Britain wants to give the Conservatives a good thrashing, but it isn’t in love with Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour. The first leaders’ debate gave us a tantalising glimpse of what could have been, had the Tories not blown a historic opportunity to transform Britain.
Starmer’s performance was barely passable; in no way does he deserve the once-in-a-century landslide about to land in his lap. He would be eminently beatable by a Tory candidate with a decent record and a distinctive conservative vision; one with an added dose of common touch would trounce him.
Starmer will be an accidental prime minister, and would do well not to take his impending gargantuan majority personally, or mistake it for a groundswell of public support for a Left-wing revolution. British politics is undergoing such intense convulsions that he too could be spat out in a few years’ time, though not without leaving a trail of irreparable destruction in his wake. The latest YouGov poll puts Labour on 40 per cent, against 36 per cent for the Tories and Reform combined. The conservative electorate is hopelessly divided, not permanently vanquished.
The debate went well for Rishi Sunak, but all his winning points were bittersweet: they were arguments from the Right, and thus merely remind us of 14 squandered years. He was cheered when he hinted at pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and when he rejected 35 per cent pay rises for junior doctors; he struck gold when he warned of Labour tax rises.
But sending out strong Right-wing vibes at one minute to midnight in a desperate bid to deflect the oncoming Nigel Farage tsunami isn’t enough: after 14 years of talking as conservatives but governing as social-democrats, the Tories have run out of excuses. They broke their promises on migration, legal and illegal, and never had the guts to pull out of the ECHR. They increased taxes, and are planning to do so again as a share of GDP.
This is why I blame the Tory wets, in charge for almost all of the past 14 years, for the Starmer-ite calamity that is about to befall Britain.
It is the wets who jettisoned free-market economics, deregulation, tax cuts and supply-side reforms, who crippled the City, who increased immigration, who ignored the collapse of community and family and the baby-bust, who failed to fix the Civil Service, who refused to scrap the BBC licence fee, who had no interest in properly reforming the public sector, including the NHS (and who promoted even more cultish reverence for a failing system), who vetoed prison building and a real crackdown on crime, who embraced net zero and the neo-Blairite quangocracy, and who wanted to surrender to the woke stormtroopers.
It is they who snubbed Farage, especially after Boris Johnson was defenestrated, and who took the Brexiteers for granted. It is the wets who are responsible for the rise of Reform.
The Tory Left failed to accept that Brexit wasn’t just about leaving the EU in a technical sense, but also about resetting our politics, institutions, culture and economy. It was a mechanism to address the discontent that began to emerge during the early- to mid-2000s, in response to the pathologies of the Blair-Brown era and exacerbated by the slower growth that followed the financial crisis.
By 2016, the electorate was crying out for a dramatic rupture; instead, the wets only offered up more of the same. By the time Sunak came to power, lockdowns and Russia had set off crippling inflation, there was no majority in the Tory party to do anything radical and, in any case, it was too late. The only agenda that could have saved the country and the party had been torpedoed by a group too culturally and economically comfortable to understand the concerns of the Red Wall and of suburban Middle England.
Even now, when faced with their party’s extinction, they are looking after themselves, stuffing the party’s most winnable seats with their friends and excluding genuinely conservative candidates. This is a scandal, and a further betrayal of their long-suffering members: what remains of the parliamentary party will be even more dominated by the Left after the election, making it even harder for a united, rational opposition to Starmer to organise on the centre-Right.
Yet the wets’ greatest blunder was to believe the Conservative Party is eternal, that it can never be replaced by a more Right-wing, populist alternative. Such parochialism now looks delusional. In France, the hegemonic party of the Right is now Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy has displaced previous centre-Right parties.
We are now at a tipping point whereby Britain could go the same way. The first question is whether any Tory parliamentary candidates defect to Reform just before the candidates’ deadline on Friday, especially in Right-leaning seats, potentially robbing the Tories of the ability to stand in that constituency, kickstarting a great realignment even before the election.
The second great unknown is whether we will see a crossover moment, whereby one poll – even if it is a fluke – shows Reform ahead of the Tories. The latest YouGov poll suggests that this is likely, with Farage’s party a mere two points behind Sunak’s at 17 v 19 per cent. Farage only wanted to return once he was convinced such an explosive outcome was likely, even if it still translates into the Tories amassing more MPs.
Any crossover would inflict a near-lethal psychological blow on the Tories: Sunak’s most powerful argument to Right-minded voters is that a vote for Reform is wasted, and tantamount to supporting Labour. A crossover would invert this equation, allowing Farage to claim that voting Reform, not Tory, is the best way to keep Labour out, and triggering another collapse in the Conservative floor in a classic self-fulfilling doom loop.
Disastrously, it would also deliver even more seats to Starmer, but this point now looks moot as the Right eats itself.
Farage’s re-entry into British politics has set off a chain reaction with uncontrollable and unpredictable consequences. The Tories are on the verge of being sucked into a death spiral. The wets and other centrist-dad wannabes must face facts: they bear full responsibility for the possible demise of their once great party.
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