Only a Major comeback can save the Tories

In Britain, a Tory government, long in office and beset by a cost-of-living crisis, battles allegations of sleaze as it tries to heal the latest self-inflicted wounds from its civil war over Europe.

It has recently knifed the charismatic prime minister who won its largest majority in a generation and installed as leader a man who is the first person from his background ever to lead the Conservative Party.

Hardly anyone gave John Major a chance of defeating Neil Kinnock in the general election of 1992. He did.Credit: AP

Labour, meanwhile, has replaced a doddering old socialist ideologue with an uncharismatic but respectable leader from its centre-left. One byelection after another is catastrophic for the Tories. Labour leads in the opinion polls by more than 20 points, with an election only 18 months away.

The year is 1990. Hardly anyone gave John Major a chance of defeating Neil Kinnock in the general election of 1992. He did.

This little jaunt down memory lane reminds us how remarkably history repeats itself. Of course, there are differences. There was no Liz Truss-type interregnum between Margaret Thatcher and Major. The UK had not just left Europe; it was about to engage even more deeply through the Maastricht Treaty. Kinnock was uncharismatic in an entirely different way than Keir Starmer is uncharismatic. (The excitable, verbally incontinent Kinnock was known as “the Welsh windbag”. Starmer is as tersely methodical as the Crown prosecutor he was.)

Nevertheless, the look and feel of UK politics in 2023 is uncannily similar to 1990.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has steadied the ship, but he has very little electoral appeal beyond the Tory base.Credit: Getty

The 1992 British election also reminds us that, no matter how desperate a political leader’s position looks, the voters have a habit of proving pollsters and pundits wrong. Victory can never be taken for granted; defeat is never inevitable. No struggling prime minister is politically dead until they are actually on the slab. (Just ask John Hewson or Bill Shorten.)

Yet I still think it will be very difficult for the Conservatives to win a fifth term at the election due next year. While 18 months is an eternity in politics, everything appears to be going Labour’s way right now.

There are several reasons why Labour will be hard to beat. Starmer has subdued, if not silenced, the Corbynites. The odious former leader – a Hugo Chavez-loving anti-Semite who wanted to take Britain out of NATO and despaired at the fall of the Berlin Wall – repelled traditional Labour voters (while being embraced by the north London intelligentsia). Starmer expelled him from the parliamentary party, marginalised his supporters, and has built a credible front bench.

British Labour Party leader Keir Starmer has subdued, if not silenced, the Corbynites.Credit: Bloomberg

Secondly, Britain faces its worst cost-of-living crisis in memory. It will not matter that many of the upward pressures on prices – like the energy crisis precipitated by the war in Ukraine – are beyond the government’s control, or that Starmer is unlikely to have any better answers than Sunak. When living standards fall, people always blame the government.

There is also the inescapable reality of the political cycle. The Conservatives will, by 2024, have been in office for 14 years. The only longer post-war period of government by one party was the 18 years of Thatcher and Major. All long-term governments eventually run out of road, from a combination of their own fraying internal dynamics and the public’s sheer fatigue. The last five years in particular – with COVID piled upon Brexit, and accumulated political scandals – have tested the public’s patience beyond endurance.

Not to mention the revolving door of Downing Street. Britain is onto its fifth prime minister in seven years. Infamously, there were three in 2022 alone. The last time that happened was 1868, and that was an election year when the government changed. The Tories’ hope was that Sunak would steady the ship. This he has largely done, at least economically. Yet the public will hardly reward a Tory prime minister for sorting out a mess of another Tory prime minister’s making.

Starmer got some unexpected good news last week with the sudden resignation of Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. Traditionally, Scotland has been Labour heartland, particularly in the industrial areas of Glasgow. With the rise of the Scottish Independence movement, the SNP supplanted Labour; it now holds only one of Scotland’s 59 seats. With the departure of Sturgeon, the SNP tide is expected to ebb; SNP seats will be rich pickings for it.

Sunak’s biggest problem is that he has very little electoral appeal beyond the Tory base.

The disastrous prime ministership of Liz Truss lasted just over a month.Credit: Getty

The swinging middle-class voters who applauded the fact he is Britain’s first prime minister of Asian heritage are nevertheless likely to vote Lib-Dem, if not Labour. And Sunak lacks Boris Johnson’s uncanny ability to connect with working-class England – the key to his 2019 landslide.

Older, socially conservative Labour voters in the industrial north rallied to Johnson as the champion of Brexit. His atavistic patriotism and idiosyncrasy cut through with them. Though Sunak supported Brexit too, it is not his brand. Even Johnson’s indiscretions could sometimes be an asset: they revealed a human fallibility that made him relatable. There is nothing relatable about Rishi. He is Davos Man.

Nevertheless, Sunak should be admired as an outstanding example of social mobility and the success of multiculturalism. But Labour has turned the poster child of aspiration into the face of privilege: a millionaire merchant banker, who married into a billionaire dynasty. At a straitened time, Labour’s key message is that the Tories don’t understand the struggles of everyday Britons. So it has reached back to one of its oldest tropes to create a caricature: beneath Sunak’s modern, minority ethnic persona, he is just another super-rich, out-of-touch Tory.

At a recent “away day” at Chequers, Cabinet was briefed by Isaac Levido, the young Australian who has succeeded another brilliant Aussie, Lynton Crosby, as the Tories’ chief strategist. He told them that, notwithstanding Labour’s commanding lead in the polls, there was still 20 per cent of the electorate undecided. The election was winnable.

And so it is. Just as every election is winnable. But somehow I doubt Rishi Sunak will do in 2024 what John Major, the working-class Tory from Brixton, managed to pull off in 1992.

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