Where have all the Tories gone?

A vote against rather than a vote for, and the unanswerable question is whether Reform would prevailed had the voters thought they had a chance. A by-election is a frivolity, allowing voters to express contempt without consequence. However it would be foolish to assume that ‘natural Conservatives’, if there is a such a thing any more, will come home at a real election.

I recall the first Blair election, canvassing in a safe Conservative seat, where the focus was trying to convince voters to take it seriously: the seat fell to Labour and has stayed with them. Remember Canterbury, and all commentaries saying it was a blip that such a blue seat could go red for a moment, and it was all to do with students? It stayed Labour even in Boris Johnson’s landslide. There is no ‘accepted wisdom’ in electoral politics; only accepted folly.

Bare statistics do not do justice to the challenge. Since 2010, there have been four general elections, resulting in a Conservative-led government; but only two of those provided a Conservative majority in Parliament: Cameron in 2015, a bare scrape despite his major achievements; and Johnson in 2019, by sheer force of personality and Brexit elation. There has been no swell of enthusiasm for Conservatism.

Then again, there has barely been any Conservatism displayed in action, and the shallow state has remained Labour-controlled throughout.

There can hardly be enthusiasm for Labour either – they are the most awful collection of deranged hate-mongers to disgrace the political system. They survive only be being “the other ones”. The electorate and the press, being inherently conservative, if with a small ‘c’, will not look at alternative alternatives, and our system barely permits it. We end up with a situation where voters anxious to kick the Tories out will vote for a party whose policies are everything they oppose: high taxes, state interference with private affairs; open immigration; concreting over green spaces; wokery enforced by law; anti-Semitism; and economic collapse – you could say that the things the voters hate about the Conservatives have been for committing the sins that Labour have urged them to. But what is the choice?

That said, all this is written from the perspective of someone who has knocked on the doors of householders and chatted with workmen. The unsolidified mind of youth, inexperienced but looking at a lifetime of debt and locked out of home ownership forever is different. No party has policies for them, only unattainable promises and policies that will do the opposite. I do not inhabit the social media sphere they do, which has its own motive illogic. Capturing that space will be a key battleground.

In the meantime it is too tempting to hide under a table and hope it goes away, and pretend the world is not collapsing under us, as it is.