Will the Tories come back?

They do tend to

John Major leaving power in 1997; David Cameron returning to it in 2010. Images C-Span/BBC

When Jürgen Klopp held his first press conference as manager of Liverpool Football Club back in 2015, there was an odd sense that the day of his unveiling already anticipated the one of his leaving; that, all the more for it being so perfect an introduction, it was already coupled with a sad day of farewell. We have ceremonies of commencement, and they are mirrored not in the great tide of events which follow them but in the bookends which signal they’re done. It follows too, then, that endings inevitably summon thoughts of beginnings.

When the British Tory Party is ejected from office sometime this year, that moment of defeat will also mark the symbolic beginning of their journey back to power. Rishi Sunak leaving Downing Street will find an echo years later in some unknown Tory PM – maybe not even a Member of Parliament yet – standing on the steps to Downing Street; the Tories, as the hegemonic party in British politics, always come back, as befits generally being one of only two viable choices to form the government our electoral system allows. They tend to be in power most of the time, and the British, not natural social democrats, decide to evict them only once they’ve driven the county into the ground, a mission about which they’ve been particularly thorough this time.

And yet. There is a slight sense in the world at this time that the Tories may not find such an inevitable road to recovery. Firstly, there is the chance that the election itself delivers them not just an almighty drubbing but an absolute wipeout; not a 1997-style landslide defeat but the kind of shredding the Canadian Progressive Tories suffered in 1993, which saw them reduced from 156 to two MPs and presaged their eventual demise as a single party. Certainly such electoral destruction seems to me as likely a possibility as a shock Tory victory, as James Austin has ably argued here. Of course, it’s worth saying that Labour also suffered a 1993-Canada-style-defeat in Scotland in 2015 – and now, only a decade later, is starting to creep back. Under First Past the Post, even obliteration is not necessarily terminal.

Oddly, one of the chief political problems the Tories have is that, in Brexit, they have won one of their central demands. This is a bad idea in politics. Look at the Labour left under Corbynism; for years, the radical left – with which I was tangentially involved growing up – treated it as a shibboleth that, even only a robust left-wing alternative was offered to the British people, and not this Blairite ‘Toryism lite’, they’d vote for it in droves. It was only the Labour Party denying the British people such an alternative - hence why their real enemy was the centre and right of the Labour Party, rather than the opposition. And now socialism had been offered, and rejected en masse, with the party suffering its worse defeat since 1935. No such silent left-wing majority existed, as it does not in any other European country either, and only a hung parliament in 2017 – a result itself 528 votes away from a Tory majority – could be used as consolation that a radical left alternative had been only narrowly rejected.

Likewise the Tories and Brexit. It’s an odd business, Brexit, as the reality of it – negotiating tariffs on lamb with Australian trade representatives – is so wildly different from the spirit in which it was proposed, namely the vision of an independent nation off to buccaneer on the high seas. A project of excitement. There were some Brexiteers who saw it more pragmatically but overall Brexit and its adherents put forward that rarest of things, a utopian project of the middle-aged. There really do seem to have been a lot of people on the British right who believed that out of the vote to leave the EU a land of milk and honey would almost automatically spring up, as per Daniel Hannan’s quite fantastical piece here, and are blinking now in the light of the country being largely the same as before only somewhat poorer and no surer of its place in the world.

Therefore a large part of the right is currently dealing, in its own internalized way, with the failure of its own dearest hopes, like a longed-for extramarital affair having become a rather squalid business of premature ejaculation and threats to send incriminating messages to your family. It is always hard to admit you’re unhappy, but harder still when unhappiness results from having got what you want.

Yet the Tories aren’t ready to engage with how their dream project has actually played out; instead, they seem stuck in the comfort zone of attacking those who opposed Brexit or presenting the project as endangered. The reversal of Brexit is discussed, or its status as secure proclaimed – but it’s never discussed as an actually existing policy, and certainly not one where the changing sentiments have to be met halfway. I write here not to comment on the wisdom or otherwise of Brexit as a project, but rather to argue that this disillusionment and avoidance of facing it has restricted the Tory ability to regroup and make the pragmatic concessions needed for power; it has distanced and continues to distance the Tories from reality. If the price for a hearing for the electorate is a quiet admission that Brexit has not gone as planned, the Tories are still years away from this, and have created their own version of a Labour left convinced that the silent majority is just waiting for socialism.

