Vote Conservative: it’s the only way to save the UK from the mess made by the Tories. That’s the message, historically speaking, that has won more elections than any other. The Conservative party is the UK’s most successful political party by a distance, but it is, like Agamemnon’s fleet, powered by human sacrifice. It has been reelected eight times since the second world war, and five times it has done this with a different leader than the one who fought the previous election.
These frequent changes at the top allow the party to present itself as a fresh alternative to a tired government: despite the fact that, more often than not, the “tired government” in question has been a Tory one. Even David Cameron, the only Conservative prime minister in the 21st century to be re-elected, did so by promising that voting for him was the best way to repudiate coalition governments like the one he was the leader of.
So will it be the same again in 2024? It’s tempting to say yes. Under Keir Starmer, the Labour party has set itself up as the antithesis of Boris Johnson: sober, a little dull and in possession of a decent haircut. It’s not clear that the opposition has the versatility or vision to respond to a Conservative party led by frontrunner Rishi Sunak: sober, a little dull and in possession of a decent haircut.
One reason why history may not repeat itself is that the UK is facing rising inflation and a grim economic picture. A change of leader increases Tory hopes at the next election, simply because they are better off with someone who is less widely disliked than Johnson had become. However it is unlikely to prove sufficient if the economic pressures facing the UK get worse.
But the other reason is that almost every part of the Tory party has forgotten its history. Some of the rightwing press is comparing Johnson’s exit to that of Margaret Thatcher in 1990 but the fact that John Major went on to win the 1992 general election and thus prevented a Labour government that would have repealed and dismantled much of Thatcherism doesn’t get a look-in. That particular bit of bad history is in part about political expediency: everyone not working for Rishi Sunak is incentivised to attack him, and it is hard to criticise him for his leading role in bringing about the end of the Johnson government if you also concede that he has probably extended the lifespan of the Conservative administration.
It’s more of a problem that in different ways, all of the contenders have also forgotten the lessons of 2019. While Johnson won a big majority in part because of Jeremy Corbyn’s unpopularity and in part because of Brexit, he also did so because he was able to prevent Labour from fighting a public services election by pledging more money for schools, hospitals and the police. The tax rises that Sunak’s rivals are keen to blame the former chancellor for are the direct consequence of these pledges.
It is far from clear how the party can abandon its tax rises without also having to retreat from such election-winning positions on the public services. When Sunak says that the electorate is ready to abandon “fairy tales” about tax and spending, what he is really saying is that the public is ready to accept further reductions in state spending provided the leader delivering them is not Johnson. Perhaps he’s right, but perhaps the reason why the Conservatives lost their parliamentary majority in 2017 wasn’t that the party had lost the art of arguing for austerity but that their coalition’s willingness to bear further cuts had been exhausted.
Although Sunak’s pitch to MPs puts an awful lot of weight on his own abilities to persuade voters to rediscover the appetite for further cuts, he is at least clear about the implications of his policy positions. That the chasing pack is pledging to reduce the tax burden but is even less specific about what that would mean for the provision of public services means that, for the moment, the former chancellor looks like an island of sanity in a sea of fiscal incontinence.
But the problem for all of the would-be prime ministers is that none of them are talking about the government’s real political problems. Other than tax, the focus is all on statues and pronouns, despite the fact no one is proposing a different approach to that of Johnson. There has been next to nothing of substance about how to make the energy market work better or what to do to help households feeling the pain, beyond unrealistic promises of tax cuts. It is the equivalent of a Conservative leadership contest in 2019 without the word “Brexit”, or one in 1990 where nobody talked about the poll tax. A party that has forgotten its past might well find that it is no longer able to repeat it.