat at elections. I mean somebody who, like the former US president, is an outsider, isn’t the product of Westminster, who “tells it as it is”, who is pro-growth, who isn’t hamstrung by net zero or human rights laws, and who would be willing to do what it takes to crack down on crime and regain control of immigration.
Sunak briefly dabbled with a more popular approach to politics, but didn’t communicate it well and quickly reverted to type. He represents a technocratic version of the centre-Right that is actually not very good at solving complex technical problems and which has no future. It can’t truly address immigration, increase growth, build more homes, tackle extremism, reform the NHS properly, reduce welfarism or even fix potholes. The PM’s situation is thus disastrous. The recent YouGov MMR poll in The Telegraph put the Tories on 26 per cent of the vote, even with relatively benign assumptions; the most recent regular YouGov poll has them on 20 per cent, Redfield & Wilton on 22 per cent and WeThink on 23 per cent.
A crucial question is whether Nigel Farage properly re-enters the fray at the head of his very own Reform party. He isn’t quite a British Trump – his appeal is more narrowly on the Right – but he may very well be elected in Clacton and would undoubtedly give his party a huge boost. The Tories fell to 165 seats in 1997 (out of 659) and 156 (out 670) in 1906; their floor this time around could be substantially lower. In the short-term, the Government needs some high-profile Rwanda deportations, a game-changing abolition of inheritance tax, and extended scrutiny of Labour’s more unpopular policies if it is to avoid obliteration. But unless it embraces a very different approach, the most successful political party in history may finally have had its day.
New political vehicles can emerge even under first past the post, as the rise of the Labour Party in the 1920s demonstrates, and the gap in the marketplace is just as wide 100 years on. Will the next conservative Prime Minister really be a member of the Conservative party?
