In The Times yesterday, surveying the wreckage of the local election results, Rishi Sunak was quoted as saying Britain was heading for a hung parliament at the general election with a Labour government having to be propped up by smaller parties. Nice try, Rishi, but you have got to be joking…
It could barely have been worse for the Tories…
The results were a disaster for the Tories. The fact that Labour only got 34% of the vote is irrelevant, being obscured by all sorts of local factors that won’t be repeated at a general election. Labour won almost everywhere they had to, often very comfortably and the LibDems and Greens had good results too. What was remarkable is that Labour, in particular, for the first time in a generation, are distributing their votes efficiently rather than simply piling them up in inner cities where they were already doing well. That is a very, very bad omen for the Tories.
The clear message is that most voters are heartedly sick of the Tories and will go to any lengths to get rid of them. It really doesn’t matter how relatively unpopular Starmer is versus Blair in his hey day. It is time for a change and the huge anti-Tory coalition will swing into place ruthlessly in the Autumn voting tactically to wreak the most damage; LibDems in the South/South West and Labour everywhere else including Scotland which of course wasn’t voting last week. Reform UK will undercut the Tories from the Right, everyone else from the Left. Oh dear indeed…
This blog currently predicts not a hung parliament but a Tory wipe-out. They will be lucky to survive with a 150 seats.
And only some while after the next election will the Tories get interesting again. Every government needs a decent opposition and Labour with an inherited economic mess and no clear mandate in terms of policy commitments will quickly become unpopular. There may at least be some curiosity about what lessons the Tories have learnt from their defenestration.
The problem is that, today, there are very few indications from leading Tories they will learn anything. With rumours of a Johnson/Farage realignment of the Right of politics using the vehicle of a hugely weakened Tory Party a year or too hence, with good moderate Tories going/gone (the former West Midlands mayor, Andy Street, being one of these) and the existing left of the Tory Party seemingly (self) defeated, the Labour Party regardless of their competence may be in power for a very long time.
Time for a new centre-right party you might think. Well, however laudable, we have been here before and it seems as likely as one of Sunak’s unintended jokes about a hung parliament.
Inside Right Politics 