All this makes it harder for the Tories to regroup, which means they are effectively waiting for the opposition to mess up. Luckily, the opposition is the Labour Party. In power it will undoubtedly make unforced errors and create unnecessary enemies. And in Starmer’s character we can just see hints of the slight inflexible peevishness which has so undermined current German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, that vague air of some questions being too trivial to answer. All this will after five years or ten surely generate enough material for the Tories to oppose.

But does this Tory Party have the discipline to capitalize on it? At the moment it seems not. What the Tory Party appears to be currently longing for is to explode in a mass of conspiracism, 15-minute cities, legislative overreach in response to ‘wokeness’ and complaints about Easter Eggs being on sale in January. It also wants to have an unholy internal dust-up between libertarianism, communitarianism and, albeit buried deep in the mix, One Nation Conservatism. Assuming its traditional role, as a vehicle for a specific small elite to maintain control of the British state, may appear less attractive to the Tories than simply fighting itself. The Tory Party is paying a high price for taking a big old huff of ideological populism; now it’s got hooked on the stuff, and boring old administration with the odd compromise to the changing mores of the electorate has got to it doesn’t look appealing compared to the thrill of internal warfare.

There may well, of course, be a split on the British right between the tribes mentioned above. Which ironically means that one outstanding answer for the Tories to return to power is a change of our electoral system to proportional representation. I sometimes amuse myself by imagining that we’re in the twentieth year of a centre-right and populist-right coalition government, and reading someone a letter to The Guardian quietly raising that ‘I’m not sure this is quite what I meant with a progressive alliance.’ Without electoral reform, the populist and more traditional right – and, I imagine, various businocentrist parties – will duke it out over the electoral space on the right; if Starmer keeps the centre-left together, emphasizing the scale of the if, Labour could enjoy an extended period in power simply by dint of our electoral system. Indeed, if we had PR now, the Tories would likely be facing less of a drubbing in the first place; Tories who cling to the FPTP system might want to think that under it they’ve won one decent majority, and will likely have suffered two enormous defeats, in 25 years.

Without PR, I predict the road back will be longer for the Tories than otherwise and, as I said above, that the next Tory PM may not even yet be an MP. When I see Tory young blood Sebastian Payne touring the constituencies in search of a safe seat I often want to tell him he could afford a decade running a tiki bar in Hawaii and still be back in good time for any prospective Tory revival.

They have another problem, likely to worsen over time; the years 2010-2023 simply haven’t gone very well for the Tories. As New Labour has improved in folk memory, so this period of Tory government is unlikely to raise its reputation over time; indeed, in Liz Truss’ 43-day reign, the Tory Party has created its very own little winter of discontent (‘summer of gild descent’?) which will stay with many voters as a memory of bad economic mismanagement. In Liz Truss, the Tories put their own Jeremy Corbyn in power, without even a public vote.

There are voters in my generation of old Millennials who are by now anti-Tory for life, or will need a very long timescale to even consider them; we saw them take the fairly prosperous, fairly inclusive Blairite country of my youth and, seemingly for no coherent reason, bugger it up. The Tories don’t even seem to like the country which has come about as a result. One of the key tasks of their period opposition will be, and this is a continual task for conservatism, reconcile themselves to how the country has changed. At the moment the Tories hatred of the UK seems to go beyond the Labour Party to the country itself. They were, I’d argue, closer to mainstream electoral sentiment when David Cameron led them than now.

It's a long way back for the Tories, but that return starts the moment they lose. I won’t say they can’t manage it; they might even manage it more quickly than expected, because the Tories exist to win and that atavistic impulse might well kick in soon after power slips away from them. But still, faced with their challenges, I see a Tory Party that’s not thinking straight, and that is paying a high price for its own decision to take down from the top shelf and uncork the dusty bottle marked ‘ideology’. This time, the beginning in their end is just a little harder to discern.

Enjoyed this piece? Feel free to buy me a Ko-Fi