There is a morose mood in the Conservative party. It isn’t just that the Tories expect to lose the next election – they fear that the coming defeat might be definitive, a result from which they never recover. One recent multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) poll forecasts that the Tories could be reduced to fewer than 100 seats – their lowest ever haul – with Labour predicted to secure an unprecedented 250-plus seat majority. Tory grandees are consequently gloomy. The former Brexit negotiator David Frost has called it a “desperate situation”. Charles Moore, the former Telegraph editor and Thatcher biographer, tells me the party’s condition is “probably worse than I’ve ever seen it”. Some are billing the next election as an “extinction-level event”. Rishi Sunak’s single-minded obsession on forcing through the Rwanda scheme appears, in this light, like a desperate attempt to distract himself and his party from the approaching abyss.
Some Tories may feel the party has reached its nadir as an electoral force, but such apocalyptic language is nothing new. In fact, fear of extinction is part of a long Conservative tradition. “It will be interesting to be the last of the Conservatives,” Lord Salisbury, one of the party’s longest-serving leaders, wrote glumly in 1882, as the age of mass suffrage loomed. “I foresee that will be our fate.” (Almost a century and a half later, he’d be relieved to learn that his great-great-grandson is leader of the House of Lords.) In 1945, on the brink of an unprecedented landslide victory, Labour candidates spoke openly about wanting “the complete extinction of the Tory party”. Then, six years later, the Tories returned to power and stayed there for the next 13. In 1974, amid the broadly progressive contours of the postwar consensus, the political scientist Andrew Gamble foresaw a future in which the Conservatives could be condemned to “the museum of Fantastic Zoology”. And here we are. “People often talk about the death of the Tory party, and it doesn’t happen,” Lord Moore told me.
But there is one historic precedent causing existential concern among Conservatives (and excitement among their enemies, left and right). It comes not from Britain, but Canada in 1993 – references to which have become more frequent in recent weeks. That year, the ruling Progressive Conservatives fell from 167 federal seats to two overnight, after being outflanked on its right by a party named, ominously, Reform. The Progressive Conservatives never recovered and dissolved just over a decade later. Could the same happen here?
That’s what Reform UK, led by Richard Tice and with Nigel Farage as its honorary president and majority shareholder, says it’s aiming for. According to recent polling by YouGov, its support has risen to 13%, only seven points behind the Tories. If Farage chooses to stand as its leader – the threat of which he currently enjoys too much to actually commit to – Reform could plausibly overtake the Tories. “I know it’s only once every hundred years these things happen,” Farage said recently, “but I do think we face the possibility that this could be the end of the road for the Conservative party.”
There are surface-level similarities between Canada in 1993 and the UK today: a long-running Conservative government coming to an end, a weak economy, a first-past-the-post system, an upstart party called Reform. But these mask more profound differences. Whereas the Progressive Conservatives formed in 1942, the Tories – rather like the royal family and bad weather – essentially feel as old as Britain itself, a confounding force that has shaped political and cultural life in their image. The result is that no matter how drastic their defeat in an election, the Conservatives can usually count on access to various gilded bunkers – from Fleet Street to the City – from which to regroup, plot their return and influence government from afar. “When a Conservative government is in power, it is an integral part of a continuous landscape which extends in a smooth, unbroken space around it,” historian Perry Anderson observed in 1964. “When a Labour government is in power, it is an isolated, spot-lit enclave, surrounded on almost every side by hostile territory, unceasingly shelled by industry, press and orchestrated ‘public opinion’.”
Some wonder whether today’s Tories have, in their feverish radicalism and volatility, surrendered their establishment entitlements. In this view, their calamitous economic record and immense unpopularity has disillusioned industry bosses, wearied even their loyal cheerleaders in the press, and in their increasingly fringe obsessions – deportations to Rwanda, gender-neutral pronouns, far left extremists – renounced any claim to reflect “public opinion”. The mass exodus of Tory MPs at the next election – so far 66 MPs elected as Conservatives in 2019 have already said they won’t be seeking re-election, close to a fifth of the total – is expected to further elevate its wilder personalities, and Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch, Jacob Rees-Mogg and co seem unlikely to pioneer the party’s extinction rebellion.
But this notion that the Tories have put themselves permanently beyond the pale is a fairytale. It misunderstands the Tory-friendly anachronisms of Britain’s political system. Even after a wipeout, and even if Labour follow through on its plans to remove all hereditary peers, the House of Lords guarantees the Tories an outsized presence in Westminster, while the swings of the first-past-the-post system ensure a majority is always within reach. The fairytale also glosses over the nature of Labour’s ascendancy – which for now, in its caution, is more an affirmation of the Tories’ enduring power than anything else. Hence the recent trend of Labour frontbenchers showering Thatcher with praise. “She smashed glass ceilings,” the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said. She was “a visionary leader”, according to the shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy.
There is an obvious logic to Labour’s strategy: by cleaving to the governing common sense and straining to appease the rightwing media, it hopes to remove the Tories’ stranglehold on Westminster politics. The calculation is that the Tories’ unpopularity will be enough to see Labour through. But even in the likely event this works, the strategy has an obvious, self-defeating flaw: the public aren’t just sick of the Tories, after all – they’re sick of what they’ve done to the place. Any victory premised on continuity with the status quo will only make Labour guilty by association. Labour become complicit in – and barely distinguishable from – the party they are meant to oppose. As the lessons of New Labour show, the result is low election turnouts and, in the void of enthusiasm, ripe conditions for the Tories’ return.
Absent a desire to confront Toryism as a material force rather than simply as a tally of seats – and without the intent to confront the Tories’ bunkers of power through serious media and electoral reform – Labour’s tiptoe approach makes the Conservatives obsolete only by making them unnecessary. One might ask who really becomes extinct in this process: the Conservatives or Labour?
Samuel Earle is a writer based in London and the author of Tory Nation: How One Party Took Over