In 2005, Blair lost quite a few seats and ended with a majority of 66 but it still took until 2015 before Cameron was able to form a government without the LibDem's help and even then he only narrowly succeeded with just 12 MPs more than the opposition.
Yet a huge MRP poll last week by Survation on behalf of Best for Britain with a massive 15,000 sample size and published by The Sunday Times, suggests the Tories are in line to be reduced to under 100 MPs with Starmer enjoying a 286-seat majority. And it isn't out of line with other pollsters either.
By any measure, this is absolutely remarkable, even staggering:-
Incredibly, Sunak himself is at risk with a bare 2.5% lead in his once-safe Ripon constituency.
I don't attribute very much of this to Kier Starmer either. Ditching Jeremy Corbyn helped a lot and not adopting anything too radical in the policy arena was all good but let us be honest, most of it has been self-inflicted by Conservatives. Starmer is no doubt competent and clever, charismatic he is not. But that is a positive. The Tories tried the charisma schtick under Johnson and the whole idea has now been comprehensively trashed, except in the more deluded corners of the Tory party.
Lord Frost has recognised the symptoms along with many of his MP colleagues, more than 60 of whom are planning to step down as soon as the starting gun goes off, but he comes up with an entirely wrong diagnosis. He says:
“The Tory party needs to face up to the reality that its current policies have alienated huge numbers of our voters. Only a shift to properly conservative policies, to deliver the change in the way the country is run that people voted for with Brexit, can alter that. It’s not too late — but time is running out.”
Some voters may well want ”proper Conservative policies” (with a capital C) but an even larger chunk of the population is heartily sick and tired of them and would sooner rip their own heads off than vote Tory. His own elevation to the peerage is one of the reasons I daresay.
Brexit is a large part of the problem. Not only has it failed to deliver what was promised in 2016, it has succeeded in delivering the total opposite and in doing so absorbed a huge amount of legislative, departmental, and ministerial time and energy to the exclusion of all else.
Turning an 80-seat majority into a 285 majority for the opposition takes some doing but Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, and Sunak have managed it and there is an outside chance they may be joined by another leader shortly as MPs plot to replace Rishi with somebody else.
Don’t forget these five leaders were the best that either the Conservative parliamentary party or the grassroots members could offer. They are not even scraping the barrel now.
They have tried the sensible and the diligent, the flashy, the wild cards, and the steady hand on the tiller. All have failed and the chances of the party digging up someone to reverse their fortunes is somewhere between zero and nil. I can’t see any candidates who might be quarter-decent.
Professor Sir John Curtice thinks Labour has a 99% of winning the election when it comes and short of Starmer being revealed as a serial killer with zillions stashed abroad in tax havens, it’s difficult to argue he’s wrong.
The Sunday Times piece portrays Sunak in a bunker mentality:
“Rishi’s selling point was supposed to be that he might be a bit crap at politics but he’s good at governing and is quietly getting on with running the country,” one anonymous minister said. “But Downing Street is a black hole, it is where policies go to die. No one can get a decision out of them.”
Now this is very odd, isn’t it? Not for fifty years has a British government had such freedom of action to make policy as it pleases, yet it seems totally helpless. Sunak apparently can’t make a decision. MPs know they are very far from ‘getting on with governing’ - the current meaningless mantra - because the House of Commons is not really doing anything substantive apart from trying to ship a few dozen pitiful migrants to sub-Saharan Africa at vast expense.
The ST article talks of "claims from cabinet ministers and their aides that Sunak’s toxic combination of control freakery and indecision has paralysed the business of government...."
Brexit may have cut the umbilical to Brussels but what it has exposed is just how reliant Britain is on the EU. So much so, that we are agonising over every policy to try and avoid more damage to an ailing economy that is looking increasingly sick and with The Treasury's medicine cabinet totally empty. This is the real reason for the indecision.
Brexit is going to play a big part in the election without being an explicit issue. Half the voters the Tories have lost think they haven’t implemented Brexit properly and are turning to Reform UK Ltd so they might make a bigger mess of it, while the other half can now see they were deceived in 2019 and believe any more Brexit is just going to make matters worse.
Couple that with bad news for the government on every other front from the Rwanda fiasco, the Post Office scandal, virtually bankrupt and indebted water companies dumping sewage in our rivers, local authorities going to the wall, HS2 being canceled, satisfaction with the NHS at a record low and the whole cost of living crisis and it's easy to see why the Tories are looking at an existential catastrophe.
The party is going to split and it will be lucky to remain in just two parts. Many will be attracted to Reform UK, particularly if Farage can be persuaded to return to British politics away from a lucrative career in the USA. If Trump loses in November, he probably will.
The rest - assuming there are any moderates left who are willing to spend a decade or more trying to rebuild the party - will try to form something along the lines of the old One Nation, pro-EU, Tories under Harold MacMillan and Edward Heath. They should all be prepared for years, perhaps decades, in the political wilderness and shouldn’t rule out total oblivion. But we can only pray for that.
