Partly in preparation for the worst, but also as a way of finding hope for the longer term, a book that has not exactly been a UK bestseller has suddenly become popular bedtime reading among British Conservative politicians. It is entitled Full Circle: Death and Resurrection in Canadian Conservative Politics. Written by the Canadian author and historian Bob Plamondon, it charts the obliteration and near-death experience of the country’s centre-right Progressive Conservative party at the 1993 general election, when it crashed from holding a majority in the Commons to losing all but two seats. Many dark years in the wilderness followed, before a merger and name change allowed it to claw itself back into the reckoning and eventually regain power in 2006, in one of the more remarkable political renaissances of recent times. Even before Rishi Sunak’s disastrous blunder on Thursday, when he flew home early from the D-day commemorations with veterans and world leaders to conduct a political interview (having insisted politics was being suspended for the day), potential parallels with the Canadian experience were already being drawn. Could the Tories in Britain be all but wiped out in a similar way, Conservatives are now asking themselves. And if so, what are the chances of a previously annihilated party rising again from the ashes? This weekend, these questions seem ever more pertinent. The UK Conservative party seems to be spinning ever faster into a death spiral, while Labour shores up its poll lead and poses as a government in waiting. At the end of an emotional service at the British Normandy Memorial near Ver-sur-Mer on Thursday, Keir Starmer agreed to a short interview with broadcasters on the lawns overlooking Gold beach. After being asked to give his thoughts on the events of 80 years ago, the TV journalists pressed Starmer about the latest ins and out of the general election campaign and rows with Sunak over tax. The Labour leader refused to engage. The day, he told the reporters, was for the veterans, not political point-scoring. He was asked once more, and, again, Starmer opted not to take the free hit. His next stop was the international commemoration on Omaha beach.
Meanwhile, Sunak had taken his leave and was already on the plane home, slipping away to do an interview with ITV’s Paul Brand that may well turn out to be another hammer blow to his chances of re-election. Next morning, Labour’s defence spokesperson, John Healey, was able to slot the ball into an open net, as veterans accused Sunak of letting the country down. “Given that the prime minister has been campaigning on the idea that young people should complete a year’s national service, what does it say that he appears to have been unable to complete a single afternoon of it?” It could hardly have been more damning. Incredibly, Sunak’s ability to lead the Tories even until polling day on 4 July – never mind beyond – is now being called into doubt by some on his own side. Tory candidates and staff out campaigning this weekend to save their seats are beyond despair. One said on Friday: “If you had actually tried to pick an issue on which to upset my constituents, you could not have chosen a better one.” On Friday morning, the former Tory special adviser Sam Freedman revealed how talk of replacing Sunak before the election was spreading among his friends and followers on X: “Had several messages this morning asking me if there’s any precedent, in any country, for a major party leader being replaced during a campaign. I can’t find one.” Writing in the Observer, Rob Ford, a leading expert on voting intention and trends, says the evidence from polls shows that “an electoral asteroid is streaking through the atmosphere” and is heading for the Tory heartlands. Ford no longer thinks it impossible that the Conservatives could end up with less than 100 seats, so badly is their campaign misfiring and so much trust have they lost over 14 years and the tenures of five prime ministers. Other polling experts say that such is the geographical spread of the Tory vote, and the brutal nature of the first past the post system, that once their vote drops into the low 20% region, the number of seats could fall into double digits – and could go as low as 20. Last week began terribly for the Tories and Sunak – but still managed to get worse. First came apocalyptic polls, including one in the Daily Mail predicting the Tories would win just 72 seats.
Then Nigel Farage announced he was standing for Reform UK in Clacton-on-Sea, and would lead the hard-right party for the next five years. Every Tory candidate knew instantly that the rightwing vote in their area was now much more likely to split, making the job of retaining seats more difficult. “Rarely can a party have received two such blows in one afternoon,” said elections guru John Curtice, adding: “Unfortunately for the Conservatives, most of Reform’s support comes from those who backed Boris Johnson’s Get Brexit Done appeal in 2019 – many of whom would probably revert to the Conservatives if Reform were not now an option.” A telltale sign of the campaign imploding was the way Conservatives were suddenly prepared to tear into their own leader, so disillusioned and despairing had they become. Just as Sunak was trying to rebut claims in midweek that he had lied over Labour’s tax plans, Fraser Nelson, the editor of the Tory-supporting Spectator magazine, appeared to side more with Labour than Sunak. “There are serious issues at stake in this general election, and the Tories have just released nonsense figures with fake attribution and given it to newspapers who took it on trust,” wrote Nelson. “I’m really not sure that this will help their chances very much.” Similarly, former Tory chancellor George Osborne was not over-supportive when he said mockingly on his podcast with Ed Balls that Sunak was visiting ultra-safe seats that no other leader would have visited because they were only ones left he could win.
“He’s visiting Honiton in Devon. He is visiting Harpenden in Hertfordshire, is visiting Macclesfield in Cheshire. Those are traditionally safe, Conservative seats that I don’t think a Conservative leader would have visited in the general election in my lifetime,” Osborne said. So with the campaign hurtling off the rails, the polls refusing to turn, Farage threatening to split the rightwing vote and morale plunging, where are the Tories heading in the event of humiliation, or even annihilation? There are various theories, depending on the gravity of the defeat, though no one really knows, and few want to go public with their thoughts. Former Tory cabinet minister David Gauke believes things will probably be at the worse end of expectations for the Tories on election night and that the party would then lurch dramatically to the right. “My fear is – particularly if Reform do well and Nigel Farage is elected as the MP for Clacton – that the instincts of much of the Conservative party will be that we need to lean into that, we need to unite the right, we need to form an alliance, if not a merger, with Reform, and that is where the Conservative party has to go.” If that did happen, Gauke says, “I think the Conservative party is surrendering for at least a generation, possibly for ever, its once held position as the natural party of government, the party of the middle classes, the home counties, of business.” He believes that former home secretary Priti Patel could well emerge as the new Tory leader, strike some kind of deal with Farage, and invite Boris Johnson back in to the parliamentary party. Patel, he says, remains on better terms with Johnson than other possible leadership contenders from the right such as Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick. She also is on good terms with Farage. “I have long predicted that Priti Patel would lead the party after the general election, standing on a platform of uniting the right, of wanting to reach some kind of accommodation with Nigel Farage, of wanting to bring back Boris Johnson into the parliamentary party,” Gauke says. “One of the fascinating political issues of the post-election world will be the Nigel Farage/Boris Johnson relationship, and it may well be that it is not possible for one party to contain them both, but I think she will try to find a way.” Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London, who has done extensive research on the likely political complexion of the Tory party in the event of a defeat, says that in a nightmare scenario – where it wins only about 100 seats – the parliamentary party that would emerge would be “more southern, more nimbyish, more Oxbridge-educated, and quite possibly a little more representative (although still not very representative) of ethnic minorities, as well as women”. Where this would leave the party is not clear to him nor anyone else.
Bale says he had always recoiled from the idea that the Tory party could go out of business and just disappear, but now he thinks some radical reconfiguration could happen. “While talk of the Tories facing an ‘existential threat’ or ‘going out of business’ tends to make me reach for my revolver, I wouldn’t entirely dismiss the chances of such a takeover, hostile or otherwise,” he says.
“A toxic combination of Brexit, Boris Johnson, and an increasingly hysterical rightwing media ecosystem – along with a highly unrepresentative grassroots membership that nevertheless has the final say on choosing the party’s leader – has pushed the party towards becoming an ersatz populist radical-right party rather than a mainstream centre-right outfit. “In 1997, the party merely suffered a very bad defeat, and even that saw it head off to the ideological hills for a while, electing William Hague – he of ‘a foreign land’ and ‘save the pound’. A truly catastrophic, nightmare-scenario result would only see the Tory party travel further down that road toward radical rightwing populism than it has already travelled since 2016 – and without an obvious off-ramp. “Whether, at that point, it would still be the same Conservative party which has dominated British politics since the coming of democracy, I’m honestly no longer sure.” Ryan Shorthouse, executive chair of the Bright Blue thinktank, which promotes liberal Conservatism, says that if Reform does well, “some people will be pushing for some kind of merger with Reform” and that “some on the Tory right will feel it is the right place for them”. But he believes that could then leave a higher proportion of one nation Tories in the parliamentary party, who would not want to choose a rightwing leader to succeed Sunak. “The lesson from Rishi is that moving to the right is the wrong approach, so my view is that the MPs will be more one nation and will pick someone who is more of their persuasion.” The reality is that, as things go from bad to worse on the campaign trail, most Tories are braced for annihilation. But no one knows how, or whether, the party could survive, after the asteroid has struck, in anything like its current form – or whether the Conservatives could somehow eventually reinvent themselves, as happened in Canada.