The comimg Tory apocalypse

Interview with Professor Rob Ford on the collapse of the ruling elite

My interview with Rob Ford is one of the best I have done. You can hear it on Apple (see player below) Spotify, and every other podcast host.

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The 6^th of December 2023 was a political anniversary barely anyone noticed. Election Maps UK, a data cruncher, announced that exactly two years before, on 6 December 2021, the last poll was published showing a Conservative lead. Since then, 736 polls had come and gone, and not one of them showed the Tories in front.

On that same day Paul Krishnamurty, a professional gambler, and a consultant to the betting firms, gave me a stat anyone putting money on British elections ought to remember. In 1997, Labour won with a landslide and reduced the Conservatives to 31 percent of the vote (30.7 percent to be precise). It was the Tories’ worst result in the modern era and kept them out of office for 13 years.

Ah, how today’s Tories dream of 31 per cent. As of 6 December, 2023, the Conservatives had not hit 31 percent in 168 consecutive opinion polls.

You might say that there is about a year to the next election, and that things can change. And there is truth in that. You might say that governing parties almost always make up ground before a general election. And that is undeniable too.

But turn from the polls and look at the by-elections and local elections in which Tories have gone down to extraordinary defeats, and you wonder what they can save from the ruins. It is as if about three-quarters of the public has made a collective decision to destroy the Conservative party with any and every weapon to hand. Electors voting tactically and determinedly have overturned the largest Conservative majorities. If you dig into the details of the polling, the voters prefer Labour and damn the Conservatives on every conceivable issue.

Meanwhile, Keir Starmer looks like a winner. I grant you that he hardly sets hearts ablaze. And yet, and yet, he has the enormous advantage of being a lucky leader. Through no action on his or the Labour party’s part, corruption allegations have ended the SNP’s dominance of Scottish politics, opening the prospect of Labour retaking seats in Scotland, which would transform the balance of power nationwide.

Starmer is lucky that after years of ultra-left posturing, his own party appears serious about taking power. But most of all Starmer is lucky that British Conservatism is having a nervous breakdown.

I was delighted to interview Robert Ford, Professor of politics at the University of Manchester, and one of the most thoughtful analysts around.  When Boris Johnson won the December 2019 election the Conservatives had a majority of 80 and looked set to rule the UK for the whole of the 2020s.

Yet within three years Tory hopes turned to ashes and they are staring catastrophe in the face. There is a decent chance that the 2024 general election could join the 1906, 1945 and 1997 elections as a moment of Tory obliteration.

There are four reasons why

The fake news of 2019

Boris Johnson was never a popular populist. Even today, Tory MPs dream of raising him from the political dead, as if he were a portly Dracula. They forget that Theresa May was more popular than Johnson was when she threw away her majority in the 2017 general election.