In less than a week’s time, we will have a new, Labour government: that is not in doubt. What is harder to explain is the fact that it appears that the Tories are seemingly leaning into their likely historic defeat.
Are we seeing the controlled demolition of the most successful political party in electoral history - and if so, why?
I think we are - and although things remain fluid I advance here an explanation for this seemingly unlikely outcome. We need to step back over some of the history of the last few years to connect some dots.
The Monsoon Election
The surprise general election called by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was almost too perfectly incompetent. Here we were, outside No 10, in a typical British early summer (read: freezing and damp) and the (un)expected happened: rain; rain; rain. Inside was the warm press room built in the Covid years (the downpour of course reminded us of the fact). Rishi is wet through. Behind the gates of Downing Street, “legendary” anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray pipes the Blair mantra, “Things Can Only Get Better”.
Could an umbrella not have been provided? Let alone an inside berth?
Could the police not have stopped the external noise, for ten minutes?
Could the communications professionals be this incompetent?
The announcement of the election came as a surprise; most commentators expected the government to near to full term. As we stand, in the week of the election, news is getting marginally better. (It’s all grim, but we are talking margins.) GDP growth (for what it’s worth - which is little) is edging up. Inflation is stabilising - but yet to be reflected in interest rates. Economic tells would indicate waiting. As indeed would the simple, hopeless, desperation to cling on to power for as long as possible (as happened, for example, with Major government in 1997 - and the Brown government ion 2010.)
And meanwhile, in the “immigration election” the government’s chosen distraction of “small boats” are always likelier to be higher in summer than winter.
The election was called to coincide not only with our weak approximation of summer, but also the national religion of a football tournament - Labour’s Union Flag messaging than the lifeless Conservative campaign speaks of the simple patriotism that football engenders. And this, too, only serves to highlight the ethnicities of the major party leaders.
A bland manifesto promises only one significant policy: the introduction of National Service, but without the rigour of the Armed Forces for everyone. Labour needs to do little to defeat this.
The election campaign is merely the coda to fourteen years of Conservative rule that has culminated in record high taxes outside of wartime conditions, 2.5 million immigrants in two years (and repatriation levels of failed asylum seekers that would have been an embarrassment to Blaire’s Labour government), gay marriage legislation (and Cameron’s return high office reminds us constantly of his proudest achievement), and, of course, the ruinous policy of Net Zero. The closest we have come to “repatriation” is the former Chancellor, George Osborne, now Chairman of the Trustees of the British Museum, floating it for the Elgin Marbles.
We have a choice of interpretations: either the Conservative Party has (almost overnight) become absolutely tin-eared to electoral politics, in a way that makes us yearn for the days of John Major; or that the party machine is indeed complicit in its destruction.
Five Prime Ministers - and the Truss Ascendancy
Sunak, of course, is universally painted as an “installed” Prime Minister, having lost the Conservative leadership election to Liz Truss. It is worth reliving the circumstances of that campaign, as background to this General Election.
I have long believed that Liz Truss was prepared for the leadership. Here, I called it for her in December 2021. Through the Covid years, her hands were kept clean in the role - hugely popular with the Tory base - of International Trade Secretary, negotiating post-Brexit deals with foreign states. Follow that with a spell as Foreign Secretary, at a time of unquestionably (sadly) popular war with Russia, allowing activist-friendly photo-ops with tanks, in direct homage to Thatcher herself.
A confession. I did join the Conservative Party for a few years; not out of support, but (for the cost of a few tens of pounds per year) to observe the inner workings, and have a laugh at the same time. This allowed me access to a party hustings in Leeds. The mood of the hall was quite clear: Truss was the candidate of the Right, and therefore the Party. And yet… she is wooden. The South African-English cricketer Kevin Pietersen referred to an old England coach Duncan Fletcher as a “mood-hoover”, and the term is perfect for Truss: she sucked the life out of a room rooting for her. After an hour, the room was warmer to Rishi.
Remember, Truss had been the Remainer; Rishi the Brexiteer. “Based Liz” was a creation; she the palimpsest (and probably without the intellect to recognise the fact). Nonetheless, her tax-cutting rhetoric was guaranteed to appeal to the Party members above Sunak’s caution. She won the leadership race, of course; but the final margin (57% to 43%) suggested that she lost ground the more people saw of her. And then, in her premiership of 49 days, she was “destroyed by the markets”.
It appears that she was set up to fail. My first thought was: to demonstrate the “there is no alternative” law of the markets; there is no going back to Thatcherite tax policies. (Of course, her fiscal package was based around massive state subsidies for energy costs, not free market dogma, but that’s another story.) The simple accretion of “another” leader adds a little to the image of Tory incompetence, and the “installing” of Rishi as a leader who lost the vote does add something to his portrayal as a Prime Minister not even elected by his own party.
This fits with the idea of a controlled demolition of the party, but there could be a further angle which I suggest later.
The Covid Years, revisited
I wrote this in November last year:
“It's hard to believe the Tory party is not actively complicit in its own destruction at the point. I've always thought it's unlikely - the maintenance of the two party system is the most useful containment. What if I'm wrong? What if they indeed are complicit?”
Suffice to say, if it was believable that the Tory party was “complicit” in its own destruction then, it is only moreso now.
Why may this be so?
Which brings us back to the biggest thing that has happened in the last term: the Covid years.
There is an old(ish) saying: “Only Nixon can go to China”. The Kissinger-brokered detente between the US and Red China - with the view of isolating Russia - could have only been sold to the US public by a committed ant-Communist such as Richard Nixon, not a liberal like Johnson or Carter. In a similar vein, on both sides of the Atlantic, “Only the Conservatives/Republicans” could have got away with lockdowns. The different constitutional systems of the two Anglosphere countries mean that a direct equivalence is not possible; but the broad principle is the same. In the UK, consider the situation where a Labour government (or a narrow-majority Tory government) had been in power: the natural disposition towards liberty of at least some Conservatives would have been much more to the forefront; as it was, this was easily quashed. Perhaps an initial lockdown would have been permitted; otherwise (and aided by the fact that Labour would have certainly been supportive of increased measures), the natural dynamics would have led certain factions of the Tories to break much earlier than they did, and oppose at least the second lockdown. And it was the second lockdown through the grim winter which enabled the vaccine rollout across the whole population. Recall Hancock’s ever-moving targets on which groups would need to be vaccinated before restrictions were released.
The electoral logic “needed” a sizeable Tory majority to hold the Covid discourse for a year, to run the vaccine programme. It happened to have it.
In the US, not dissimilarly, the Federal nature of the country meant that a nation-wide initial response to Covid was only practically feasible under a Republican presidency. Consider the likelihood of President Hilary in 2020 attempting to impose restrictions on Texas or Florida. States differed (and were able to differ) much earlier in the US than and therefore there was more political dissent happened than in the UK; but the Trump administration bought into the initial Covid panic and pushed through the vaccination programme with Operation "Warp Speed”.
I have written here about my thoughts on the Covid regime generally: a brief summary is that it was (I believe) and exercise in the logic of Bertrand de Jouvenel in terms of an “arms race” in political technology (and/or biotech technology) between the West and China. From where we sit now, it seems to have been largely successful; whilst there is unquestionably more cynicism in our circles about the state’s acquisition of power, should another (presumably more deadly) virus outbreak occur, I have no doubt that the majority of the population would still go along with the narrative, and on platforms (including but not limited to technologies) that have been and will be invested in more thoroughly in the years to come. And, on a deeper level, the political technology of digital-based population control measures has been furthered. The Blairite digital-ID programme may have more dissenters as a result of the Covid years, but also more acceptance in the population as a whole. How many people do you know who now pay for their pint by waving their phone (or wrist) towards a terminal in the pub?
Nonetheless, it has to be recognised that the last four years have come at some cost to state power. Even the most cynical of us (I’m putting my hands up here) were relatively innocent in the early days of 2020; willing to attribute the response of the government more to cock-up than conspiracy. Remember: we live in what Sam Francis referred to as “soft”, not “hard” managerial regimes; as much as we recall the excesses of the police in early 2020, we still are managed by something approaching consent, not brute force. In the end, the abiding (and terrifying) memory of the Covid years is that of neighbours shopping each other in, and “spontaneously” banging pots and pans for the NHS, not police drones over Stanage Edge. We did not need to be welded into our apartments.
The Controlled Demolition
So, how does this link in with the current election cycle, and what I’m calling the Controlled Demolition of the Conservatives?
Firstly, it’s worth pointing out an adage of mine: the Regime always backs each-way. That is, situations are (I believe) gamed such that alternative outcomes are possible, and catered for. (I certainly do not believe that the regime is “all powerful”, just more powerful than we assumed in 2020).
The important point is this: in a “soft” managerial regime, the “cost” of instituting a policy increases the further from reality that policy is .
