Allister Heath:
The PM has angered every demographic, leaving her with poll ratings nearly as dire as John Major’s
It takes genuine skill to be this bad at politics, to simultaneously repel old and young, Remainers and Brexiteers, urbanites and rural dwellers, Left and Right. In years to come, political scientists will study Theresa May’s time in office with morbid fascination, dissecting her unique knack for alienating every group of voter bar none.
They will reflect on her broken promises, her breathtakingly poor communication skills, her selfimposed isolation, her pointless micro-management, her abject inability to lead, her squandering of one of the greatest opportunities for political realignment in British history. Their conclusion, surely, will be that never before had such a mediocre apparatchik been so overpromoted, landing us with a prime minister entirely unsuited to the art of statecraft. They will wonder how she remained for so long in Downing Street at a time when somebody truly exceptional was required, and why her party failed to remove her, even after it had become clear that she was taking the Tories to the brink of annihilation.
Lord North, who gave away the New World colonies, was a far more plausible leader: in any case, American independence was one of the best things ever to happen to the world. Robert Peel split his party and robbed it of a majority for 30 years, but delivered the extraordinary bounty that was free trade.
There have been no upsides to Mrs May’s time in office: she has trashed Brexit, her party and democracy itself, all for nothing. Her modus operandi will be held up as a guide on how not to be a politician: a reverse of Machiavelli’s The Prince or of Cicero’s How to Win an Election. Her decisions were not so much Sun Tzu as sub-marx Brothers, slapstick but without any of the laughs.
Why did nobody remind her that the purpose of politics is to maximise votes, not minimise them, historians will ask, only half in jest. She should have built a post-brexit broad church, uniting an even greater proportion of the country around an optimistic, patriotic, generous vision for a self-governing country. Instead, she quickly blew all of that, but even after her preposterous election campaign, the Tories still collected 42.4 per cent of the vote in 2017, matching Margaret Thatcher’s 1983 result.
Yet less than two years later, and now that Brexit is in mortal peril, she is down to around 31 per cent in the polls, barely above John Major’s 30.7 per cent nadir of 1997. She has lost one in four of those who voted for her, primarily because of her failure to deliver Brexit, and over one third of her original, tentative support base from 2016. She has also legitimised Jeremy Corbyn’s party, despite its dalliance with Marxist ideas and its disgusting harbouring of anti-semites. She has helped create new, radicalised Brexiteer and Remainer identities, poisoning politics for years to come. Instead of absorbing the populist rebellion, and demonstrating that the mainstream can change to reflect popular views, she has turbocharged it. Her mission was to mop up Ukip and the protest movements, recreating a mass-market governing party; instead, we are back to where we were before the referendum, albeit with a much more bitter kind of fragmentation.
Most unforgivably, Mrs May has dashed the public’s trust in democracy, and proved our constitution to be fundamentally broken.
The European ballot on May 23 could easily be the worst election result the party has ever had. The Tories’ 23.1 per cent eked out in the 2014 Euros, when David Cameron was beaten by Labour and Ukip triumphed, may yet be remembered as part of a much-missed golden age.
Slowly but surely, the polls are beginning to capture the implosion in Tory support that many of us had been predicting for months. The local elections will also be grim.
European election polling conducted by Hanbury Strategy for the Open Europe think tank still puts the Tories on 23 per cent, with Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party on 10.3, Ukip (now a dreadful gang still trading under the old name) on 7.5 and the pro-remain Change UK on 4.1. As the campaign progresses, Farage’s and Chuka Umunna’s groups are likely to improve their scores, and the Tories could conceivably fall below 20 per cent for the first time, especially if some of their supporters boycott the whole exercise. A general election held tomorrow would probably see Labour emerge as the largest party, a catastrophic outcome for which Mrs May and her reverse Midas touch would bear the entirety of the blame.
Some of the discussion in recent days in Westminster has lost track of these fundamentals. Yes, the Tories must regain “younger” voters: the age at which people tip over to being Tories is now 51 and this needs to go down by a decade at least. The party’s related failure to appeal to more ethnic minorities could prove to be even more cataclysmic. A report by the Onward think tank makes for sombre reading, as does a separate analysis by James Kanagasooriam, one of the authors.
The Tories are being hammered by falling home ownership, the fact that graduates are now Left-wing, the politics of urbanisation and declining smaller towns, and their inability to attract more non-white voters.
All of these must be addressed: yet this, in my opinion, can be done without the Tories becoming even more Left-wing, especially given the modern youth’s fiscal conservatism and entrepreneurial leanings. Young voters tend to be Remainers, but even that could be counteracted with the right language and vision.
However, the crucial point is that everybody else is also deserting the party, including older Leavers. A proper Brexit party ought to be polling at least in the low-40s, if not higher.
Mrs May is facing total collapse: she has angered every demographic. She needs to quit as soon as possible, but that is merely a necessary, not a sufficient, condition to save the Tories and the Eurosceptic cause.
The party must select a candidate with broad appeal who can deliver a meaningful Brexit and rebuild Tory support among all groups, young and old. Can it be done? Does such a potential Tory leader even exist? Do the Tories still have it in themselves to snap back from extinction, or will they once again pick a dud?
I no longer know.