Rishi Sunak called a snap General Election to try and catch Labour on the wrong foot. All he managed to do was wrong foot his own party, leaving them totally unprepared for a campaign which Labour were well up for.
By any standards this has been a terrible start to a campaign. Sunak was caught out in the rain, couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery, crumbled in a biscuit factory, asked Welsh people if they were excited about watching a football tournament they hadn’t qualified for. MPs are refusing to knock on doors, Ministers have gone on holidays, and constituencies are running out of cash even before the campaign spending limit kicks in. They even managed a trip to the Titanic museum in Belfast, the only part of the UK where the Tories aren’t standing any candidates.
Their own MPs are furious at Sunak for calling a snap election and some are endorsing other parties.
Labour might be having some in fighting over candidate selection, but otherwise they are calm and well planned, with a proper communications matrix so that everyone knows what topic they are focussing on day by day, week by week.
The Tory campaign looks like a total shambles, with announcements made on the hoof, and most MPs not having a clue what they are meant to be talking about.
Their main policy announcement so far is bringing back national service, something that only the oldest of their core vote cares about, and which is actively hostile to the younger voters they need to win over. They kept on talking about national service days after it was ridiculed by a succession of retired Major Generals, normally their most reliable supporters.
Having pissed off younger voters over national service they then announced they were scrapping ‘mickey mouse’ degrees to fund apprenticeships. This was the same policy they announced during the 2010 election campaign only to drop the degree part of the policy from the manifesto after it turned out that no-one in the real world was doing an actual degree in Harry Potter studies or Horse Grooming. Even if they did increase apprenticeships by 100,000 that would only make up half the fall caused by the introduction of the apprenticeship levy.
Their campaign so far is so awful the question has to be asked? Are they trying to lose?
Some of this is understandable. After 14 years in power, Covid and Brexit lots of backbenchers are exhausted, tired of the constant crisis and dreaming of a lucrative post Commons career. But this doesn’t apply to the large number of recent Red Wall Tories, who have only been MPs for 5 years, and who are unlikely to earn as much again. They are behaving just as badly
Some of this is because too many PMs and Ministers in such a short period of time has left the party chock full of thwarted ambition, and failed careers. Boris Johnson in particular is making mischief from the sidelines, but he isn’t the only one; Liz Truss harbours more grudges than Morrissey, and still believes she might have another stab at the leadership. Or at last another stab at someone.
Too many senior Conservatives are fighting the battle to be the next conservative leader rather than fighting a general election campaign. They would rather have power within the party than power for the party, or at least have given up hope of power and will settle to be King or Queen of the rubble. This is the same toxic ambitions that kept Labour out of power for a long time.
Reform and GB news are funded by some very rich people who want to remake the Conservative party in their own image; authoritarian, nativist, dedicated to Trussite economics. Lots of the traditional Tory press are on the same page; even the Telegraph, which a decade ago was the home of sensible Toryism, has become obsessed by the same narrow agenda. For those who want to reshape Conservatism a defeat might help their take over bid.
Reform, GB News and the rest of the Tory media have set the agenda, and tone of debate for the British right. As a result the Conservative party talks in language that terrifies lots of voters, but is never able to make those terrible promises work in the real world, endless letting down the constituency they are pandering to. Talk the talk but can’t walk the walk.
Some on the far right might even be happier out of office free to indulge their ideological fantasies without any of the constraints of reality that Government brings. This same disease labour had under Corbyn, talking to their own core supporters in language that alienates ordinary people, making ideological promises that reality won’t let them keep. Once that mindset takes hold it is very hard to change, as multiple Labour election defeats testify.
But at the bottom of this whole mess is the ideology of the Conservative party. They have spent decades fetishising the individual above the collective, trashing ideas like service and duty and elevating selfishness and greed. They elevated the posh amateur over the common expert.
This is where that ideology leads; a failed Government and a party reduced to a squabbling mass of egos and neuroses. This is who the Conservative Party is now. And that will take a long time to fix.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/29/tory-party