At the end of next week, I think politics will look quite different. We’ll have had another TV debate, and this time one in a format that suits Starmer, and I’m sure his team will have pointed out his flaws. Reform, Nigel Farage’s party, will continue their rise in the polls. And, I think, they’ll overtake the Conservatives. Not once in post-war history has the governing party finished third place. It is unprecedented.
Various political analysts have tried to pinpoint where it all went wrong for the Tories. Was it partygate, or appointing Chris Pincher, or electing Liz Truss, or the direction of Sunak’s government, or the shift to the right? My stance is that this disaster for the Conservative Party has been a decade in the making.
To recap: In January 2013, David Cameron went for another term in office – successfully – and fought off UKIP by pledging a referendum on EU membership. That referendum resulted in a vote to leave the EU in 2016, and David Cameron resigned. Theresa May became leader and attempted to deliver her version of Brexit, and called the 2017 election to strengthen her majority. The Conservatives lost their majority, and Theresa May wasn’t able to unite the party on Brexit. In 2019, she resigned and Boris Johnson took over. Again, Johnson couldn’t persuade Parliament to back his version of Brexit. He called the 2019 election, and this time his leadership was about a single issue: getting Brexit done.
That sounds great for Boris Johnson. He enjoyed a popular couple of years in office, firstly delivering on his main pledge, and then leading a highly-approved (at the time) response to the pandemic. But soon, the unity was over. A party united around Brexit, and a country united around getting through coronavirus, now had nothing to unite behind. Boris Johnson introduced levelling up, but this faced two problems. First of all, it was place based, and Conservative MPs represent two very different types of places – think Jeremy Hunt compared to Jonathan Gullis. Second, this was effectively “improve outcomes”. Surely every MP should be united behind better sociodemographic and economic outcomes anyway?
Thanks to partygate – or rather, Boris Johnson’s lying about partygate – the party found itself with no ideology, no goal, and now no leader to unite behind. Cracks begun to show, with traditional Tory MPs finding themselves at odds with the 2019 intake. MPs who had won (and won, and won, and won) their seats based on centre-right politics were in the same party as those who found themselves in a job thanks to Johnson’s personality.
As the Conservative Party began to slip in the polls, it resorted to more divisive policies, and for two reasons – largely due to the aforementioned divisions, but the long Conservative rule meant the party was stale and out of new ideas despite being desperate for them. Not only bad for the country and liberal democracy, these tactics also further divided MPs. The Rwanda plan (which Rishi Sunak didn’t even agree with), the arguments about trans rights, and now national service are all tactics seen as necessity but which do damage to the Conservative Party.
If the Reform Party ever get into government – which I find unlikely in this election cycle, and probably the next, but not an impossibility in the long term – they are likely to face precisely this challenge. They have both an asset and a threat in their Boris-like campaign coalition. A charismatic leader and an easy soundbite to rally around can win power, but it can also cause the demise of a party if not properly planned.
Let’s say Reform get into power with a flagship aim of net-zero migration. They achieve it within 2 years. What next? It is a deeply right wing party that simultaneously supports British institutions like the NHS which is socialist in its roots. Social conservatism isn’t popular in the UK and may not be uniformly popular in Reform supporters. There is no coherent economic view in the party, with agreement on tax and spending coming secondary to immigration figures. Whilst it may enjoy short term electoral success, the Reform Party is in no position for real, long-term government.
Lewis Compton 