We learned two things about the Conservatives last week. First, that they’re planning to spend so much money at the next election that they can’t afford to return Frank Hester’s tainted millions. Second, that the election won’t be held in May. I doubt I was alone in breathing a sigh of relief that the Easter holidays weren’t going to be blighted by a campaign. Even so, I couldn’t help but wonder whether it might actually have been better, for all our sakes, had voters been given the chance to put the Tories out of their all-too-obvious misery. Instead, the country will have to put up with another six months or so of fag-end government. It wouldn’t be the first time, of course. There have been plenty of occasions on which the proverbial swing of the political pendulum has seen us governed by politicians who have served their purpose yet remain doggedly determined to hang on, hoping against hope that something will turn up while their supposed supporters tear them down and tear themselves apart in the process. Whether, though, we’ve seen anything that quite matches the truly chronic combination of torpor and turmoil that we’re witnessing right now is debatable. That’s because by no means all outgoing administrations since 1945 have been aware that they were about to be booted out. The Labour politicians who lost in 1951 might have been exhausted after serving in government for a decade of war and peace. But with opinion polling still in its infancy, and with their core working-class vote and their faith in socialism still strong, they weren’t simply – or at least so obviously – going through the motions. Likewise, the Tory politicians who lost in 1964 knew they were in trouble. Harold Macmillan’s failure to secure EEC entry, plus a bitterly contested succession that saw the leadership pass to the aristocratic Alec Douglas-Home, along with a faltering economy, didn’t help. Still, they hadn’t entirely given up the ghost – rightly so since, in the event, the election proved a very close-run thing.
More than that, like their Labour counterparts in 1951, and in stark contrast to the Conservatives today, Douglas-Home and his colleagues, for all that Wilson and his team talked of “13 wasted years”, could point to some solid achievements: a huge housebuilding programme and massively improved standards of living for the masses – and all without doing any appreciable damage to the postwar welfare state. Nor, unlike today’s Tories, did they have to worry about the parliamentary party turning into an undisciplined, factionalised rabble, focused more on a post-election leadership contest than winning the election in the first place. Back then, loyalty really was the Conservative party’s secret weapon and Douglas-Home, having lost the election, was free to hand over to Ted Heath at a time of his own choosing. Heath (like Wilson in 1970) was surprised to lose in 1974. So, for all the difficulties both men encountered, neither really ran fag-end governments. That was not, perhaps, so true of Jim Callaghan, who famously bemoaned “a sea-change in politics” – “a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of” that, after 1978/79’s winter of discontent, helped Margaret Thatcher come to power. The same might be said of Gordon Brown’s government in 2010, even if, like Douglas-Home’s, it ran the opposition much closer than anyone imagined. But the real parallel with Rishi Sunak’s so-called zombie government and parliament is, of course, John Major’s – an administration for which, after Black Wednesday in 1992, everything that possibly could go wrong did go wrong, with any light at the end of the tunnel turning out to be an oncoming train.
Polling by then was no longer in its infancy, and it indicated beyond any reasonable doubt that nemesis was just around the corner, while the days of even residual deference to the leadership among Tory MPs, along with the public’s enthusiasm for “Thatcherism with a human face”, had long since passed. Sleazy, out of ideas, and utterly divided on Europe, its civil service turning its mind to Labour, and many of its own MPs preoccupied with post-election plotting or else unemployment, the government simultaneously limped on and fell apart. Even so, I don’t recall Major’s fag-end administration being quite so poisonous and pointless, or quite so loathed, as Sunak’s. I guess we’ll just have to wait until autumn to see if the voters agree. • Tim Bale is professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, the deputy director of UK in a Changing Europe and the author of Five Year Mission: the Labour Party Under Ed Miliband, and The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron