Ditching Boris sowed seeds of shambolic Tory defeat

It tells you all you need to know about what an utter shambles the UK Conservative Party had become that when, as polls closed last Thursday night and the exit survey predicted it would win 131 seats, there was palpable relief among many Tories. They had feared the result would be worse – at one stage, opinion polls had put them in a close race for second place with the Liberal Democrats.

To many minds, 100 seats became the psychological threshold between annihilation, and merely a terrible result. When the seats were declared, the actual number – 121 – was a bit worse than the exit poll, but even that was towards the upper end of expectations. As former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng told journalists, this was not an “extinction event”.

Former UK prime minister Boris Johnson announces his resignation outside 10 Downing Street in July 2022. The new British PM, Keir Starmer, in the same spot on Friday after Labour’s election success.Credit: AP

For Conservatives, this election was only ever about saving the furniture. Some valuable political furniture was indeed salvaged, notably former chancellor and foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt – the man Boris Johnson beat for the leadership.

However, the Tories were never going to turn around the 20 per cent lead which Labour had enjoyed for over a year. During the campaign, Labour’s lead widened. This was due both to the impressively disciplined performance of Sir Keir Starmer, and the sheer awfulness of the Tory campaign. That awfulness was not the fault of the strategists – led by the Australian Isaac Levido (who had vehemently opposed Rishi Sunak’s decision to call the election early) – but because of the seemingly endless unforced errors which dominated every news cycle.

From the moment Sunak announced the election, umbrella-less in drenching rain outside 10 Downing Street, to his incredible decision to depart the D-Day commemoration early and the Tory election-betting scandals, this campaign was defined by cascading Tory blunders.

There were three big winners and two massive losers in this election.

Obviously, the biggest winner was Labour and Starmer himself. Remember that not only was this comparable with Labour’s best-ever result (411 seats v 418 in 1997) but that at the 2019 election, Labour had its worst result since 1935. To turn your worst result in nearly a century into close to your best result ever in the span of a single electoral cycle is an astonishing achievement.

Yet for all that, there was something anaemic about Labour’s campaign. Each of the other four Labour leaders who replaced a Tory prime minister had a big, era-defining idea. For Tony Blair in 1997, it was the Third Way – reconstructing a new centre-left politics not based on ideology or class division. For Harold Wilson in 1964, it was about re-engineering the British economy by embracing “the white heat of the technological revolution”. For Clement Attlee in 1945, it was the New Jerusalem of the welfare state, in particular the NHS. For the first Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald in 1924, it was the very idea of a Labour government itself: a ministry of trade unionists (plus a couple of radical aristocrats) was utterly unfamiliar to a deeply class-stratified society.

What is Starmer’s big new idea? It’s not to be found in his anodyne one-word slogan, “Change”. None of his signature policies – renationalising industry, creating new state-owned enterprises, punitive taxation of the middle class – are modern. They are the same old recooked socialist ideas from the days of Wilson, which Blair repudiated. Starmer’s future looks very much like the 1970s.

The other winners were the Liberal Democrats who, with 72 seats, achieved their best result in their current form– a result not seen by the Liberal Party since the collapse of Lloyd George’s government more than a century ago.

Apart from Starmer, the biggest personal winner was Nigel Farage. While his Reform Party won only five seats, the true measure of his impact is to be seen in the huge number of seats he cost the Tories. Polling suggests that one in four people who voted Conservative in 2019 intended to vote for Farage this time. The debate about whether to join with Farage or repudiate him will dominate Conservative politics in coming years.

In sheer seat numbers, the biggest loser was the Scottish National Party, swept away in all but nine of its 48 seats by Labour. With that, the Scottish independence movement will subside.

The other big loser was, of course, the Conservative Party. This was its worst defeat in its two-century history: the loss of 251 seats exceeded its previous greatest electoral cataclysm, when the Balfour government went out of office in 1906, losing 246 seats.

Commentators and political scientists will spend years analysing how the Tories’ biggest victory since Thatcher turned into its worst electoral humiliation in just one parliamentary term. In my view, the turning point was the political assassination of Boris Johnson two years ago today. Everything went downhill after that. It was a spectacular act of political self-harm.

Those who say that things were already going downhill – that Johnson had become toxically unpopular due to the “partygate” scandal – miss the point. Johnson’s Houdini-like capacity to recover from seemingly unsurvivable political scrapes has defined his career. As the news cycle moved on, he would have recovered from “partygate”. A mesmerising stump orator with remarkable appeal to working-class Britons, he would have given the charmless Starmer a run for his money. I doubt he would have won – the “It’s time” factor for any long-serving government is as irreversible as the ebbing of the tide – but I have no doubt that he would have done much better than Sunak.

At the very least, Johnson would have kept Farage out of the race. Farage (who was initially reluctant to run at all) has always been intimidated by Johnson, whose appeal to Brexiteers eclipses his. Dozens of safe seats lost to Labour or the Liberal Democrats would have been saved had Farage not skimmed a quarter of the Tory vote.

As a triumphant Starmer embarked on his new job last Friday, many of the skittish, spineless Tories who lost their nerve in 2022 woke up without theirs. They have only themselves to blame.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is a professor at ANU.

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