Wipeout

How bad could things get for the Tories?

Rishi Sunak learning how to resuscitate a patient in critical condition

Westminster loves a narrative shift even when not much is changing. Polls this year have been remarkably stable: since December Labour have averaged between 48-44% and the Conservatives between 29-26%. Yet in March and April we had a “Sunak comeback” as polls marginally tightened, he managed to secure the Windsor Framework Agreement, and nothing terrible happened for a few weeks.

This led to a spate of columns suggesting maybe he could win after all. A dreadful set of local election results then made that hard to sustain, but for some reason still translated into a belief a hung parliament was now inevitable.

In the last few weeks the momentum has shifted back the other way. Sunak’s lack of progress against any of his seemingly unambitious pledges has now been widely noticed. As has his party’s lack of discipline – with multiple by-elections imminent. Rising interest rates have made cost of living an even more dominant preoccupation for the public, and the government has little to offer beyond exhortations to hold our nerve, which is not a message the multi-millionaire Prime Minister and Chancellor are well suited to deliver.

These narrative shifts may appear to be a media concoction but they have a very real impact on the behaviour of MPs, strategists, donors and lobbyists. In April Tory MPs were surprisingly upbeat, given the polls were still pointing to a devastating defeat. Now they are very much not, leading to more and more announcing they won’t fight the election. There has been an uptick in negative briefing – albeit without much purpose given there’s no serious challenger to Sunak. The reality of a likely defeat hasn’t changed but has now become impossible to ignore.

Even though the Tory hope of a win has faded there is a still a lingering belief that the result, bad as it may be, will be better than polls suggest. This is partly because, in some peoples’ minds, the historical tendency for government’s political fortunes to improve from midterm to elections – swing back – has morphed into an immutable law. This is despite an example from just two elections ago, in 2017, of the opposite happening in spectacular style. As Will Jennings wrote this week there is nothing inevitable about it.

But it’s also because of Labour’s weaknesses, both current – with Starmer still only marginally outpolling Sunak on best Prime Minister ratings – and historic. Janan Ganesh summed up this view that the weight of past failure could yet drag Labour down in a recent column:

“To be clear, voters are sick of Tory nonsense. But they haven’t even begun to consider Labour nonsense. It has been out of sight these 13 years. Soon it will come to the foreground: the trade union special pleading, the idea that spending isn’t spending if it is “investment”, the identity neuroses, the moralising overkill of the NHS rhetoric and, above all, the memory that Labour had to be smashed to electoral dust to do something about the hard left. All parties have their pathologies. If the Tories’ ones are more exposed, it is because they govern for so long. Elections have a way of equalising the scrutiny.”

Some of this feels more like a list of Ganesh’s own irritations than ones that will bother the public. I haven’t noticed an obvious dislike of moralising about the NHS – an issue on which Labour currently have a 25 point lead. And issues of identity remain stubbornly low on the list of things people profess to consider important, despite the concerted effort by sections of the media to force them up the agenda. It’s certainly true that Labour will come under more scrutiny, but they’re well aware of that. That’s why we’re getting rafts of briefing about their commitment to fiscal caution and proposed crackdowns on every left/liberal shibboleth in sight.

My position since the Johnson/Truss calamities of last summer has been that the Tories are in very deep trouble. We could yet see some swing back, but there is no reason to assume we will, and quite a lot of reasons to think things will yet get worse. We could be looking at a result so bad it puts the future of the party in serious doubt.

This possibility is little discussed because it seems so inherently unlikely. There is no historical precedent in the UK in the last century since the Liberals were reduced to 40 seats in 1924. Since 1935 neither Labour nor Conservatives have ever won fewer than 150 seats. The only modern example in a first past the post system is that of the Canadian Conservatives in 1993, who went from governing to holding two seats. But because of that it’s been underexplored in analysis which tends to automatically assume the Tory position will improve, even if only marginally, as we move into a campaign. So in the rest of this post I will look at five reasons why a Tory wipeout is entirely possible.