Promises, Promises

Britain’s voters will punish the Conservatives for breaking their word

Britain has had five Conservative prime ministers since 2010. It would have a sixth, but Conservative members of Parliament seem uncertain if it’s worth the trouble. There will be an election before the end of the year. After 14 years in government, the Conservatives are not so much squeezed by the polls as violently compressed, like a totaled car in a crusher. On their left flank, they are polling more than 20 points behind Labour. On their right, they have lost as much as 14% of the vote to Reform UK, a populist right-wing party.

In early March, the Ipsos polling group reported that support for the Conservatives was at its lowest since Ipsos began tracking voter opinion in 1978. Labour was at 47%. The Conservatives were at 20%, their lowest-ever rating. If an election were held today, the Conservatives would suffer the kind of defeat that sent them into the wilderness for a generation after 1997. They might even suffer something worse.

In 1993, Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party won 16% of the votes but retained only two of its 162 seats. The political scientists Anand Menon and Daniel Béland identify three reasons for this disaster. First, a failed regional policy led to a loss of support in a major province, Quebec. Second, the right-wing vote split with the rise of a rival regional party, also called Reform, whose members felt ignored by the metropolis. Third, economic growth was poor, taxes were high, and the economy still recovering from a recession.

The British Conservatives are in a similar position. First, they have lost the regions. They hold only six of Scotland’s 59 seats and 14 of Wales’s 40 seats. They hold none of Northern Ireland’s 18 seats, though their allies in the Democratic Unionist Party hold eight seats. Second, the right-wing vote is splitting where it counts most. In England, which has 533 of the House of Commons’s 650 seats, and 328 of the Conservatives’ 348 MPs, the regional insurgency of Reform UK is splitting the Conservative vote. Third, the economy went into recession in the last quarter of 2023, and taxes are at the highest level since 1948.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Rishi Sunak was Boris Johnson’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. His largesse with the public finances bought him some of the highest poll ratings ever recorded. Little over a year later, in December 2023, a YouGov poll found that his favorability rating was -49.

Before the 1993 elections, Canada’s Progressive Conservatives appointed Kim Campbell, a new leader with strong personal ratings. Campbell went on to lose her seat. Britain’s Conservatives made the same gamble in October 2022 when they selected Rishi Sunak as prime minister. During the coronavirus pandemic, Sunak was Boris Johnson’s chancellor of the Exchequer. His largesse with the public finances bought him some of the highest poll ratings ever recorded and even secured him a small bounce when he took over as prime minister. Little over a year later, in December 2023, a YouGov poll found that his favorability rating was -49. In a Daily Telegraph-Savanta poll from mid-March, only 45% of Conservative voters wanted Sunak to lead the party in the coming general election.

Time is not just against the Conservatives because there must soon be an election. The long cycle of British politics is against them, too. Since 1945, the Conservatives and Labour have alternated long stints of roughly 13 or 14 years.

The Conservatives ruled from 1951 to 1964. Labour ruled from 1964 to 1979, with an unsteady Conservative interlude from 1970 to 1974. The Conservatives returned for 18 years, extending the cycle by changing prime minister in 1990 from Margaret Thatcher to John Major. Labour then achieved the statutory 13 years from 1997 to 2010, under Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown.

The Conservatives are now in their 14th year in office. They returned to power in 2010 under David Cameron, in coalition with the Liberal Democrats. They shed the coalition in 2015, then shed Cameron after the Brexit referendum in 2016, then shed their unity, their principles, and three more prime ministers. They include Theresa May, who squandered Cameron’s 2015 victory by bungling the 2017 election; Boris Johnson, who in 2019 won the biggest Conservative victory since Thatcher in 1987 and then, like Thatcher, was knifed in the back by his own MPs three years later; and Liz Truss, who held office for only 49 days and who, though she never held power, nevertheless came close to crashing the economy.

Sunak promised to bring stability. He has overseen chaos. Not all of it is his fault. Like President Joe Biden, Sunak can blame exceptional challenges, such as the coronavirus pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Like Biden, he can tout a rapid economic recovery and remind us that inflation is coming down and unemployment is low. And, like Biden, he finds that the public is not convinced. Personal debt went through the roof during the pandemic. Prices went similarly skyward afterward. For the first time in modern history, British households are predicted to be poorer at the end of a parliamentary session than when it started. As in the United States, in Britain, the voters are feeling it in the pocketbook.

In January 2023, Sunak made five pledges to the British people. “I fully expect you to hold my government and I to account on delivering those goals,”