Katy Balls & James Forsyth

Corbyn’s our fault

The Tory deputy chairman on what went wrong

issue 22 September 2018

As Labour gathers for its conference in Liverpool this weekend, the Conservatives will be watching with trepidation, rather than the schadenfreude with which they initially treated the rise of the hard left. Underestimating the appeal of Jeremy Corbyn was one of the biggest mistakes the Tories have made in the past two years, and the party has had plenty of time to ask why Labour ended up doing so well. James Cleverly, the party’s deputy chairman, believes that he has the answer.

‘A big, big chunk of that was our fault,’ he says when we meet at Conservative Campaign Headquarters. ‘The Prime Minister, as we know from all the time she’s been in parliament, is a grafter. She is focused on detail. She’s not a flamboyant, televisual, box-office kind of person: we knew that. And yet somehow, between the summer of ’16 and the summer of ’17, we convinced ourselves that all the experience we have had of her, over the decades she was in politics, was wrong.’

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