The Tories are toast – it’s Labour’s turn to govern

You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. 

Cromwell was talking about the Long Parliament back in 1653, which up to that point had sat for 13 years. But who can doubt that he would have said the same about the current Tory government that in one form or another, under three prime ministers, has held office since May 2010? 

Whoever is finally anointed Tory leader will be handed the keys to Downing Street no later than 5 September. He or she will then embark on a programme of emergency reconstructive surgery intended to convince voters that the chaos of the last six years was no more than a temporary aberration and that all is for the best in this best of all possible parties. 

Conservatives see no reason why they shouldn’t carry on, uninterrupted, into the distant future. Enough for them is never enough. They regard themselves as the natural, indeed the only, party of government and the Labour Party as hopeless insurgents. More than that, they have convinced themselves that they are the people’s choice. The fact that their 80-seat Commons majority (now down to 78) resulted from less than 43 per cent of the popular vote is dismissed as irrelevant. Them, as the present locateur of Number 10 might say, is the rules of the game. They won a “landslide” in 2019 and theirs is the power, if not, increasingly, the glory. 

Of most immediate concern, the Tories, whether presided over by Boris Johnson or his successor, are sinking fast and hundreds of MPs could go down with the ship unless something causes them to stop rearranging the deckchairs. The damage is done. The goodwill that came their way in 2019 has almost totally drained away. It doesn’t matter whether you are pro or anti-Brexit, or even pro or anti-Tory. The fact is that nearly everything that has happened since the 2016 referendum, including the pandemic, has been seriously mishandled, revealing the government as self-serving, incompetent and venal. 

The one exception is Ukraine, on which, it should be noted, the government has the support of the entire House. But even then it is hard not to conclude that Johnson clings to Volodymyr Zelensky like a drowning man to a spar. 

Margaret Thatcher would be appalled by the present, ever-shifting embarrassment of senior ministers. She would have despised Boris Johnson and at least half of his cabinet. Thatcher was not to everybody’s taste (she was certainly not to mine), but even her worst enemies recognised that she was a woman of the utmost probity, who would have gone through the current crop of Tory pretenders like Christ cleansing the temple.  

What message are we to take from the party’s latest leadership campaign? Each of those slugging it out on the hustings is apparently convinced that their rivals are useless – and who could possibly disagree? With the exception of Rishi Sunak, who at least knows how to make money (for himself), which one of them would have a hope of making it to the top in any line of work outside of the City? I admire the chutzpah of Kemi Badenoch, a black woman running on the basis that race, and wokeness, are just so last year. But the truth is that both individually and as a collective they are bad news for Britain – representing more of the same at a time when the country desperately needs a fresh start. 

Which brings me to the obvious alternative, the Labour Party, with or without the support of the Liberal Democrats. The prevailing view among Tory Party members and their media and business backers is that the Conservatives at their worst are better than Labour at its best. Thus, they will agree that the Tories in 2022 have reached probably the lowest ebb in their history. They despair of Boris Johnson and regard most of those who would take his place as nonentities propelled by little more than ambition. Yet what is their rallying cry? It is, Vote Tory to ensure a better future for Britain. 

Can they not see what is staring them in the face? Have they not twigged that the game is up and that the institution they serve needs to spend time in the wilderness before re-emerging, first, as a credible Opposition, then as a putative party of government? 

Or are they just being wilfully blind, putting party before country? 

I am no Conservative. In the past, I have voted for both Labour and Lib Dem candidates and, when still living in Northern Ireland, the nationalist SDLP. But I not only respected Thatcher, I also had time for John Major and David Cameron, who it seemed to me knew how to act the part of prime minister, as well as a number of their senior colleagues. It is the sickness that entered the party in the immediate aftermath of Brexit and the ascent of Boris Johnson that (once Jeremy Corbyn had been expelled) confirmed for me that Labour is the only cure for the parlous condition in which the country now finds itself. 

We need a Labour government. It is as simple as that. Whether it is led by Keir Starmer or some other big beast (most obviously Andy Burnham) is of only secondary importance. The necessary groundwork has been completed. An effective vaccine for Corbyn-15, the virus that so nearly left the party at death’s door, was successfully rolled out by Starmer and his team, who must now be seen as the obvious, and only, answer to the mess that, outside of the defence arena, has left Britain self-isolating and socially distant. 

Labour needs to be in government, just as it needed to be out of government in 2007 at the fag-end of Gordon Brown’s premiership. And the Conservatives urgently need to return to first principles. They need to rid themselves of the current crop of failed leaders and allow a new generation to emerge, helped by an election that removes the dead wood and delivers an intake unsullied by the past.

It would help if the new Tory leader, having discovered the depth of the hole the party has dug for itself, called an early general election. But that isn’t going to happen. Instead, the latest version of this latter-day Long Parliament will stagger on to the bitter end, at which point yet another leader will be elected charged with the task of rebuilding.  

I need hardly add that it is time for Labour to harry the Tories as never before. Starmer has stiffened his sinews; now he needs to summon up the blood. With luck, he could hope to remain in office for five, perhaps even ten years, steadying the ship and rebalancing the national agenda while giving the Tories the time they need to rediscover what it is that made them Conservatives in the first place. 

You know it makes sense.