THE BIG READ: As two polls put the Tories on just 20 per cent support, we shouldn't make the error of thinking this is as low as they can go.
Rishi Sunak's main function now is to block the rise of a more gutsy and popular right-wing political offer and hand the centrist baton on to Keir Starmer in the autumn.
BACK in 1977 Britain was represented in the Eurovision Song Contest by the duo of Lynsey de Paul and Mike Moran performing their original song “Rock Bottom”.
The moral of the song, which came runner-up in the competition, was that if you found yourself as low as you could go then it was time to implement radical change. Or as the lyrics put it: “Where are we? Rock bottom. Tragedies? We got ’em. Remedy? Why don’t we rub it out and start it again?”
I was reminded of this by a headline in the London Evening Standard on Monday which accompanied coverage of a new opinion poll by Ipsos.
“Tories hit rock bottom with support hitting record low of 20 per cent, new poll shows,” said the headline. And indeed, compared to the last Ipsos poll for the Standard the Tories were down a big seven points. Rishi Sunak’s personal ratings were also at a record low with 73 per cent of voters dissatisfied with him and just 19 per cent satisfied, giving him a net score of -54.
As the respected pollster Will Jennings put it in response: “It feels significant that the government is now polling as poorly as at the low point of the Truss premiership – yet nobody is talking about it.”
Yet that’s not quite true. Regular readers of this website will know that I have been recommending for months that when it comes to the Sunak regime, the Tories need to “rub it out and start it again” (under a new and better leader).
But let’s let that one pass. What I do take greater issue with is the Standard’s inference that this poll definitely represents rock bottom for the Conservatives rather than simply a new low.
A similar 20 per cent finding for the Tories by YouGov on Friday would seem to indicate that it is indeed becoming the new normal. But is it as low as the Tories can go? Have they hit their bedrock support now? I don’t think so. For starters, that 20 per cent headline score is what pollsters arrive at after reallocating “don’t knows” from their raw data. For example, YouGov’s original data tables show that only 14 per cent of respondents are actually naming the Conservatives when asked who they intend to vote for.
And this, remember, is when the main right-wing challenger party Reform is operating without the talismanic presence at its helm of Nigel Farage. That could easily change at any time over the next few months to the obvious further benefit of Reform and further disadvantage of the Tories.
A still more powerful reason to expect the Conservatives to keep ebbing away under Sunak is that the Prime Minister made a telling and disastrous strategic choice back in November when he sacked Suella Braverman as Home Secretary and brought in David Cameron as Foreign Secretary. By doing so, he turned his back on Mrs Braverman’s warnings about the failure of multiculturalism, the disaster of excessive immigration and the damage being done by pro-Palestine “hate marches”. And he was also seen to re-embrace the referendum-losing, centrist “liberal Conservatism” of the 2010s.
Since then all of Mrs Braverman’s warnings have been vindicated in the eyes of millions of voters: legal immigration figures have spiralled yet further, no illegal migrant has been sent to Rwanda following a disastrous Supreme Court defeat and waves of anti-Semitism and Islamist intimidation of its critics have further highlighted the naïve failings of those singing the praises of multicultural society.
By withdrawing the Tory whip from Lee Anderson immediately after Islamists succeeded in changing House of Commons procedures via the tactic of making threats to MPs, Sunak sent out a further powerful signal that he is determined to shore-up a failed centrist paradigm when it comes to issues of immigration and integration.
Going somewhat over the top in an onslaught against London Mayor Sadiq Khan, as Anderson did, was judged by the 10 Downing Street operation to be a far more pressing issue than the entire political process sliding into the grip of Islamist bully boys. That represented a risible mis-ranking of priorities and confirmed to right-of-centre voters that Sunak just doesn’t have what it takes.
The Prime Minister tried to claw back lost credibility on Friday in an address in Downing Street that followed George Galloway’s Rochdale by-election win. Yet his performance merely served further to highlight his weakness.
Instead of pledging to fight back against the Islamist menace with every instrument at his disposal, Sunak engaged in a particularly naff and threadbare exercise in triangulation, the political technique in which one defines two opposing extremes in order to occupy a supposed sensible centre ground one’s-self.
Sunak warned against the rise of Islamism on the one hand, but the rise of the Far Right on the other, telling us that these two menaces fed off each other.
Even for someone like me, who does not think the Far Right threat is invented and does believe it is growing (albeit from a very low base), the attempt at drawing equivalence with Islamism sunk without trace. For starters, in this country the Far Right only ever rises in reaction to a perceived threat whereas Islamism is a relentlessly expansionist force with demographic change putting wind in its sails. More importantly, Islamist terror threats dwarf the Far Right when it comes to the case load of MI5 and other security agencies. And this is the case even though Islamists must hunt for support from among a still relatively small pool of Muslim UK residents, whereas the Far Right in theory has 80 per cent of the public to pitch its messages to.
When it comes to the street politics of recent months, one could argue that the Far Right made an appearance on Armistice Day, when a few dozen retired football hooligans formed part of a larger turnout of people determined to protect the Cenotaph from Islamist desecration. Apart from that it has been the Far Left, in unholy alliance with the Islamists, that has brought hatred into the hearts of our big cities on most weekends. Yet the Far Left menace was not even mentioned by Sunak.
What the Prime Minister did say was that the pro-Palestine demonstrations had got out of hand and become intimidatory and needed more active policing and that the Prevent strategy needed re-energising. Britain needed to do more as well to stop Islamic radicals from other countries spreading hate. Basically, all the things he blocked Mrs Braverman from doing many months ago. And then sacked her for complaining about.
Sunak’s perverse talent for enraging, or at least depressing, right-of-centre voters is now a major part of the Tory malaise. The derision expressed among socially conservative voters about him joining in with Labour’s distraction-obsession with the Far Right bogeyman has been something to behold.
For all his establishment credentials as a “grown-up” and conventional centrist and globalist-inclined leader, the truth is that Sunak has now emerged as an almost unmatched voter repellent for electors across the political spectrum.
As many of us warned before his disastrous post party conference tilt to the centre ground, there is no substantial section of the electorate on the centre and centre-left to be won for the Tories at the coming general election. Those sections of the electorate were already utterly fixated on opposing the Conservatives.
The new ingredient he has added, post-Liz Truss, is the active alienation of right-of-centre voters. That the Conservatives under his command should be attracting the active support of just 14 in every hundred British adults points to his epic uselessness.
In a political context which has seen politicians he would no doubt consider “Far Right” win elections in Italy and the Netherlands and almost win in France as well, Sunak has led the dominant party on the British right into a vanishingly small electoral niche: middle class centrists who don’t despise the Tories despite Brexit and can’t bring themselves to vote for Starmer’s Labour or the Lib Dems. In other words, almost no-one.
His main political function now - and the function of those Tory MPs who still
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