Do you remember the exit poll?
I was nestled in my usual election chair, nerves becalmed by a curry and a couple of pints. My hunch was that the result would be better than expected. But I say that now. As the 10 PM countdown began, I was terrified. Had Boris flumped along the line? Or was it a nightmare on Downing Street? Too much politics had been going on. Not another sickening twist. I wanted it to stop.
I needn’t have worried. When Huw Edwards intoned the results – whatever happened to him? – I was overwhelmed by relief. After three long years, Brexit would get done. Jeremy Corbyn was finished, as benefited a man manifestly unfit to govern. Labour faced a reckoning Seats that had never gone Tory before did so. The biggest majority since 1987. A government for the many, not the few.
A new dawn had broken. 2020 was going to be a fantastic year for Britain.
It didn’t quite work out like that. Trying to recapture the optimism is now difficult. I was still a student. I didn’t think, four and a half years on, that I’d be writing the next election day ToryDiary for ConservativeHome. But I also didn’t expect a global pandemic, war in Europe, three Prime Ministers, and a looming Labour landslide. I was too busy studying Victorian art critics (and girls).
Unless the last few years have been an elaborate cosmic joke, they hold one lesson: you never know what is coming next. Most do not read Foreign Affairs or The New Scientist. Why should they? It’s a free country, and they sound quite boring. Even if they had, would they have known a bloke in Wuhan was tucking into tasty bat soup as Johnson returned triumphantly to Downing Street?
Plenty of autopsies will be written about the consequences. Covid-19, lockdowns, Partygate, Ukraine, the cost-of-living crisis, Chris Pincher, the leadership election, the Queen’s death, the mini-Budget, another leadership election, the Channel boats, October 7th: a litany of dumpster fires, scandals, and tragedies. Don’t you just want it to stop? Don’t you just want us to stop?
If anything decides votes today, it is a desire to get rid of the effing Tories. Half of Labour’s voters give it as their main justification. 46 per cent want us wiped out entirely, including a quarter of those voters who backed us in 2019. Stop the rot. Has a party ever been as hated? Has it ever looked at a collapse so total, a defeat so biting? Has it ever felt so stale, grubby, or exhausted?
Of course, they have. Well, I assume. Somebody mention something about Canada. But from where many voters stand, voters won’t have known many governments that have proved so disappointing or incoherent. Because when we aren’t just talking about one government, are we? We’re expecting people to pronounce judgment on Boris Johnson and Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.
We’re asking them to vote on the grim consequences of the lockdowns they cheered on. We’re asking them to call out those interminable Downing Street parties and the hollow promise of levelling up. What did they think of the 49 Day Queen, and the smoking rubble she left? And what of the man who came next, with his five pledges, missed, discarded, and forgotten?
That’s not to say there hasn’t been anything of value in the last four and a half years, or in the decade before. The vaccine rollout was a genuine Brexit benefit. We have the joint highest growth in the G7. Our reforms to education and welfare were clear improvements in areas Labour had let stagnate. But their advances were wasted by lockdown, as was record NHS spending.
Piecing it all together makes my head hurt, and I have to do it for a living. I know that if I ticked any box other than the Conservative one on my ballot today, I’d have some form of violent allergic reaction. But it’s not hard to guess why millions of disillusioned Tories will vote as they do today: for Labour, the Lib Dems, and Reform UK. Or sit on their hands at home, sodding the lot of them.
But that would be a mistake. Nobody can pretend we have covered ourselves in glory. But that doesn’t mean we should be happy about blessing Labour with a majority that would make Tony Blair blush, whatever you choose to call it. The situation is too desperate. And the adage remains true: even a poor Tory government is better than a Labour one. And this Labour one will be bad.
Credit where credit is due. Keir Starmer has changed Labour, primarily by not being Jeremy Corbyn. He has made socialism boring again. The Absolute Boy brought the stench of Salisbury, Syria, and anti-Semitism. Voting for him seemed morally repellant to millions. Starmer’s worst problems seem like an adenoidal voice and an enervating tendency to mention his late father’s job.
But that doesn’t mean voters shouldn’t be worried. For all Starmer’s subsequent attempts to banish his predecessor to Siberia, the former editor of Socialist Alternatives stood squarely behind him. There were Tories that needed hating and a Brexit that might be stopped. He may be a late middle-aged man who really wants to be Prime Minister. But how will his Labour be in power?
You may fulminate that, in fourteen years, the Tories have failed to turn back the clock on the post-1997 settlement. But stasis is surely better than Labour actively advancing it. Engage the socio-economic duty; pass the Race Equality Act; send Harriet Harman to the EHRC: under Sue Gray’s watchful eye, Blair’s constitutional revolution will be completed. All power to the stakeholders!
That’s only based on what we know Labour will do. The rest of their plans are either vague or undeliverable. Ed Miliband’s campaign to plunge the country into darkness by 2030 is just as worrying as the tax hikes that Rachel Reeves is planning. VAT on private schools won’t stretch far. When Angela Rayner’s housing plans don’t deliver the growth they need, your pockets will be raided.
So what? Wasn’t it Rishi Sunak who took taxes to a 70-year high? Certainly. But he had the excuse of a global pandemic, and a genuine desire to bring rates back down. Remember Labour’s centre of gravity. The Tories govern like lefties due to laziness. Labour do so because they want to. Everything we can do, they can do worse. Who comes after Starmer, if he doesn’t last a term?
We entered government following the financial crisis; we leave it following a pandemic, an energy crisis, and a war. What horrors can the next few years bring? When China attacks Taiwan, do you want a Foreign Secretary who didn’t know that Henry VII came before Henry VIII? What are Labour’s answers to our existential questions: an aging population, AI, and fracturing multiculturalism?
Today’s result won’t be closer to Britain 1970 than Canada 1993. But every ex-Tory who votes against the party or stays at home is complicit in the coming misery. That especially applies to those following Nigel Farage’s siren song. Haven’t the last few weeks proved that Reform UK is a basket case? They couldn’t even vet their own candidates. They are not a serious organisation.
But, you might suggest, at least Farage means what he says about migration, and pledges the tax cuts that we should have been delivering in office. Yet we did try to deliver them, and the Gods of the Copybook Headings said no. Policy can’t be made up on the back of a fa*g packet. You need talented people and a coherent strategy. If you want us replaced, buy Cummings, and sell Farage.
Clacton’s favourite son will be lucky to win a handful of seats. He will not be Leader of the Opposition. But Ed Davey could – a man more interested in pratting around than meeting aggrieved post-masters. If we can’t be re-elected, we can still hold Starmer to account. Every vote for a Conservative means that critique will come from the right, not another centre-left knight of the realm.
No one can pretend the last few years have been enjoyable. You have been let down – on immigration, taxation, housing, and more. However many MPs we win today, opposition will be hideous. But every vote for a Tory is one step closer back to power, towards the day when Labour collapses, unable to regulate their way to growth, and unequal to the coming crises. It will be grim.
When Starmer stands waving outside Number 10 tomorrow, backed by the greatest number of seats of any leader since Stanley Baldwin, just remember Johnson doing the same four and half years ago. Remember what came next. Remember the shocks, the scandals, and the sadness. Keep an eye on the Taiwan Strait, and keep the faith. Nothing is written. Where there is discord…
Vote today with both eyes open. Vote at the end of fourteen long years and against what is coming. Vote Conservative, because things can only get worse.
