After the Tories suffer an extinction event, there will be a realignment on the right

Following last week’s two by-elections, even the most insanely optimistic Pollyannas on the Tory benches must realise that the coming general election will be an extinction event for the Conservative Party. Once swings of more than 20 per cent become common currency, electoral carnage sets in.

At present, ElectionMapsUK is forecasting an outcome at the next general election of 420 parliamentary seats for Labour, 33 for the Lib Dems and 156 for the Conservatives. However, it has also suggested that if the swing in Mid Bedfordshire were replicated at a general election nationwide, the result would be 480 seats for Labour, 104 for the Liberal Democrats and 20 for the Conservatives.

Psephologists were quick to claim that such a notional result was highly unlikely, though the Tories would certainly be in trouble. The fact remains that, on the basis of an already occurred electoral experience, there is no guarantee that the Tories will manage to retain a total of seats in treble figures at next year’s election. Desperate Conservative apologists are seeking consolation in the fact that the Labour vote barely rose – in fact, in one of the two by-elections it actually fell – but that conceals more ominous implications.

Former Conservative voters, it is correctly claimed, stayed at home last Thursday; at the general election they will come out. Yes, but to do what? In an unquantifiable number of instances, to punish the party that has so prolifically lied to them and betrayed them, is the answer. There is a 1997-style lust for vengeance in the air and the Tories’ infamous record over the past thirteen years is what has provoked it. There is a palpable relish for punishing the Tories that exceeds the reckoning of 1997.

Yet the memory of the last Conservative defeat is a distraction and dangerously misleading. This is not 1997. The Major government was punished for Black Wednesday, for forfeiting its reputation for economic management and visiting financial hardship on the country. Compared to today’s charge sheet, that looks like a misdemeanour. Tory rule since 2010 has been a comprehensive, scatter-gun assault on the British public and everything it holds dear.

David Cameron made the Conservative Party toxic. The tie-less millionaire became the icon of luxury liberalism, as many genuine Tories were excluded from parliamentary candidatures in favour of “A-Listers”, describing themselves as “socially liberal”. Social legislation was outsourced to Stonewall, children in schools became guinea pigs for social engineering.

Many Britons did not like that, any more than they liked mass immigration, so additional laws against free speech were passed to silence criticism. The police became de facto legislators, decriminalising burglary, shop-lifting and any other offence that might bring them into conflict with dangerous criminals. The Conservatives have created a society in which a woman can be arrested for praying silently inside her head, but violent supporters of mass murder can scream “Jihad!” in the ears of police bystanders without fear of rebuke.

And so on, the charge sheet is endless, the Brexit betrayal the worst offence. By the so-called “Windsor Framework” the Conservative and Unionist Party shamelessly hived off Northern Ireland to the EU. Why? Because the Tories’ craven instincts create a hopelessly Stockholm Syndrome subservience to Brussels. It is doubtful that Rishi Sunak could leave the ECHR even if he wanted to, since a phalanx of anti-British Tory backbenchers could deny him a majority, thanks to the relentless social democratic entryism of the past two decades of candidate selection.

If the worst-case scenario of a Conservative Party reduced to 20 seats at Westminster came to pass, even then it is unlikely the majority of them would be Tories. There is no historical precedent for so consistent, comprehensive and prolonged a betrayal of its supporters by a political party. Now it is payback time. The most significant statistic among the dismal data furnished by last week’s by-elections was the fact that, in both constituencies, the vote for the Reform Party was larger than the Labour majority.

Reform deprived the Tories of both those seats. With a flood tide running for Labour, its supporters were hardly likely to defect to Reform; nor were supporters of the fanatically Remain Liberal Democrats disposed to switch their votes to the former Brexit Party. There can be no doubt, no ambiguity: the Reform vote came from disaffected Conservatives. And now that Tory voters across the country, who have been ignored and insulted by their party for thirteen years, have seen that revenge is a practical proposition and its vehicle is Reform, that tendency can only grow.

As with the Brexit Party, Richard Tice’s Reform does not need to win a single parliamentary seat to destroy the Tories: all it takes is a candidate on the ballot paper – and there will be one in every UK constituency next year – to give the lie to the old, patronising Tory grandee’s mantra “They have nowhere else to go” and Sunak and his pack of nonentities are history.

Reform has certain advantages. It possesses a party organisation manned by people who have already acquired election experience. It has a collection of feisty leading candidates and a highly motivated membership. Its policies, with one exception, amount to the articulation of majority opinion in the country. Tice, however, must be persuaded to jettison the daft policy of abolishing the House of Lords. It is absurd to commit to an albatross policy that has broken governments in the past, obstructing more important legislation, especially when the simple solution is to appoint supportive peers.

However, the greatest potential benefit to Reform is currently outside its ranks, but ideally placed for a merger. The National Conservatism movement held an outstandingly successful conference in London last May which showed how far the intellectual heft, philosophical integrity and original thinking are now concentrated on the right. The speeches at that conference exposed the banality of the globalist clichés spouted at the gatherings of the legacy parties.

Among the most banal was Labour, which will be entering government around this time next year, if not before. Here, above all, is where the misleading parallel with 1997 is most irrelevant. In 1997 a killer political team of Blair, Campbell, Mandelson, et al. took power in a micromanaged operation calculated to delude the British public into awarding New Labour power at three successive general elections. Today, the contrast could not be greater.

The effortless anti-charisma of Keir Starmer joined with the talentless ambition of Angela Rayner, at the head of a motley crew of Remainers, pro-Palestinian fanatics, open-borders dogmatists, class warriors, climate hysterics in conflict with trade unionists unhappy with net zero, Trans warriors and free speech extinguishers, with an unknown quantity of covert Corbynistas – this is not a repeat of the long-haul team of 1997, but the ingredients for a disastrous, one-term Labour government. With a landslide majority, too, some pretty toxic flotsam and jetsam would be swept into Westminster, possibly erasing much of the cosmetic reconstruction effected by Starmer.

Nigel Farage once calculated that it would be around 2026/27 that the mould would be broken. That is a credible assessment. The public would find Labour intolerable – its attitudes on migration and culture war issues guarantee that – while the memory of the Tories would be too noxious for the voters to turn to them. That could be the window of opportunity for a new conservative party. If Reform and the National Conservatives were to converge, with Farage as the charismatic leader, the impact would be considerable on an electorate alienated from the legacy parties.

Even the first-past-the-post sea wall might not hold, if the political situation became desperate. Nigel Farage would be a crucial element in any popular electoral revolt. He is absolutely right, for the time being, to pursue his media career, which gives him an invaluable platform. In the future, though, some kind of authentic conservative coalition, with Reform and the National Conservatives at its epicentre, conceivably joined by a breakaway faction of the Tory Party – the mobbing of Farage at Rishi Sunak’s political wake in Manchester strongly suggested that possibility – could reshape British politics.

Reform will not cause the Conservatives to lose the next general election, the Tories have organised that kamikaze outcome themselves, but it will worsen the scale of the defeat. A Labour government will then furnish an unpalatable interlude, during which Britain can expect to experience dismal misgovernance at home and humiliation abroad. What we must prepare for are the subsequent developments, after the public has endured the gross misrule of the legacy parties to the point where they have become intolerable and unelectable.

The usual suspects in the mainstream media are canvassing the prospects of Labour government in the post-Conservative era. They are already behind the times: the intelligent preoccupation is to attempt to chart the course of events in the post-Labour era, for this is not 1997 and after Labour fails the nation, the Tories will not be coming back.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life