The art of losing an election

There’s a new default conversation for Tory MPs at any Westminster drinks party: is this 1992 or 1997? Is the party doomed or not? In 1992 John Major became the only prime minister to have been 20 points behind in the polls and then gone on to win two years later. But in 1997, with the Tories mired in accusations of sleaze, Major lost by such a landslide that his party was out of power for three terms.

At last week’s cabinet away day, William Hague was brought in as the evening entertainment to make the case for optimism. The current situation, said Hague, more closely echoed the electoral landscape of 1990, when Major went on to turn the party’s fortunes around. If the Conservative party would only unite behind Rishi Sunak, he went on, they could win.

But Tory MPs who are unhappy with the direction of government and wounded by the exodus of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss tend towards the second option. Labour is receiving the type of attention from business and the press that suggests it is on the cusp of power, they say. The shadow cabinet members Wes Streeting and Jon Ashworth are leading the conversation on NHS and welfare reform while the government talks of ‘technocratic’ solutions.

The growing consensus in Tory circles is that the next election is unlikely to resemble either 1997 or 1992. There is another scenario that MPs with neither an axe to grind nor a cause to promote increasingly see as the more likely option: graceful defeat. Some Tory MPs are already preparing for this soft landing and, of them, several even argue that winning a narrow victory would be worse than giving Labour a small majority.

Plenty of Conservatives are therefore quietly preparing for opposition, while few accept that they are fated to lose most of their MPs and be out for a generation. They think that the work that needs to be done in the next 18 months may well fall short of what’s required to win an unprecedented fifth term, but that the party could be in a position to bounce back sooner rather than later.

What’s certain is that Sunak faces stormier economic weather than Major did ahead of the 1992 election. While inflation is expected to have fallen by the time of the next election, the boom that followed Black Wednesday is not in prospect this time. Instead, the forecast is of recession. The IMF this week suggested Britain is the only major country whose economy will shrink this year. Disposable income is falling fast, as wages fail to keep pace with inflation and taxes have hit an all-time high. ‘Yes, it hurt,’ said one of Major’s posters: ‘Yes, it worked.’ If it doesn’t work, we won’t forget the pain.

Yet if Keir Starmer is doing better than Neil Kinnock, he is showing little sign of being the new Blair. ‘I think the next election could be defined by apathy,’ says a senior Labour figure. ‘Voters are turning off. They are not enthused by any major party.’ When ministers attended the away day at Chequers they found some comfort in the presentation by 2019 election strategist Isaac Levido. For all the anger directed towards the Conservatives, polling suggests that Starmer is not liked and few know what he stands for.

Strategists on both sides believe the polls will tighten as the election approaches. ‘On previous precedents it ought to narrow by at least nine points,’ says one Labour figure. This thought is echoed in Tory high command. But a Labour lead cut from 20 to ten points would still mean easy victory. ‘The scale of the defeat is critical,’ says a senior Tory politician who has sat in the Commons since the early 2000s. ‘A small defeat means we can rebuild and get back in quickly.’

MPs are discussing what would be the least worst option in the event of a Tory loss. ‘I would rather a Labour majority than a hung parliament,’ says a former cabinet minister. The concern is that if the Liberal Democrats were enlisted into a coalition, they’d demand a change to the voting system to bring in proportional representation – and keep the Tories out of power for decades.

But there’s another reason some Tory MPs can see the upside to a narrow Labour win. ‘We need a time out,’ says one minister. The hope is that a small Labour majority would highlight internal tensions within the party – Starmer could struggle to command authority – and allow the Tories a chance to rejuvenate.

The scale of loss would also play an important role in deciding who becomes the leader of the opposition. ‘If there is a wipeout, there will be a big push to move us to the right,’ predicts an MP in a Blue Wall seat gloomily. MPs could argue that Sunak’s steady managerialism was fatal and that Jacob Rees-Mogg or Suella Braverman were needed. If Labour ended up with a small majority, then a more centrist candidate like Kemi Badenoch – popular with the grass roots and Gove-ites alike – would be more likely to prevail.

The defeatism is not universal. At the weekend, the Tory MP WhatsApp group was outraged by an anonymous minister quoted in the press as saying that the party did not ‘deserve to win’ and there was ‘a fin de siècle feel’. It led Justin Tomlinson (among others) to say that any minister preparing for defeat should resign and start campaigning for victory. Others say that anyone who is imagining a brief spell in opposition is delusional. That was, after all, Labour’s plan in 1979.

The coming months could yet serve to focus minds. Plans are afoot for a parliamentary away day in a few weeks’ time, to remind Tory MPs of the importance of teamwork. Sunak is working to come up with plans that might unite the party. The Minimum Service Levels Bill on strikes passed the Commons this week. Next up could be drastic steps on immigration that would see Sunak put his political credentials on the line. If it works – and stranger things have happened in the past seven years – the mood in both the party and the country could shift.