The Conservatives have realised a little too late that young people vote

‘If the party doesn’t move towards the centre this will be its last spell of government,’ asserts George Osborne, who always loaded the worst of his cuts on the young

The Tories are in a bit of a fix in the light of the Corbo-futurist youthtopia we saw emerging on the Pyramid stage (Getty Images)

What black magic is this? The Conservatives are worried about the youth vote? Apparently some senior figures are so aghast, they’re prepared to rethink their signature policies of stamping on the faces of Harry Potter readers and hurling five-year-olds into the River Ouse.

Jeremy Hunt is among those murmuring that austerity might have reached a natural end, a day after voting to cap public sector pay (this is the problem with Conservatives: they never take responsibility).

Theresa May’s Kammerjunker, Damien Green, believes the Tories should consider something eye-catching, like scrapping tuition fees (it will never happen… but this is the other problem with Conservatives: all spin and no substance).

But Green has at least realised that they’re not completely stupid, these young people. David Cameron fondling a huskie is not going to cut it. The party must “recast our core beliefs in a manner that captures the prevailing mood of the era”.

As a borderline young person (or at least, as a member of a demographic that decisively rejected the Conservatives in the last election) my instinctive response is: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

“Not my circus, not my monkeys,” as that useful Polish proverb has it – a proverb that is anxiously awaiting repatriation to Wroclaw post-Brexit, one of a series of unforced boondoggles the Conservatives have inflicted upon the nation.

But while the fate of said nation remains a source of heaving anguish, there is a certain abstract amusement in contemplating that of the Tory party itself. As a Tottenham fan, I kind of enjoy the lachrymose debates about Arsene Wenger’s future at Arsenal too.

The self-proclaimed ‘natural party of government’ is in a bit of a fix in the light of the Corbo-futurist youthtopia we saw emerging on the Pyramid stage last week. “If the party doesn’t move towards the centre this will be its last spell of government,” asserts George Osborne, who as Chancellor always loaded the worst of his cuts on the young, on the basis that the young didn’t vote.

And as Michael Heseltine shrewdly notes, the Conservatives’ natural enemy is not so much a resurgent Labour party as the implacable hand of death. "One thing which is just worth having in mind, and you can’t do anything about it, 2 per cent of the older part of the electorate die every year - they are 70 per cent Conservative. Another 2 per cent come in at the young end of the electorate - they are about 70 per cent Labour… There isn’t much time.”

Death hasn’t bothered the Tories so much in the past, since they’ve gambled that any dalliance with leftist politics is youthful naivety. Don’t people move right as they obtain mortgages, children, an appreciation of Georgian architecture, etc? Labour’s huge mobilisation of 18-24 year olds has commanded attention; and these are voters who are unlikely to abandon the party any time soon.

But the swing among the not-so-young is more striking. In 2010, Labour was 3 per cent ahead among 30-45 year olds. That had grown to 14 per cent in 2015, and a cavernous 36 per cent in 2017.

And it’s not hard to see why adults are now moving rationally leftwards. This is the generation who might be expecting now to put down some roots, save for the future – but finds instead declining wages, unaffordable housing, insecure futures, and run-down public services to boot. Education cuts were a common plaint of parents on the doorstep; they had received enough fundraising letters from their children's school to be gravely concerned.

This is also a generation who came of political age in the (domestically) stable years of Tony Blair’s governments – with little or no memory of previous Labour governments. “It is vital we teach the young how low Britain fell in the 1970s,” angsted a Sunday Times headline yesterday. Surely it is more vital that we teach the old how low Britain has fallen in the 2010s?

My own associations with Conservatives in government are (dimly) the sleaze and torpor of the John Major era, the meanness of the Cameron-Osborne years (compounded by its hoodie-hugging hypocrisy), and the chaos of Brexit.

The Conservatives’ assertion that they are the sensible ones is all the more laughable given their fingerprints are all over the most naive and fanciful political project of our times. And their claims to be the ‘national’ party are shown up by the fact they’ve put so obviously put party before country twice in recent years.

It would be the most delightful contrepasso if the party’s cynical short-termism were to result in its long-term destruction.