Sometimes I feel like the only person in Britain who is intending to vote Conservative. I know this can’t be true, since I have a few colleagues at ConservativeHome, and someone has been putting blue leaflets through my door. I assume Rishi Sunak will vote Tory, but he might have been distracted by dreams of Santa Monica. Not many others are hoping today proves more Britain 1970 than Canada 1993. Half of all voters want us Tories completely wiped out, including 24 per cent of those who voted for us in 2019, according to a poll published last month. And a YouGov survey published yesterday revealed that almost half of Labour voters give their reason for doing so as getting the Conservatives out. We are loathed.
Labour could be on course to get an uber-landslide to deliver an agenda that doubles down on everything wrong with the last 25 years
Coming from Labour or Lib Dem voters, that is no surprise. But over-hanging the election has been how popular the idea of ‘Zero Seats’ for the Tories has been with my fellow young right-wingers. From Twitter anons to school mock elections, the momentum is with the TV hellraisers of Reform UK. Farage has the mandate of TikTok in his quest to bury the Conservatives.
Reform’s central critique of the Tories is one familiar to fans of Evelyn Waugh. In fourteen years of government, they have failed to turn back the clock one second. Tony Blair’s constitutional revolution remains in place. Taxes are at a 70-year high. The culture war is lost. Brexit’s potential has been wasted.
Nowhere is that truer than immigration. Fourteen years of Conservative promises to reduce numbers. A vote to Leave, an end to free movement, and the potential for a sensible system prioritising high-value individuals. What did we get? Net migration of 745,000 in 2022, and five more Birminghams by 2040.
When you’re paying £700 a month to live out of a box room in Zone 4, the long-standing oemerta over immigration and housing rather rankles. That’s especially when the veil of silence has been perpetuated by Tories zealously opposed to building the homes we require, where they are required. No wonder the average Conservative is now over 70.
Add to that a lockdown that robbed us of a year in favour of our ungrateful elders, and you can see why the young are mad as hell. To be a young Tory requires denying your own material interests. Michael Gove improved schools to make us more eloquent in repudiating his party. We will be fifth with under 24s.
So why have they still got my vote? Has voting Conservative become an unfortunate habit or addiction, the electoral equivalent of picking my nose? Not quite. I’m clinging to nurse for fear of something worse: the horrors of a Labour government, and the hope that a shattered party might learn its lesson.
Since my first political memories are of shouting at Gordon Brown on Newsround, I have no illusions about just how abysmal a Labour government can be. The prospect of a man who didn’t know Henry VII came before Henry VIII being Foreign Secretary when China invades Taiwan terrifies me.
If the polls conducted throughout the campaign are right, then Labour are about to get an uber-landslide to deliver an agenda that doubles down on everything wrong with the last 25 years. Ed Miliband’s decarbonisation agenda means blackouts by 2030. Angela Rayner’s housing plans can’t deliver the homes we need. And Rachel Reeves will soon work out that VAT on private schools won’t raise all the funds her ministers want, so taxes will grow even higher.
The Tories govern like lefties through a combination of politeness, laziness, and incompetence. Labour do it because they actually believe in it. Under Sue Gray’s watchful eye, it will be all power to the stakeholders. Parliament will be further disempowered in favour of the courts and quangocracy. The Conservatives have proven failed to the thicket of the Blob. But Labour will relentlessly extend it.
All of this will make the job of Britain’s next right-wing government even more difficult. Which is the other reason I can’t follow many of my friends, and tick a box next to Reform. The Tories have been useless and self-indulgent. But Reform makes them look like Lee Kwan Yew.
When Farage announced he would be running for Clacton a few short weeks ago, the idea that Reform candidates would be defecting to the Conservatives by the end of the campaign seemed absurd. But – famous last words – Farage has blown his opportunity to finish off the Tories in a haze of claims and counterclaims about Ukraine, racism, and Channel 4. Pax Logan Roy, they are not serious people.
If Reform ever found themselves in power, Farage would be drowning his sorrows in The Red Lion by the end of his first week. If you’re interested in replacing the Conservatives, buy Dominic Cummings, and sell Nigel Farage. Before that, what hope is there for opposition to the long march of Starmerism?
When Enoch Powell urged voters to finish off the Tories in 1974, the fates provided for the party to produce Margaret Thatcher, and Stepping Stones, an honest look at the roots of Britain’s decline. Our imminent defeat will be far worse than that one. But the energy is with the Tory Leninists: the Young Turks aiming to radically restructure the party and take the fight to Labour.
All of that will look rather unlikely when Keir Starmer is waving outside Downing Street tomorrow morning, backed by a greater number of seats than any leader since Stanley Baldwin. But if Labour can go from their appalling defeat to a landslide in only four and a half years, why can’t the Conservatives?
Which is why, like the proverbial dog returning to its sick, I will vote Tory today. Not under any illusions about what the party has achieve on office, or with hope of stopping a Starmer government. But because of what the Conservatives could be, if they finally got their act together. Stranger things, and all that.
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