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Stephen Daisley

The 2024 election will be cataclysmic for the Conservatives The Spectator, 28 December 2022

I spend a lot of my time fantasising about the death of the Conservative Party. I like to picture election night 2024 and Huw Edwards struggling to keep up with the mounting Tory defeats:

‘Labour gains Chingford from Iain Duncan Smith, former leader of — Wait, I’m being told Labour has also gained Chipping Barnet. I think that’s been Tory since Reginald Maudling won it in — Goodness. We go live to Laura Kuenssberg with some significant news about Priti Patel. Laura, we understand Witham is heading for a recount…’

The fantasy reaches a crescendo with the election’s Portillo moment: Suella Braverman — out.

This reverie is not motivated by any enthusiasm for Labour. I doubt if I’ll ever be able to vote for them again. They made British Jews fear for their future in this country and I can’t think of anything more unforgivable. No, my feelings are motivated by raw, undiluted, full-fat-no-soy hatred of the Tory party. It has grown to an unquenchable loathing.

The party could use its remaining 18 months to push a bold, conservative agenda but I wouldn’t count on it.

So when I read an unnamed Conservative MP in the FT pronouncing the red wall ‘dead’, my reaction wasn’t one of satisfaction but impatience. I don’t care about the red wall tumbling, I want to see the blue wall flattened. I want them run out of Staffordshire, Lincolnshire, Essex. Clacton must fall.

While I don’t expect anything so dramatic come next polling day, I suspect the Tories will have a worse night than even their gloomier MPs are predicting. Setting aside card-carrying members of the party, I know no one under 40 who is planning to vote Tory next time. Not a single one. Not in Scotland, nor London, nor Wales, nor the Midlands, nor the North.

The breadth and depth of the revilement is breath-taking. I know blue-collar small business owners who spend their days inveighing against crime, mass immigration and wokeism but would sooner see a gang of non-binary Albanian drug-dealers move in next door than vote Tory. I know graduate professionals champing at the bit to elect a Labour government that will clobber them with higher taxes. I know people who despise the SNP and yet are determined to withhold their vote from the Tories in blue-yellow marginals. The Conservatives are at the worst point a government can reach: the voters don’t just want to boot them out, they want to hurt them.

Absent some unforeseen upheaval in British politics, this gives the Tories at most 18 months left to get anything done. Conservative supporters should not get their hopes up. In 12 years of power, the Tories have done exactly one thing that, while not necessarily conservative, was an article of faith for many Conservative voters: Brexit. Now, it’s the worst possible Brexit, diluting UK sovereignty in Northern Ireland and leaving the people there at the whims of the disastrous Protocol. In failing to bed down even a very bad Brexit and capitalise on its opportunities, the Tories have made it easier for the next government to realign with Brussels across the board. Prime Minister Keir Starmer may not be able to take us back into the EU but he could render our relationship with it Brexit in name only.

What else do the Tories have to show for their 12 years in power? They have presided over an increase in immigration. They have lost control of the UK’s sea border to people-traffickers. They have done little more than tut as progressives marched through the few remaining institutions they hadn’t already captured. They abandoned plans to decriminalise non-payment of the BBC licence fee and have apparently done the same with proposals to privatise Channel 4.

They have allowed the Supreme Court to grow in constitutional stature at the expense of Parliament. They have not merely failed to roll back devolution but transformed regional parliaments into rival power centres with which Westminster must compete for political legitimacy. They have stood by while one arm of the state after another has signed up to radical theories about race, gender and identity. The question lingering over the next election is not whether Labour will win but how anyone will be able to tell.

What makes that election potentially cataclysmic for the Conservatives is that while those of us who are liberals, centrists, social democrats or leftists have myriad reasons to vote them out, instinctive Tories have no reason — none at all — to keep them in. No vote in the 2024 election will be as wasted as a vote for the Tories because, even if they somehow managed to win, they would govern as though they hadn’t. In electoral terms, a Conservative victory and a Conservative defeat guarantee the same quantity of conservative outcomes.

The party could use its remaining 18 months to push a bold, conservative agenda but I wouldn’t count on it. The people who run the Conservative party don’t like conservatives and they don’t like conservatism. I can’t tell you who to vote for any more than I can figure it out for myself but I can tell you this: your party hates you. You should join the rest of us in hating it right back.

WRITTEN BY

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail