Tories blame Sunak for this implosion, but they are fooling themselves. The rot goes back decades
Rishi Sunak and Margaret Thatcher coasters for sale at the Conservative party conference in Manchester, October 2023. Photograph: James Veysey/Shutterstock
What an absolute shambles the once formidable Conservative party has now become. Whatever happened to political probity, discipline and even mere professionalism? And what an important development this Tory collapse may prove to be for British politics, not just next week, but in the future too. Even now, it is hard to believe it is happening. But it is.
At least the Tories would run an effective campaign, one still assumed, perhaps naively, when the election was called a month ago. Winning elections is one of the things the Conservatives have always been very good at. Sure, they were on the defensive and the polls were against them. And Rishi Sunak isn’t the greatest leader. But this party is nothing if not focused. Even in defeat, it would surely go down fighting.
Instead, the Conservative survival instinct has been scattered to the winds. Perhaps this too was predictable, another casualty of so much infighting and churn over the last few years. But offending D-day veterans, or trying to make a few quid by allegedly betting on the election date, and then allowing these stories to overshadow everything else in a campaign that was always going to be fought in the media? Mother of God.
Lots of us like a flutter. In the interest of full disclosure, I can reveal that Theresa May won me a decent sum, at 8/1, by becoming Tory leader two years after I had backed her. Other similar offences should also be taken into account. But I did not have inside information. If you are on the inside, or even have access to it, you don’t mess with betting on the date of the election. Or you damn well shouldn’t. Once again, the easy convenience of the mobile phone is helping to transform politics.
Expectation of defeat has been hardwired into the Tory party for months. The all but invisible campaign at local level reflects that. It has fed into the party’s current sauve qui peut – everyone for themselves – mentality. This is not confined to the GB News payroll Tories or to those who are openly plotting to succeed Sunak. When a generally level-headed Tory like James Sunderland, who was a parliamentary aide to the home secretary, James Cleverly, describes his own government’s flagship Rwanda policy as “crap”, as this week he was revealed to have done, you know the rot has gone a lot further.
I have argued before that Sunak should not step down as leader the moment he loses the general election. He should wait until at least after the autumn party conference before making any announcement, to allow the Tories some time for reflection and, if possible, to change the leadership election process. Almost certainly, though, this is spitting into the wind.
The blame game on 5 July is likely to be instant and brutal, with the rightwing media fanning the flames. Sunak will struggle to survive it even if he wants to hang on. Some of the recriminations we can expect are already out there. For a choice example, look no further than at what Kwasi Kwarteng said this week when asked whether he accepted that the mini-budget he delivered during Liz Truss’s brief prime ministership was to blame for the party’s poll decline.
“I feel partially responsible,” Kwarteng replied. “But I didn’t feel responsible for leaving D-day early, I don’t feel responsible for the Reform party, which was on 4% in October 2022, being on nearly 20% now. I don’t feel responsible for the election betting scandal. Nor do I feel responsible for the fact that this election has happened way before anyone was expecting.” Another helpful contribution to the Tory cause from Kwasi.
The truth is that the Conservatives now face a perfect storm – loss of power and of voter support on the one hand, mixed with division, recrimination and argument about the party’s future direction on the other. This storm is entirely of the party’s own making. Its origins go back not just years, but decades. It is about far more than who should be party leader. For the Tory postmortem to focus on Sunak’s shortcomings would be an act of denial and trivialisation.
A large reason for the coming storm is that the Conservatives are paying the price for the way our politics is done. They have been the governing party for 14 years, so the Tories squarely own this issue, although Labour has contributed. The issue is urgent. As a heavyweight letter to the Times this week from 34 of the “great and good” put it: “Trust in politics, and in the people and institutions of public life, is at an all time low.”
The past month has showcased much that is wrong with the campaigning side of politics, too. It is your election, the BBC likes to claim. But it isn’t yours. The election belongs more to campaign consultants than to voters. In the past two decades, the Conservatives have spent millions on consultants like Lynton Crosby, Mark Textor and, today, Isaac Levido. Their stock in trade, honed in Australian elections, is to use divisive cultural issues to drive wedges into their opponents’ support, pulling the centre of gravity in campaigns to the right. They are both a symptom and a cause of the debauching of politics.
When all is said and done, the Conservative implosion – and it’s not over yet – is more the result of this shift to the right than of any other single factor. Yes, individual qualities come into it – Sunak somehow too trite, Truss too fixated, Boris Johnson too lying, and so on. And, yes, big events have occurred, starting with the wholly self-inflicted Brexit, that would challenge the capacity of any government to cope.
In the end, though, the Conservative party is wrecking itself because it has moved away from the electoral centre ground on to which David Cameron, with all his faults, led it and to which May, with all of hers, was unable to return. Beguiled by the illusion that the era of Margaret Thatcher can somehow be magicked back into existence half a century later, the party has instead gone in search of a more right wing, individualist, anti-government, leader-struck and more insular section of the population.
It has done so only to discover that such people are disproportionately old and male, and that in any case they do not constitute a majority. It has instead become what Labour has sometimes appeared to be in its own past. The Tories have become a party that is not really interested in providing the country with a government. It is hardly surprising that the country has lost interest in the Tories in return.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
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