Delaying the election will only mean one thing for the Tories

As a new poll predicts the Conservative Party will suffer its biggest defeat since the dawn of modern democracy, Sean O’Grady explains how Rishi Sunak could stem the bleeding – or create an even bigger disaster

The voters have made their minds up and stopped listening to Sunak and his gaffe-prone colleagues (AFP via Getty)

What are we to make of the latest “megapoll” conducted by Survation – one that presents us with the prospect of a Tory disaster greater than anything since the dawn of modern democracy in 1832? That’s right. Eighteen hundred and thirty-two, the first general election to be held after the passage of the Great Reform Act.

In some ways, it tells us nothing new, except perhaps suggesting that, even now, the Tories don’t realise what is about to hit them. The British general election of 2024 will be a record-breaking affair. If an election were held now, the Conservatives, who’ve ruled the country for the majority of the past century, would win just over a quarter of the vote (26 per cent), the lowest of any major party in any general election, surpassing Labour under Michael Foot in 1983 (who came in at 27.6 per cent).

However, unlike Labour in that heat, the Tories would be down to a rump of 98 seats. Half of the cabinet would be gone. Rishi Sunak is in real danger of being the first sitting prime minister to be turfed out since Arthur Balfour in 1906. Sir Keir Starmer’s prospective 45 per cent vote share and vertiginous 286-seat Commons majority would exceed anything that Tony Blair and New Labour dreamed of.

The SNP do better in the megapoll, and the Liberal Democrats much worse, than many expected, and maybe the pollsters haven’t quite got the incidence of tactical voting right – though the folk who commissioned the poll, Best for Britain, rightly point out that it is not always clear how to get a Tory out when there’s no one in clear second place (and we saw a bit of that confusion at the Mid Bedfordshire by-election).

But those are relative details. It seems most likely that the wave of local and mayoral elections on 2 May, plus a by-election in Blackpool, will endorse the broad picture of the megapoll, and indeed all polls and elections over the past couple of years. Some larger questions immediately present themselves.

Can the Tories do anything about it? Frankly, no. The voters have made their minds up and stopped listening to Sunak and his gaffe-prone colleagues. The Survation researchers were kind enough (or unkind enough) to ask Reform voters what they’d do if there were an electoral agreement between Sunak and Nigel Farage – the most unlikely rapprochement since the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact – and in such a circumstance, the Tories would bounce up to 150 seats. Still miserable, but it would at least feel like an official opposition worthy of the name.

But then one has to ask oneself what the price of such a deal would be. Making Farage an MP, and a permanent nuisance, in a safe seat? Ambassador to the US? Deputy Tory leader in charge of migration policy? Or a series of radical policy shifts, such as Liz Truss-style tax cuts, physically getting Border Force and the Royal Navy to push the small boats back, ending the operational independence of the Bank of England, politicising the courts, and leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, and doing it now?

Even if such a joint manifesto were possible, it would only alienate voters in the centre ground, the ones found in abundance in “blue wall” seats. Voters are not sheep, and they don’t have to do what party leaders would like them to do. The association with Reform might well put off more people than it attracts.

It almost goes without saying that seeing a few flights of desperate refugees set off for Rwanda, some more cuts in national insurance, and a trend downwards in mortgage rates won’t be enough to prevent armageddon – given that two of those things have been tried recently and didn’t work.

Nor would substituting Sunak with anyone else rescue the situation, because that would merely confirm, in high pantomime style, that the Tories are divided, inward-looking, and don’t know what they’re doing.

There is nothing that Sunak or anyone else can do – and, given the mood, the longer he hangs on, the more some people will be determined to punish him for outstaying his welcome. When he pleads that “no one wants an election”, he’s quite wrong (as current polling shows), if indeed he even believes that. It’s just that, like Dickens’s down-on-his-luck-but-ever-optimistic Mr Wilkins Micawber, he hopes that “something will turn up”. Instead, and reaching for a more recent reference to popular culture, the prime minister will find that “things can only get worse” if he tries to defy and then gaslight the electorate.

Would a Labour landslide be bad for democracy? We’ll hear a lot more of this in the coming months – the idea that gifting Starmer an unfeasibly large majority will endow him with dictatorial powers, and might even allow the “revolutionary left” to dominate the parliamentary party, with disastrous consequences. “Vote Conservative,” will be the plea, “to prevent a one-party state.”

Of course, we didn’t hear them make such arguments in 2019, or indeed during the whole of the 1980s, when they were the beneficiaries of large parliamentary imbalances. The truth is that Starmer is unlikely to abuse the system as badly as Boris Johnson and Truss did, and besides, the voters really want to hear as little as possible from the Conservatives for the foreseeable future. They want them humiliated. Call it “the will of the people” if you like.

Would the Tory party be finished? Probably not. In a best-case scenario they’ll find a new, competent leader, with minimal baggage, who can take them back to the centre ground, marginalise the remaining extremists, deselect Truss and make Johnson history, rethink Brexit, abandon the culture wars, renounce cakeism, and come up with some attractive, believable policies.

That is, in fact, more or less what the Tories did after previous crushing defeats, in 1945, 1966 and 1974. A rapid policy review, promoting new faces, and giving a semblance of unity and competence can work wonders even for a badly mauled party – as, in fact, Starmer is currently proving. But if the Tories fall further into civil war and find themselves mesmerised by Reform and Farageism, purging the remaining moderates and embracing Islamophobia and anti-science, then many years in the wilderness await them, even if the Starmer administration runs into difficulties.

That, of course, is what happened after the Labour landslide of 1997, when the Tory right took over under William Hague and then Michael Howard. Even by 2005, when the shine had definitely come off Blair, they still couldn’t win. Only in 2010, after David Cameron and George Osborne came along and persuaded them to “stop banging on about Europe”, did they come anywhere near winning a general election.

It is true that Mrs Thatcher found herself the beneficiary of a shift to the right in 1979, but that followed a crisis on the left, the collapse of the governing Labour Party, and a national mood that was in the process of fundamentally rejecting the post-war consensus. It is not obvious that such a sea-change will be happening again by 2028, or even 2029. If Starmer and Rachel Reeves just give the country a quiet life, they’ll probably get a second term.

The one thing that probably would spell the end of the Conservative Party is if it allowed itself – its name, assets, organisation and membership – to be taken over by the Reform UK Party Limited in some misguided attempt to “unite the right”.

That’s because, as its full name indicates, Reform UK is not a membership party but a limited company (number 11694875), and only a few people have any say in what happens in it, principally Farage and Richard Tice. There are no leadership elections, no national executive, no meaningful party conferences, no policymaking, no members in the normal sense, and no democracy. Policy is just whatever cranky line Farage and a few others want to push from day to day.

If it gets its hands on the Tories, the combined or allied grouping will then become a Trumpian vehicle to complete the takeover of the British state that began in earnest with the 2016 EU referendum. That shouldn’t happen, because if the Tories drift even further to the hard right, they will make themselves even less electable than they are now.