Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020, and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
What was our party’s heaviest defeat at a general election? As Conservatives qua Conservatives, we suffered it in 1906, when we fell from 402 MPs to 106. Arthur Balfour, our then-leader, lost his seat at Manchester East.
What if we also include the Tory prelude? The Duke of Wellington secured our lowest-ever share of the vote in 1832, 29.2 per cent, translating into 175 out of 658 Commons seats. After that, the Tory Party was closed down and replaced with Robert Peel’s Conservative Party in 1834. A very great man, Robert Peel.
Can we go back further? For the sake of argument, let’s count the followers of both Lord North and Pitt the Younger as Tories, thereby bridging the gap between Bolingbroke’s semi-Jacobites in the early eighteenth century and the reforming Tory ministries of Liverpool and Canning a century later. That gives us more than three centuries of data, including the long Whig ascendancy of the eighteenth century. What was our worst performance during that entire span, whether as Tories, Pittites, Unionists, or Conservatives?
It is impossible to give a definitive answer, given the fluidity of faction. But, trusting to the wisdom of crowds, let’s go with Wikipedia’s tallies. In 1754, the MPs who were at least sometimes referred to as Tories went down to 106 seats. Insofar as they could be said to have a leader, it was the Northamptonshire baronet Sir Edmund Isham (pronounced Eye-shm). Sir Edmund Who? Quite.
Our worst result by share of the popular vote, then, at least since it has been possible to measure it, was 29.2 per cent in 1832. And our worst result by seats was 106 in 1754.
How does that compare with where we are now? According to an MRP survey of 22,000 people at the weekend, we are on 23.5 per cent support, which will translate into 72 seats. For once, that over-used word “existential” seems apt. I’m not sure how a party comes back from such a walloping.
What might turn things around? No one is listening to policy announcements. And no one wants to hear that most of what is going wrong in the country, from tax rises to hospital waiting lists, has to do with a lockdown that the electorate (and the Labour Party) wanted to prolong.
That leaves only an appeal for clemency. Voters are enjoined to vote Conservative to deprive Labour of its “supermajority” – the latest Americanism imported into our political lexicon.
The trouble is that this appeal assumes an interest in the mechanics of politics that few people have. You, reader, are a politics nerd. Here you are on ConHome. But in an electorate where 78 per cent of adults cannot name their local MP, and 91 per cent don’t know what a backbencher is, trying to explain why voting Reform can only result in a bigger Labour majority is a hell of a struggle.
I am with Winston Churchill on democracy. It is a good way to avoid the catastrophic outcomes inherent in other systems. But, if you have ever canvassed, you’ll know that politics is just as much a hobby as, say, Formula One, and just as opaque to non-enthusiasts.
When Grant Shapps says that voting Reform UK risks putting Labour in for a generation, he is right. When William Hague argues that a tiny Opposition means an unconstrained government, he is right. But try convincing the perfectly sensible fellow I canvassed in his Sussex garden yesterday, who was fond of Rishi Sunak, but was no longer prepared to vote Conservative because “the hard Right will topple Rishi once they get back in”
We have the least bad system of government, and I would no more complain about it than about our matchless countryside. I simply observe that most people have more immediate concerns than the political process. Talking to a group of private school parents, all worried about Labour’s VAT plans, I was struck by how many were inclined to vote for Reform “to stop Keir Starmer”.
Given that the most optimistic poll has Reform winning seven seats, and most have it on zero, this seemed to me absurd. But it was I, not they, who was unusual, having this bizarre interest in the mechanics of elections.
So Conservatives are playing their final card: “Stop the landslide”. They appeal to people’s sense of proportion. Sure, runs the subtext, you want to give us a kicking. But are you so in love with Starmer that you intend to hand him the largest majority ever enjoyed by a single party?
“Stop the landslide” has a semi-mythical status among election strategists. In 1995, in the Australian state of Queensland, the incumbent Labor Party was cruising to re-election. The opposition supposedly conceded, causing many voters to hesitate, and resulting in a tiny Labor majority.
I say “semi-mythical” for a reason. The phrase “stop the landslide” does not seem to have been used. Instead, the Liberal/National opposition urged Queenslanders to “send a message”. There were numerous factors behind Labor’s slide, of which the opposition campaign was not the chief. In any case, it is far from clear that Queensland is comparable to the UK, where voting is not compulsory.
The biggest difference is this. In Queensland, the opposition was back in contention because it was no longer split between its Liberal and National components. The two Right-wing parties had come back together. Here, the opposite is happening. The Right is split under a first-past-the-post system that brutally punishes such divisions.
Hence the paradox of the present poll. I’d be surprised if Starmer wins more votes than Boris Johnson did in 2019. Indeed, it is even possible that he will fall short of Jeremy Corbyn’s total in 2017. But, with Reform training its fire almost wholly on the Tories, that would be enough for a record win. And so we limp, not blindly, but hardly enthusiastically either, towards the inevitability of a Starmer landslide, already aware that we will regret it. It doesn’t get much more British.
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Author: Daniel Hannan
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