THE BIG READ: Why the Conservatives really could be wiped out at the general election.

Rishi Sunak's party has alienated almost everybody while also getting unlucky with external circumstances. It is not hard to envisage it winning fewer than 100 seats.

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

THE Conservatives right now are like a speeded-up version of the creative output of the American playwright Arthur Miller.

They have gone from Death of a Salesman to The Crucible in just 18 months, compared to the four years it took Miller. Their great salesman, Boris Johnson, was defenestrated in summer 2022, while it has only taken till the end of autumn 2023 for conspiracy theories about political witchcraft to take hold.

Our Marilyn Monroe figure in this tableau – glamorous, high IQ and oozing populist appeal - is surely Nadine Dorries, whose book The Plot has caught fire with a segment of Tory activists and, in particular, among the online world.

Dorries believes a shadowy cabal gathered around a mysterious “Dr No” figure is behind almost every significant development in the chaotic goings on at the top of the Tory party. Her latest theory is that Kemi Badenoch, who is currently way ahead at the top of the Conservative Home Cabinet rankings, has already been lined up by the cabal as a “spare” should Rishi Sunak need to be terminated.

This is all quite entertaining stuff for members of the political media, most of whom have sympathies naturally lying to the left of centre. But the febrile atmosphere makes it harder to envisage the Conservatives going into the next election in decent shape or with even a basic semblance of party unity.

It is just one factor among many leading to a fairly revolutionary thought among right-of-centre commentators: are we now seeing the death throes of the Conservative party itself? Could it be on the brink of a catastrophic defeat far worse than its landslide loss to Labour in 1997? Might political circumstances be prevailing that dictate both the loss of affluent middle-class votes to Labour and the Lib Dems and those of social conservatives to the Reform party?

Could even the straitjacket of the first past the post electoral system be coming apart at the seams due to the pressure of holding together within one party two tribes who have radically different views about many of the biggest issues in an ultra-polarised era?

And could it be that such an arrangement has now become a lead weight around the ankles of each tribe, with the socially conservative New Conservatives finding their natural voters repelled by the idea of voting for a party featuring the likes of Caroline Nokes and Tobias Ellwood, while middle class “Blue Wall” voters get sniffy about backing the party of Lee Anderson and Suella Braverman?

Yes to all of that, I think. And I haven’t even mentioned the possible imminent return of Nigel Farage to the political fray. It would be easier to envisage Dracula being a model employee at a blood bank than to imagine Farage not wishing to feast on this bleeding away of the Tory brand.

Many, many moons ago, when I was studying history at A-level, the surest way to get a top grade for any essay about the cause of a significant historical development – say the rise or fall of an empire – was to conclude that it was “multi-factorial”. So long as you had listed all the main possible elements, this was regarded by the question-setters as a sign of a maturing and inquiring mind.

Certainly we can say the ebbing away of the Conservative Party is the result of a confluence of multiple disadvantages. First off is the obvious point that they have been in power for a long time, especially if one counts the five-year coalition with the Lib Dems that David Cameron headed-up (and most voters do, therefore so should we). They have had plenty long enough to disappoint nearly everyone, which is putting things mildly.

Secondly, they no longer have the advantage of facing an opponent who can be easily depicted as an extremist. Whatever else one says about Keir Starmer, he is no Jeremy Corbyn-style gift to the Tories. Sure, they can point out that twice he tried to make Corbyn PM, but this amounts to brick-batting at one remove.

Thirdly, the Tories have governed in a very difficult era for the whole western world. The vastly expensive and intrusive public realm response to Covid sapped the faith of electorates in incumbents everywhere and has left an enormous debt overhang in its wake.

Fourthly, this has been exacerbated by the adverse impact on living standards of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has pushed up food and energy prices.

Next and in the British context alone, there has been the Brexit experience. This opened-up a whole new potential audience for the Tories – the Red Wall, “old Labour” vote – but at the expense of leaving very miffed the London-commuting class of corporate employees who never liked the idea of an economic upheaval when they were doing very nicely thank you.

Perhaps because the 2019 election forged for the Tories a new electoral coalition they hadn’t really expected and didn’t fully understand, the ensuing years have proved a particular struggle. The patrician “Blue Wall” MPs – still the most numerous grouping in the parliamentary party – have not permitted all that much “levelling-up” money to go to the new territories in towns across the Midlands and the north. And they have permitted not the slightest vestige of immigration control either, considering the very idea “ugly” and disadvantageous to business interests.

This, for me, is the biggest factor behind the Tories being so deep in the doldrums. David Cameron and Theresa May both promised to get net immigration down to the “tens of thousands” and both failed even to get close. Boris Johnson was thought to be a different proposition by Red Wall voters. In fact, he was way more liberal by instinct on migration policy than were his two immediate predecessors.

Instead of bringing net immigration down, as promised in the 2019 manifesto, he trebled it, scattering round visas like confetti, signing up to uncapped schemes for Hong Kongers and Ukrainians alike, adding a generous proportion of Afghans to the mix, allowing universities to treble their foreign student numbers and bring in vast numbers of dependents too, lowering the earnings threshold at which companies could bring in workers from abroad. Have I missed anything? Probably. Oh yes, promising “we will send you back” to those arriving illegally in small boats and then not sending them back but putting them up in swanky hotels instead.

It would be an exaggeration to say that excessive immigration alone explained the Brexit referendum result, but it was certainly the policy area that best demonstrated the case for “taking back control” in the eyes of the majority of voters who wanted it reduced. So Johnson’s failure to follow through was, in my view, the biggest factor in his downfall – bigger than his lax attitude towards the need for himself or his team to follow the Covid laws they imposed upon everyone else. Quite simply his attitude in office to immigration destroyed support for him among groups of voters who had protected his poll rating and were essential to his political longevity.

After the chaotic Liz Truss interregnum, with the unravelling of the mini-Budget and then her own ousting, it became obvious even to those not especially interested in politics that things were not normal at the top of the Tory party. Economic policy was lurching all over the road with each new iteration initially praised to the hilt by Tory MPs before being abandoned for a new and contradictory approach that earned their adulation afresh. The thought that these guys did not actually believe in anything at all other than their own self-advancement and didn’t know what they were doing either became common currency.

And then there was Rishi Sunak: installed unopposed by MPs. The loser who won among the narrowest selectorate imaginable. Had he stepped forward right away with draconian proposals to lower immigration he would have had time to see them take effect before the 2024 general election and given his party half a chance of faring well.

Instead, he told Paul Goodman of the Conservative Home website that he didn’t think the British