Any particular policy can be pursued, and run for the short term. But the more it diverges from reality, the more it costs the regime to keep it current. The more these “costs” stack up, the more the political formula will creak and risk the regime falling - or at the alternative of transforming into a “hard” regime (which in itself would have its own costs).
How does this apply to the Covid years?
There are two angles I believe to be at play:
There is something now approaching a “settled narrative” on lockdowns: that the first was broadly justified (on the basis of “uncertainty”). The range of opinions allowed extend to questioning whether financial and other wider modelling should have been taken into account; including the (utilitarian) question whether lockdown should not have happened at all; most likely on a Swedish case of voluntary restrictions. The morality of lockdowns per se is outside the boundary of this debate.
Far less advanced is the debate around vaccines: their efficacy, approval, distribution generally in the population, and of course adverse reactions.
It is the second which I believe will be to the fore in the forthcoming cycle. And, for our current purposes, please do note that the electoral platform it most matches is that of Reform.
The objection to this is obvious: won’t the regime try to hush up any bad news, as they have to date?
Here’s where I go back to my concept of “cost to the regime”. In reality, the cost/benefit of lockdowns are much less tangible, and are based on counterfactuals; the cost of an adverse reaction to a member of the public who took an unnecessary vaccination are immediate, real and potentially fatal. Add to this the psychological cost to the medical profession (a key regime group) from the ignoring of distinct flags in areas such as cardiac and stroke presentation (both up around a quarter on pre-Covid years) - and we can see the “narrative costs” adding up.
So I think we are seeing a controlled demolition of the narrative. Remember how the discussion on lockdowns has evolved in politics and the mainstream over the last year or so. It is important to note that this would be along the lines described by Higgs in “Crisis and Leviathan” - rather than taking down the whole narrative, it would just draw back the areas ceded to the state by a step or two. So: lockdowns are not fundamentally questioned as a tool of virus suppression; but they must be justified in any particular case in the future. Mass vaccination will not be questioned as a general policy; but particular vaccines must not be rushed though again. (And, helpfully on this point, the mass trials from the Covid vaccinations mean we are not starting from a zero base: the health technologies will be tweaked and improved. At least that would be the messaging to the population.)
So, I am expecting:
A more critical approach to lockdowns, in particular the further discussion of the hidden costs (schooling is a good example) and wider economic modelling;
A potentially rather damning admission on vaccination harms, although likely without questioning mass population vaccination itself.
The Conservatives could (and will) be criticised for much here, but this alone does not provide an explanation for taking down the entire Conservative party.
Trump II and the States
Here’s where I think we need to align the politics of the UK and the States. I have also believed for some time that the regime on the West side of Atlantic is gearing up for a second Trump term: again, I use the model of the “cost” to the regime in a soft power state.
Simply put, somewhere between a third and a half of the voter base in the US is of the opinion that the 2020 election result was “somewhat irregular”; and whilst I could obviously not support them in this belief1, it is a cost heavy to bear for a polity whose very basis is “democracy”.
The first Trump term, for all its sound and fury, did nothing to upset the long-term goals of the regime; could the second? Possibly in the light of the 2025 Project - an idea with a deeper base than the first term’s lone gun of Steve Bannon. It would pay to remain sceptical about this, but I am also sure that the possibility will not be ignored by the deep state.
I think it will go nowhere, and that Trump is not a serious actor. But, how’s this for a defence if he does turn out to be? That the entire early-days-of-Covid narrative - including the early approvals for the vaccination programme - are tied down in controversy and lawfare?
What better way of hobbling the second Trump presidency? And the UK (if anything, earlier and faster in all responses) would be taken down too, with the Conservatives as the fall-guys for our response.
It is also noteworthy that, whilst the US election cycle is in full swing (and embarrassing Biden), there are significant disclosures happening against (particularly) the Pfizer vaccine at the moment. This is not only actions by individuals, but also on a state level. The disputatious and litigious nature of the United States has been strangely quiet over the previous four years. It is coming more to the fore now - and it will be hard to stop.
The case brought by Kansas quoted here is the latest, and most important, to this date. It’s not impossible that all this could be used by the Democrats to cripple to Trump campaign before the election: but in which case, why leave it so late in the day? These questions have been around since the start.
Think back: has Trump been given any hard questions on the Covid years in his second candidacy to date?
The Reform Containment
Still, is the cost of the oldest and most successful political party in the West a price worth paying for the Establishment?
Maybe so, if it was going to happen in any event.
