The Tories now face an electoral meltdown even worse than 1997

The economic, ideological, demographic and cyclical forces are all lining up behind a Labour landslide

Young, ambitious and talented Tory MPS are running for the hills, announcing their early retirement, and who can blame them? The Conservative Party, having jettisoned not just its principles but also its hunger for power, is locked in a political death spiral. Senior figures, consumed by defeatism, have already privately given up, and there is a real possibility of a wipeout of an even greater magnitude than that suffered at the hands of Tony Blair in 1997.

Sir Keir Starmer is no Blair, but in the current climate the Opposition doesn’t need an uber-charismatic superstar at its helm to triumph. Far more so than 25 years ago, the most important structural, economic, demographic, ideological and cyclical forces are lining up behind a Labour landslide.

Unlike Rishi Sunak, John Major had a lot to boast about: GDP was booming, inflation tamed, home ownership rocketing and wages surging. Britain had been reinvigorated, and consumers empowered. Even so, Labour ended up with a 179-seat majority.

What will it be this time? Inflation is above 10 per cent, mostly because of excessive money-printing after Covid, and taxes keep rising. There has been mediocre economic growth since the financial crisis, and wages have stagnated for years. The country is substantially poorer as a result of the energy crisis, and real disposable income is predicted to collapse by

7.1 per cent over two years. Not all of this is the Tories’ fault, but much is. Even their most ardent supporters are hard pressed to point to any lasting achievements after 12 years in office, apart from Brexit and somewhat improved schools. The NHS is teetering on the brink.

The 1990s were a comparatively Right-wing era: Blair won by abandoning his party’s commitment to nationalisation and class warfare. He pledged to be tough on crime, to fight trendy nostrums in education, to reform welfare and not to increase the 40p top rate of tax. The present moment is very different: the Tories are well to the Left of New Labour on many issues, and the country is drifting towards bureaucratic welfarism, wokery and stagnation. Starmer just needs to emit slightly Rightish vibes on immigration, Brexit and public service reform to position himself as a centrist.

There would be no traction in a replay of a “New Labour, New Danger” campaign. The Tories are the high tax, pro-welfare party, and have lost all populist instincts on issues such as immigration and crime. They have surrendered to the politics of envy, and can’t even find it in themselves to defend private health care. They are no longer the party of the aspirational classes, because there is little point in aspiring in high-tax Britain.

This explains another seismic shift since the 1990s: the young have moved dramatically Left-wards, and more of them voted for Corbyn when he lost disastrously in 2019 than for Blair when he won triumphantly in 1997. Boris Johnson compensated for this by hoovering up the pensioner vote, hence the triple lock and other gerontocratic policies. This process has run its course: there are too many angry under-50s.

The shortage of houses, their ridiculously high price and the collapse in home ownership among 20 and 30-somethings is the main economic force pushing the young Left-wards. Owning property is the key gateway to conservatism. Our deranged planning system, and the Tories’ refusal to allocate a lot more land – not just brownfield, but also greenfield – to housing is a betrayal of our younger generation. It is one reason for the decline in marriage and fertility rates, itself another blow to conservatism.

The Tories have started to make inroads among some ethnic minorities, and I’m convinced that this will redraw Britain’s political map in a more conservative direction in the 2030s. For now, however, the electorate’s greater diversity is still primarily benefiting Labour. The expansion of the universities will also help Starmer. The very educated were always more Left-wing, as FA Hayek and George Orwell noted; but the wholesale takeover of higher education by the hard-left appears to be influencing an entire generation. Many young people now accept many of the premises of Critical Race Theory, including the lie that we are structurally racist.

The explosion in graduates has also led to what Peter Turchin calls elite overproduction: too many graduates chasing too few prestigious jobs, and ending up in low-paid work, saddled with debt. Social media has accelerated the rise of politics as a fashion statement: Left-wing ideas have become high status, and Right-wing ones low status. This has further shifted the professional classes to the Left, and encouraged the rise of woke capital. read more

follow Allister Heath on Twitter @Allisterheath at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion

They have surrendered to the politics of envy and can’t even find it in themselves to defend private health care

It’s not just the young that Sunak is losing: Brexiteers are also deserting him. Some 56 per cent of the electorate now say voting to leave the EU was a mistake, while just 32 per cent disagree. Much of this is a proxy for fury at the Government, but Brexit has been disastrously mishandled.

Massive reforms should have been made as soon as we left to show poorer and northern voters that leaving the EU would work for them, to thank centreright, southern Eurosceptics for their support, and to show the Remainer classes that Britain could flourish outside the EU. Yet the Tories have delivered nothing: working-class Brexiteers believe they have been lied to; the centre-right has been hammered by Left-wing, Eu-style policies; and the Remainers feel that they were right all along. Sunak certainly can’t afford to lose any votes to a new radical populist party.

Writing for Tablet magazine, Alana Newhouse argues that the Left-right cleavage is obsolete, replaced by a new divide between brokenism and status-quoism. Brokenists believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with a country’s institutions, economy, social affairs and culture, and are desperate to end the incompetence, elite failure, moral decay and decline they see everywhere; status-quoists are content with minor reforms and are convinced a different brand of otherwise identikit politicians will sort everything out.

In 2016, the brokenist majority voted for Brexit; in 2019, Johnson was their standard-bearer. But today the Tories are the party of the failed status quo and the brokenists are deserting them, turning to Labour, not in the belief that they are the real deal but simply faute de mieux. Absent a miracle, the Tories are facing a well-deserved day of reckoning.