Conservatives are suffering terrible downward spiral
THE Conservative Party is in a downward spiral so bad that it could be the start of a death rattle.
Yes, of course, some of it is down to policy. I can’t remember meeting anyone who’s enthusiastic about the way the NHS is going, the hapless Rwanda scheme, or almost anything else for that matter.
Who could be an enthusiastic Tory today?
I think there are actually two huge reasons for the Conservatives’ spectacular decline which almost nobody is talking about.
First, we’re all acutely aware that the Conservatives have been in power for almost 14 years.
What people don’t often think through is exactly how this leads to incompetence. In the classic television show Yes Minister, the civil servant Sir Humphrey remarked that “Prime Ministers have little choice in forming governments. There are only 630 MPs [650 now], and a party with just over 300 MPs forms a government – and of those 300, 100 are too old and silly to be ministers and 100 too young and callow. Therefore, there are about 100 MPs to fill 100 government posts. Effectively no choice at all…”
Sir Humphrey’s point may be exaggerated for comedic effect, but when a party has been in power for so long, many of the more able and competent MPs have already been Government ministers – and have since fallen out with the party leadership, or no longer want ministerial office. Take Theresa May as an example: overpromoted and perhaps incompetent as Prime Minister – but she had bags of experience and skill at the level of a Cabinet Minister.
None of this depends on policy. It’s about competence. A Cabinet Minister requires serious political acumen to do the job well, so it’s unsurprising that the Conservatives have burned through most of the competent potential ministers already. That, for example, is the reason they brought David Cameron back: they understood the lack of competence within their own benches for handling one of the Great Offices of State.
Lack of competence is a disease permeating all of Government. A competent Government
would (moral issues aside) have found a better way to achieve the same effect as the Rwanda scheme, either working within existing legislation or recognising at an earlier stage that they would need to introduce legislation.
Second, there’s the way Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister. The Conservatives held a leadership election and their members ‘chose’ Liz Truss. Bad decision, you might think. But Tory MPs whittled the field down to just two: Sunak and Truss.
I used to work in politics. I can smell Conservative (and Labour – they’re trained differently) media appearances a mile off. Sunak’s style and mannerisms reek of cookie-cutter Toryism. It just doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t resonate with people. Conservative Party members are actually aware of this more than anyone. They knew Sunak to be a bad choice.
Why did Conservative members choose Liz Truss? Well, they didn’t. They voted for the candidate who wasn’t Rishi Sunak. Polls at the time showed that Conservative members would choose Suella Braverman or Kemi Badenoch above Rishi Sunak, or even Penny Mordaunt. Conservative members wanted ‘anyone but Sunak.’ Eight weeks after Sunak had been told he had no confidence, Conservative MPs (rightly) deposed Liz Truss and (wrongly) installed Sunak.
We now have a Prime Minister with zero moral authority. The country didn’t vote for him.
That’s par for the course, rightly or wrongly, in a representative democracy such as ours. But his own party had specifically and emphatically voted against him only a few weeks before he became Prime Minister.
We’re now in the bizarre position that the Labour Party feels more stable than the actual government.
At most elections there’s a choice between the stability of voting to re-elect a government and the desire for change by voting for the Opposition.
Want to know why the Conservatives are in decline, in a nutshell? The Opposition seems more stable than the Government: Labour can expect to win the next election because it’s seen as the choice for stability and the choice for change at the same time.