The Tories have abandoned the one thing that made them electable

Conservative pragmatism has been torn to shreds by the howling gales of astonishing incompetence

Source - Daily Telegraph 25/06/24

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The outcome of the general election is now considered such a foregone conclusion that the post-mortem examination is being conducted while the corpse is still twitching. Many pundits and politicians seem to think that the Government’s imminent demise can be explained by its failure to listen to one faction or another.

There are, for example, plenty of one-nation Tories who argue that elections are won on the centre ground and their party lost its way when it lurched to the Right in order to protect that flank against Ukip, Brexit Party and Reform insurgencies.

At the same time, many on the Right counter that the Conservative Party is no longer conservative enough because it has been corrupted by “wets” who have hiked the tax burden to a post-war high and embraced net zero.

Certainly, the Tories have lurched around so much that they have provided more than enough grist for everyone’s mills. But the fact that it’s possible to make both cases suggests neither provides the full picture.

What’s more, if either faction were closer to the correct diagnosis, you’d expect the many former Conservative voters who are now jumping ship to be predominantly picking either port or starboard. In fact, as the latest Ipsos survey for the Financial Times shows, they’re throwing themselves into the sea in all directions.

It found that a third of the voters who planned to back the Conservatives just four months ago have now abandoned the party. Of these, 8pc say they will now vote for Reform UK, 6pc are switching to Labour, 7pc are undecided and 9pc say they may well not bother to vote at all.

Two summers ago, the Tories lost two by-elections on the same night. Such things happen midterm. More telling was how their opponents performed: Labour won Wakefield on a decent swing but lost its deposit in Tiverton and Honiton while the Liberal Democrats won on a huge swing in Tiverton and lost their deposit in Wakefield.

At the time, the election analyst Matt Singh pointed out that this demonstrated “industrial scale tactical voting”. It was clear from that point on that the next general election would be the Tories versus the ABCs (Anyone But the Conservatives).

(As a side note, it’s worth pointing out that the MRP polls released over the last few days predicting that the Tories will only scrape something like 53 to 155 seats don’t really take this kind of tactical voting into account.)

So what’s really going on? In the essay in which he reviews the conservative historian Keith Fielding’s History of England, AJP Taylor experiences an epiphany: the history of the Tory party, he realises, is one that is almost completely devoid of big ideas.

He goes on to conclude that the appeal of the most successful party in British electoral history lies not with ideology but rather in its pragmatism and competence. This is what today’s incarnation of the Conservative Party has lost and why it’s losing: every successful party is a coalition and the broad centre-Right tent has been torn to shreds by howling gales of astonishing incompetence.

Of course, much of the chaos of recent years has undoubtedly been the result of external factors. Equally, it’s clearly nonsense to suggest, as many do, that the Tories have achieved nothing.

Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt have done a pretty good job of taking tough decisions and steadying the economy since the Liz Truss debacle. Indeed, there’s a theory doing the rounds that Sunak made a massive error in calling a summer election.

Had he waited until autumn, the nation could have been heading to the polls on the back of two quarters of decent growth, several months of wages outpacing inflation and at least one cut in interest rates.

Maybe. But just think of what Sunak may very well have had to contend with over the summer: record small-boat arrivals, constant legalistic wrangling over his Rwanda plan and continual failure to cat-herd his increasingly non-compliant backbenchers.

And if party insiders were prepared to bet on the timing of the election in the summer, they sure as hell would have done it in autumn. The Conservative government can now boast more “-gates” than a thousand-acre farm. What are the chances they’d all have kept their noses clean between now and September?

Of course, the flipside to the general election being decided by a desire on the part of the electorate to rid itself of the Tories is that it is certainly not matched by any great enthusiasm for the Labour Party.

Among those about to deliver Sir Keir Starmer a stonking majority will be women worried about Labour’s attitude to trans activism, Jews worried about newly minted ministers’ past support for Jeremy Corbyn, parents of kids at private school worried about Labour’s plans to slap VAT on fees, and business executives worried about overly-restrictive changes to workers’ rights.

In this, do many voters resemble turkeys voting for Christmas? Quite possibly. But many will take the view that it’s still a perfectly rational choice given that Tory rule has come to resemble a semi-continuous festival of Yuletide feasts.

Those likely to vote for Starmer will be doing so because the Labour leader has persuaded them that, if equipped with a detailed map and a high-powered torch, he has half a chance of being able to locate his own conclusion.

There was a time when such basic anatomical-orienteering was a prerequisite for the most lowly of public officials. It says something about the depths to which the UK electorate’s expectations have fallen that it’s about the best that most people are hoping for from the next prime minister.