Today it begins – a lifeless shell is heaved onto the cold, silver table, and the political commentators then pour in. Each of them is scavenging for the bullet that brought the Tories down.
The evidence extracted from the postmortem will be the prerequisite for whatever sentencing is handed down to the Tories by the future electorate; get it wrong, and the Conservatives may well watch their cell door lock behind them.
In the initial hazy and raw days, the naïve, simplistic explanations are always the first to arise.
The timing of the election will be the initial red herring. However, with the height of the small boat season upon us, the ultra-cautious culture that seems to lurk mercilessly among our forecasters, and the impending threat of doctors going on strike, it was always unlikely that (the now-former) Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was going to make tangible progress in his five pledges had he gifted himself another few months.
Given Labour Leader Keir Starmer will be all too aware of the reputational issues that plagued his party in 2019, the potential slipping of his mask felt more like wishful thinking than a probable outcome.
Another excuse to emerge will be the election campaign itself, but that feels a seductively one-dimensional account. It is undeniable that there have been tragic failures in optics. Chief among them was the core message. Just as Blair couldn’t be both a vacuous metropolitan and a man with demonic eyes, Starmer cannot be both a dangerous threat and a man without a plan. However, there has been such little movement in the polls from the beginning of the election to the end to justify that explanation. Indeed, the Liberal Democrats, who over 70 seats with a campaign that resembled something more akin to an 80s gameshow and was entirely without policy, demonstrate the fatal misdiagnosis that will come from confusing the campaign with the result.
The influence of Reform will be a jagged pill to swallow, particularly for those MPs who are now defeated. Electorally, the vote share for the Conservatives was around 24 per cent with Reform on 14 per cent, and clearly this realignment has cost the former dearly. Historically, the left has always been a crowded market – Labour and Liberal Democrats – with the Greens lingering on the fringes along with various splinter groups, like Change UK. For the first time, the vote from the right is no longer a monopoly and has been decisively distributed. Usually, non-traditional parties with little internal infrastructure, like Reform, receive very little share of the vote (UKIP received 12 per cent of the vote in its peak, and the Brexit Party failed to win any seats despite the conducive political landscape), so why was the usually negligible protest vote so high this time?
Inevitably, Liz Truss is likely to take much of the blame for this, fuelled by the mass media collusion that pushed an entirely statistically fictitious narrative that she “crashed the economy”. Conservatives that fall back on this convenient rationale are being disingenuous: in August 2022, the Tories were still polling 15 points behind Labour. Some will no doubt argue that Truss’ premiership was reminiscent of when Britain crashed out of the ERM and we lost our reputation for economic competence (despite the fact the economy recovered quickly), but it’s not unreasonable to suggest the Tories lost their economic standing far sooner, even if it took the voting public longer to fully absorb. This hypothesis isn’t just evidence in the UK, but all over the world, and perhaps this is the hidden part of the iceberg we should be paying attention to.
The Conservatives partook in the biggest authoritarian experiment of state control and public spending in modern history: the Covid pandemic. In elections in France and Germany, the ruling party were relegated to third. In Australia, New Zealand, Poland, and Italy, whoever was in power during the pandemic was replaced by the main opposition, and in America, the likelihood is the Republicans will win the Presidency and Congress. It is clearly no coincidence that the parties that presided over Covid are losing power across the continuum – people have rejected the consequences of state overreach, having realised it has made them all poorer in the long term. With the tension between the establishment and the people becoming so oppositional, it is therefore facile to suggest this election result is a rejection of conservative ideas – it’s a punishment for big government, regardless of the political hue that was responsible for it. Voter volatility is clear evidence of this – Labour, with their unenthusiastic 170 majority, shows people have moved from one end of the political spectrum to the other.
While parties from either side of the political pendulum are seeing a demise internationally, big government is obviously more disastrous for right wing parties: it comes as a chokehold on infrastructure, no countervailing force arguing for tax cuts, and infantilisation. This leads to fewer people having a stake in society, such as home ownership or children, and it is mighty difficult to make the case against socialism without that; 71 per cent of people owned their own home in 2003 – that number now stands at just 50 per cent. If the ability to make the case for capitalism dwindles demographically, convincing people to vote Conservative is a colossal challenge. This is where the party needs to focus its efforts – putting the moral case for neoliberalism back into our vision, rather than living in the shadows of Covid with smoking and energy drink bans.
Circa 131 seats is not an irrecoverable position numerally – what destines the Conservative Party to extinction is to mindlessly weld swords in the acrimony of the loss without thoughtfully dissecting the culmination of poor judgements that led to this ominous night.