Would it be good for the Conservatives to lose power at the next election? Should smart young Tories with an eye on the future want to lose? Those are questions I’ve heard discussed in Conservative circles recently. And those questions arise from a Tory reading of politics that goes something like this:
Boris is leading conservatism into a dead end. Lacking principles and consistency of ideas, he has left the Conservatives without any long-term strategy or even purpose. He’s squandered an 80-seat majority and will achieve no significant domestic policy change in this parliament. Woeful at governing, his Tories are now good only for wedge-issue PR campaigns and attacking Labour. The party has no answer to the long-term social, economic and electoral shifts that will determine elections in the 2030s and beyond and is in some instances actively working against its own interests and the country’s (e.g. housing). Other than that, everything’s going swimmingly.
The paragraph above should not be read as the view of any one Conservative. Rather, it’s my attempt to distil the views of a half dozen or so Tory politicians I’ve spoken to in the last couple of weeks. In most of those conversations, I’ve been curious to know what they think a Conservative government would do if it remained in power after the next election.
The Conservatives would use a spell in opposition to regroup, re-energise, and re-invent conservatism for the 2030s
Despite everything, this remains a perfectly real possibility. The sheer scale of the electoral challenge facing Labour means a Tory majority at the next election is well within the range of outcomes next time. To recap: Labour needs a swing on a scale of the one Tony Blair achieved in 1997 just to get a Commons majority of one. And while Boris Johnson is doing a pretty good impression of John Major in the mid-1990s, Keir Starmer’s Tony Blair act still needs some work.
Yes, there’s inflation, partygate, sexual misconduct and, soon, by-election losses caused by abuse convictions and porn use. But the scale of Labour’s defeat in 2019 means a Tory government limping to victory in 2023 or 2024 is far from impossible. And remember, that election will come after a sustained and ruthless attack on Keir Starmer. He hasn’t – yet – truly made his bones with the voters. And before long, those voters will start hearing repeated Tory questions about whether he’d do a deal with the SNP to govern in a hung parliament. The posters of Keir Starmer in Nicola Sturgeon’s pocket are easy to imagine.
It might work. It seems a lifetime ago, but the 2015 election is worth recalling. Before that election, a lot of people (including one who went on to become Prime Minister) were pretty confident that the Conservatives would lose: austerity and another, albeit milder, cost of living squeeze were expected to doom David Cameron. Then the Tory attack machine went to town on Ed Miliband and lots of people (me included) were proved wrong.
There are several major differences between 2015 and now: the Tories can’t gobble up Lib Dem seats; Tory economic credibility is much diminished; Boris 2022 is less trusted than Cameron 2015. But I still think the lesson remains: don’t underestimate what an incumbent Tory party – relentlessly focussed on damaging its main opponent – can do when it’s hellbent on victory. Or even just survival.
I don’t doubt that Boris Johnson has that intent. I ignore all predictions and speculation that he’ll give up No. 10 voluntarily because they’re nonsense, just as they were when they were made about all his recent predecessors. People who get to be PM don’t give it up when things get miserable: they’ve crawled over broken glass to reach the top and they know they’ll never get to come back. So Boris will only leave when he’s dragged out, by voters or his party.
But this brings me back to those opening questions. Do the Tories really truly want to win the next election? Of course, there are as many answers to that question as there are Conservatives, but I have to report that a few of them seem less than enthusiastic about the idea of winning again next time.
I’m thinking here of a couple of people who’d be good bets for cabinet rank some time in the next decade. Both have concluded that losing power at the next election would be no bad thing for the Conservatives’ (and their own) long-term prospects. Their thinking is that winning next time would be truly dismal: a Tory administration with a small majority and no ideas, stumbling through a fifth term, is an utterly uninspiring prospect even for some Conservatives.
By contrast, some suggest that the Tories losing power in a hung parliament would end up worse for Labour. Starmer would cobble together a weak confidence-and-supply government relying on nationalists, Lib Dems and Greens. It might last a few years before producing another election where Labour’s failure to provide stable government would kill its hopes of victory. The Conservatives, in the meantime, would use a spell in opposition to regroup, re-energise, and re-invent conservatism for the 2030s – and bin Boris. Cue victory in, say, 2026 or 2027 for the New Blues.
Fanciful? Deluded? Readers will have their own views of that. And our own James Forsyth, argues elsewhere today that the cost of defeat would be much higher as a Starmer coalition could do irreparable harm to Tory prospects by changing the voting system. James makes that argument because he has also heard the Tory talk of defeat being better than victory next time. And that, rather than scenarios that are theorised to follow it, is the story here.
The defining characteristic of the modern Conservative party has been its desire to win elections, even if that meant sacrificing convictions, conventions and institutions. Yet today at least some Conservatives are dreaming not of winning the next election, but of losing it.
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