If you’re not a Tory, the past few months may have brought some pleasure after years of torment. Bad news for the Conservatives has suddenly started coming almost daily: misfiring smear campaigns, chaotic U-turns, potentially lethal investigations, Tory MPs and rightwing papers turning on Boris Johnson, panicky ministers struggling through interviews, leadership rivalries ruining policy announcements, and a sustained plunge in the opinion polls. The multiplying consequences of the Downing Street party scandals have changed the political atmosphere.
The importance of all this should not be underestimated. A terrible government, the most lethally incompetent and probably the most corrupt in modern British history, may finally be beginning to be held to account. At the same time, Conservatism’s image – as a rarely nice but often realistic ruling ideology – is being badly damaged. Seemingly unknown to themselves, Johnson and his remaining loyalists are becoming a laughing stock.
But are we laughing too much? Conservative governments in the past have regularly suffered humiliating meltdowns. In 1990 Margaret Thatcher’s premiership ended in tears after months of plotting against her. In 1995 her successor, John Major, resigned as leader and sought re-election in a failed attempt to silence his critics. More recently, the crises have come faster and faster: David Cameron’s resignation after losing his Brexit referendum in 2016; Theresa May’s disastrous attempt to increase her parliamentary majority in 2017; the failed effort to remove her through a no-confidence vote in 2018; her repeated Brexit defeats and resignation in 2019.
None of these episodes led to the Conservatives losing office. On each occasion, for days or weeks or months, the party’s future appeared to hang in the balance. Journalists reported excitedly from Downing Street, or outside meetings of the Tories’ much-mythologised 1922 Committee. Opposition parties seized on Conservative divisions and disarray. Labour politicians began to believe they might soon take office.
And then, every time, the sense of crisis gradually ebbed away. The Conservatives changed their leader, or some of their policies, or just played for time, exploiting the many opportunities in Britain’s parliamentary calendar for evasion and delay. With its frequent recesses – the latest begins next Friday – the House of Commons is not as tough a place for wounded prime ministers as is traditionally claimed.
Something less tangible also helps Tory governments survive these disastrous phases: voters often lose interest. Not just because most people only follow politics closely for, at best, a few days at a time – an attention span that digital media is probably shortening with its overload of political opinions and information. But also because these crises can be emotionally and politically satisfying in themselves.
By exposing the errors and shortcomings of our usual ruling class, and by forcing them into U-turns, changes of leadership and displays of sometimes embarrassing contrition, Conservative crises can feel like a rebalancing between politicians and citizens – and make more fundamental change seem unnecessary.
The 1992 and 2019 elections both came after particularly protracted periods of Tory upheaval. Yet they saw the biggest total Conservative votes of the past half-century. Many people seemed to feel that the Tories had listened and adapted sufficiently to their discontents. The government had been punished enough, so a new one was not needed.
In pre-democratic times, the status quo was protected by brief, pressure-releasing ruptures in the established order. In the annual Feast of Fools in medieval France, for example, low-ranking clergy temporarily swapped places with their superiors and mockery of church practices was permitted. There is also something similarly ritualised about today’s Tory crises: from the theatrical sending of letters to the 1922 Committee by MPs seeking a leadership contest, to the inauthentic-feeling attacks on the government by the rightwing press, which flare up and then suddenly cease.
These protagonists may well be playing their roles on the understanding that uncomfortable periods for the Tories are the necessary price, paid every few years, for the party’s longterm dominance. And during these crises British politics becomes, more than ever, mostly about the Conservatives. Currently that means the culture Johnson has created in Downing Street; what Sue Gray and Scotland Yard make of it; and who might replace Johnson as premier.
For non-Tories, trying to work out who would be the least awful new Tory leader is a familiar routine – in effect, a partial acceptance of continuing Conservative rule. Many voters and journalists probably know more about the rules of Tory leadership contests than they do about Keir Starmer’s policies. And that’s not just because he doesn’t yet have enough compelling ones. There is an English preoccupation with Tory politics that is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
In one-party states, it’s common to ridicule or feel contempt for your government without being able to envisage its removal. Our politics isn’t that stuck, yet, despite the Tories’ ongoing efforts to tilt the electoral system in their favour, such as making it harder to vote for social groups who tend not to support them. But the deepening cynicism about politicians means that a chaotic government no longer shocks and alienates voters as much as it did in previous eras with struggling prime ministers, such as the 1970s, when Edward Heath and Jim Callaghan were ejected from Downing Street for smaller errors than Johnson’s. Nowadays it’s widely expected that our leaders will be out of their depth, as well as entirely out for themselves. That’s one reason why Starmer’s offer of more competence and integrity has yet to properly resonate. Not enough voters can envisage such a government.
Yet it’s too early to be sure that the Tories’ current troubles will recede in the usual way. There is another, rarer kind of Conservative crisis. It is less exciting to follow, but longer-lasting and more lethal. It involves enough voters firmly deciding that the Tories have been in power for too long, and then fitting every government scandal and mistake into that template.
The last time this happened was in the 1990s, when Labour’s return to office was preceded by almost five years of Tory calamities and failed relaunches. Tony Blair was Labour leader for the most decisive part of the period, and his ability to promise a better future helped make the Conservative government look obsolete.
Starmer doesn’t have the same salesman’s gifts. Nor, unlike Blair, does he get much of a hearing from wavering Tory voters and the rightwing press. We live in a more tribal age. It’s also a more impatient one, when the political mood quickly changes. The next general election may not be for almost three more years. The Tories could be in the early stages of a terminal crisis. But if you’re hoping that they really are doomed this time, it’s going to be an anxious wait.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