In this piece, I put forward the thought that the political repositioning engineered by the Conservative Party has fundamentally changed the tectonic plates of British politics: that the Conservatives have moved the “political centre” of UK politics to the left of where the population are; whereas in the past the situation was opposite. The outcome of this is that the “allowed” centre-right opposition will need to present themselves as much more of an insurgent force against the mainstream, in a similar way to the Republicans in the States; Blairite Labour is the mainstream now (in a way it never quite became in the actual Blair years). This could happen within the Tory party of course, but it could just as easily (or more easily?) happen in a new vehicle.
Conservative MPs, indeed even (in the case of Rory Stewart) former leadership candidates, find it easy to cross the floor to Labour, or voice their support for Starmer. The Conservative Party has changed the position of the centre ground of British politics, and they are simply reflecting this.
But it is certainly the case that, if Reform does emerge as the vehicle of the Right, it will be as much a part of the establishment as the Tories are now, whatever the mood music.
Here is Matt Goodwin - author of “Right Response -Understanding and Countering Populist Extremism in Europe” for Chatham House - arguing for a vote for Farage.
Why was Truss pushed towards the leadership of the Conservative party and then destroyed? If she survives (in what should be a safest-of-safe seat), she is a leading candidate to switch to Reform. (She was a prominent guest at Farage’s sixtieth birthday party.) A former PM (taken down for her devotion of Thatcherism!) would be a bigger scalp than any. I can’t think of a better reason for her to have been elevated to a role she was utterly ill-equipped to fill.
The replacement of an establishment party in a FPTP system does not happen often - we have one example. And the political world is different to that of a century ago. The Liberals survived as a rump party, of course, but in reality Liberalism continued its march through both the Conservative and Labour parties.
Faking Kayfabe
The Tories have given up on this election. The question is why. The trivial answers are on Sunak - “He is Brown”, or “He wants a job in Silicon Valley”. Neither ring true to me: he’s no Nick Clegg; he has no need for money and could only want influence, not a pay-check. He’s an insider, playing a role; in this case, the destruction of his party for a wider cause.
My guess - since the return of Farage to the front line - is that the Reform switch is live. As I have said: the regime bets each-way, so we will see what will be the fate of the Tories after the election.
But do note the possibility of narrative change in the Covid inquiry. The upcoming modules (horrible word) are as follows:
September 2024: The impact of the pandemic on healthcare systems
January 2025: Vaccines, therapeutics and anti-viral treatment
March 2025: Pandemic procurement
As yet, the Covid inquiry has not been a vehicle for any critical thinking allowed about the Covid years. It may or may not be in the coming months; if it continues to ignore these questions, that too will be a tale. I would not be surprised if, under the new government, there was a new and critical angle. But it is interesting to note that the purely fiscal response to the Covid years seems not to be on the agenda. For everything else, Rishi may be remembered as Macavity.
Whilst we are faking kayfabe, it is also worth turning our attentions back to the elections of 2019 and 2016/2020 in the UK and US. If the logic I have set forth above holds, it was necessary for the “Right” to be in power in both polities when Covid hit. The anglosphere was fortunate indeed to have the right people in power at the right time. Unless we were to speculate that some of the conditions leading to those elections were manipulated.
In the US (for once) it is easier: this thinking would imply that the regime “allowed” Trump beat Hilary in 2016. Which was followed by the “freest and fairest election in history” in 2020 which pushed a decrepit Biden on America, as we are witnessing in the first Presidential debate.
But also consider the 2019 Conservative “Red Wall” victory. Remember that the architect of the Labour policy on the EU in the run-up to election year, after eighteen months of parliamentary frustration was Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary Sir Kier Starmer.
A policy which took down the left-populist rhetoric of Corbyn, and delivered a Johnson majority. It was Starmer, rather than not Boris Johnson or Dominic Cummings, who paved the way to the 80 seat majority.
This fact has been kept surprisingly quiet in the election campaign. He is a leader who has rebuilt a party around a Blairite managerialism, whilst keeping Brexit off the agenda (apathy is a classic Blairite tool), and expelling the Corbynite faction on the basis of Anti-Semitism.
The Tories, then, do appear to be leaning into defeat. It won’t be Zero Seats - and there will be enough of a rump party surviving to be criticised if I am at all correct.
But if there’s one message you should take, it is this:
Reform is a planned landing vessel for dissident voices. Vote for them is you like; but please don’t believe anything will change by doing so.
Personally, I shall spoil my ballot. At least I may give a laugh to the poor sod counting it, in the illusion of democracy.
Which is self-evidently a conspiracy theory
A very good piece. I won’t be voting myself.