Nearly sorry for them

If they weren’t so unpleasant, I’d feel sorry for them. The Tories evidently haven’t got a clue what’s coming for them next.

The evidence of what’s coming is there for anyone with eyes to see it. The long run of dire polls: since 1 March, they have topped 30% just 12 times out of 83 polls and tallied under 25% eight times in the same period, while Labour got 45% or more in well over half the polls (this, bear in mind, is when Rishi Sunak was supposedly leading a much-touted revival). The local election results, where the Conservatives got a national equivalent vote share of just 26% and their opponents voted tactically wherever they could to oust them, usually successfully. You have to squint till you’re cross-eyed to see any good news for the Conservatives in this.

Others have analysed this in far more depth than me, see here, here, here and here, but honestly, this stuff isn’t very complicated. In a first past the post system, if you get 26% of the vote, you lose. If you get 26% of the vote and everyone else despises you, you get obliterated.

If the Conservatives get below 200 seats, Labour will have a majority more or less by default (if the Conservatives get 200 seats and we allow 18 for Northern Ireland, 45 for the SNP, 45 for the Lib Dems, 4 for Plaid Cymru and 1 for the Greens, Labour would have 355 seats or thereabouts. Those look like friendly assumptions for both the SNP and the Lib Dems as things currently stand). Realistically, to stop Labour getting an overall majority, the Conservatives need to get at least 230 seats and I’d suggest 250 in practice. As of right now, the Conservatives would get nothing like 230 seats, never mind 250.

The working assumption among Conservatives seems to be that they will do better than 26% come the general election. Fair enough, but they’re going to need to do a lot better before they avoid obliteration. In 1997, the Conservatives got 31%. They got 165 seats with that tally. In a world where supporters of Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens are to a considerable extent fungible, you’re going to need an impressive belief in favourable boundaries to think that the Conservatives would do much better this time.

So, where might the Conservatives get additional support? There are three possible sources: supporters of parties to their right; supporters of parties to their left; and those currently saying that they don’t know who they’ll vote for.

Reform is currently polling about 5%. There’s an assumption that most of this will revert to the Conservatives come the general election. This seems doubtful. Under its previous name of the Brexit party, it took 2% of the vote in 2019. But it only stood in 275 seats, so this percentage needs to be at least doubled to establish the benchmark against it should be judged (arguably more than doubled given that it stood largely in Labour-held seats which were not necessarily its most fertile territory). If it makes good on its promise to stand in every seat this time, I expect it to take something quite close to 5% of the vote nationally. It’s not as though Rishi Sunak holds a particular appeal for prospective Reform voters. Many of them regard him as a closet Remainer.

The key question here for me is whether Reform will in reality contest every seat. Perhaps the Conservatives can buy them off or bully them off, but then there’s the question at what cost to other possible sources of support. If Reform stand everywhere, the Conservatives’ ability to squeeze the vote on the right may well be very limited.

To gain — or regain — voters who are currently planning to vote Labour or Lib Dem, the Conservatives are going to need to find a message that appeals. So far, they haven’t. Indeed, so far they don’t even seem to have understood this bit of the problem.

And what of don’t knows? It’s absolutely true that a high percentage of 2019 Conservative voters are currently saying that they don’t know who they’re going to vote for. By itself this group comprises something like 10% of the electorate. That’s a big group. And it’s absolutely true that many people who say “don’t know” ultimately plump for their previous choice. So this looks more promising for the Conservatives, right?

Well. Pollsters have long sought to take this effect into account in their surveys. Some of them have now gone well beyond accounting for “shy Tories” and now seek to attribute likely future decisions by the genuinely unsure on the basis of their past behaviour. Opinium in particular have pioneered this method.

So there’s a real danger of double counting these voters when interpreting the results of some pollsters if you assume that Don’t Knows will revert to their previous homes. That is a danger that Conservatives seem to be falling into. Moreover, a chunk of the electorate is comprised of Don’t Knows who previously voted Labour, and you can’t just ignore them. And pretty obviously some of these Don’t Knows will either not vote at all or will vote for someone other than the Conservatives. The longer they are saying “Don’t Know”, the less likely that they’ll come to the Conservatives’ rescue.

All of this means that the Conservatives have a lot of hard work ahead of them even to get to the low 30s by the time of the next election. And as we have already seen, the low 30s is unlikely to be good enough to stop them being decisively defeated.

Their main hope seems to be in Labour stuffing it up. That’s reasonable. It’s not as if Labour inspire great confidence and Sir Keir Starmer has not so far set the world alight. He doesn’t need to, however, when the Conservatives have been so chaotic, so inept, so unpleasant.

Nor do the Conservatives have much hope of good news changing minds. The Tories are exultant this week about the fact that the years ahead have been upgraded from a lengthy recession to indefinite stagnation. The public are unlikely to be equally enthused while living standards continue to be squeezed.

Indeed, all of the five pledges look politically useless to me. Don’t get me wrong, achieving them is better than the alternative. But they don’t offer any reason for voters to vote for the Conservatives. If the aim is to demonstrate dull administrative competence, these pledges simply aren’t meaningful and in any case that ship has sailed: it was called HMS Truss. With too many duffers still in government, from the Home Secretary down, the Conservatives are not going to be able to make competence a viable USP for undecided voters.

Much has rightly been said and written about Labour’s lack of a clear prospectus. For all that, Labour has spent much more time articulating the vision that it will put to the country at the next election than the Conservatives have. What on earth are the Conservatives going to offer as their programme for government at the next election? I pose the question as an exercise for the reader: so far as I’m aware, Rishi Sunak hasn’t said a peep on the subject.

A huge problem for them is that any offering has to be founded for internal party reasons on the assumption that Brexit is proving to be a success. This is a view currently shared by a tiny fraction of the population, to the point of looking batty. So they either dial down Brexit completely, enraging the diehards, or look like nutters.

It’s always possible for Labour to lose the election. As of right now, however, Labour look like winning an overall majority and a landslide looks the single likeliest outcome, by default as the Conservatives are chucked out of office.

That’s not even the worst part of what’s coming for the Conservatives. If they are indeed defeated as decisively as I expect, they are going to face an almighty reckoning after the election internally and externally. It is likely that the Conservatives out of office will not be taken seriously by voters again until they have exorcised their Brexitmania from their system (and perhaps not even then). That is likely to take years and possibly decades.

Moreover, it is likely in those circumstances that a silent lustration will take place, with past support for Brexit becoming in practice a disqualifier for consideration for any senior public sector position (being seen as an indicator of stupidity, lack of judgement or partisan malevolence). The Conservatives having made themselves the party of Brexit, they may well see an evisceration of influence rarely seen by one of the two major parties even in opposition.

The Conservatives look set to repeat the post-1997 experience of howling impotently as the country moves on in directions that they hate but cannot prevent. It would be pathetic in the true sense of the word if they did not deserve it. But they do.