There will soon come a moment, if it isn’t reached already, when Conservatives fear losing an election less than they crave release from government. The shift is not always perceptible. Disheartened MPs quit quietly, letting their more pugnacious colleagues fill the airwaves, and even many defeatists put up some kind of fight out of collegiate solidarity and automatous partisanship.
In Downing Street, sustained failure generates the bunker mentality that is essential as a defence against despair. Marching resolutely towards defeat requires a dogged faith that the right policy, the right speech and a few lucky accidents can turn things around.
But the public face of that determination takes on a desperate hue. The prime minister defends himself in a tone of wheedling exasperation that barely conceals impatience with a nation that refuses to recognise the tireless work he is doing on its behalf. On camera, Rishi Sunak looks as if he is struggling to keep a lid on the same frustration that Gillian Keegan accidentally – and in terms unfit for daytime broadcast – spilled into a live microphone earlier this week.
The education secretary appeared to resent being held responsible for the state of English schools. It is true that she didn’t install aerated concrete in any roofs herself, nor did she personally cut the funds that might have gone on non-crumbly replacements (a defence unavailable to Sunak since he wielded the knife as chancellor). But a Conservative minister in a Conservative government that has held power for 13 years doesn’t get to plead the mitigation of recent arrival in office. Especially not when the nature of a crisis stirs deeply rooted public wariness of Tories when it comes to responsible stewardship of the public realm.
The school roofs fiasco lands with exquisite precision on a zone of maximum vulnerability for a prime minister who presided over a shrinking state refurbishment budget while donating tens of thousands of pounds from his personal fortune to Winchester college, his elite alma mater.
Sunak defends himself on the charge of budget parsimony by saying his decisions in the Treasury maintained funding on the trajectory established over the previous decade. But that is no defence if the underlying problem was an austerity programme that degraded public services in exchange for, at best, marginal and short-lived gains in deficit reduction.
There is no need to rehash old economic arguments about optimal fiscal pathways out of the financial crisis to recognise that George Osborne’s 2010 strategy was primarily political. The goal was to incriminate Labour profligacy as the reason why belts needed tightening, thereby insulating David Cameron’s government from blame for the ensuing pain. The long-held Conservative ideological conviction that the state should be smaller was rebranded (with help from the Liberal Democrats) as a mission of civic responsibility.
In electoral terms, the plan was a tremendous success. Opposition efforts at rebuttal failed to get a significant purchase on public opinion and Cameron won the majority in 2015 that had eluded him five years earlier. But there is a significant difference between stirring mistrust of Labour and weaning voters off their historical attachment to functional public services and a social safety net.
It is a distinction that was recognised by the smarter pro-Brexit strategists, which is why Vote Leave put a pledge to divert resources from Brussels to the NHS on the side of its campaign bus.
The result of the referendum would probably have been different if the case for quitting the EU had been made entirely by neo-Thatcherite libertarians offering a bracing free-market enema to flush continental lethargy out of Britain’s state-dependent system, although that was the foundational Eurosceptic vision.
It is also feasible that the preceding years of spending cuts fed a mood of general political neglect and a craving for radical renewal that animated leave voters more than specific complaints about the terms of EU treaties. Austerity was certainly unpopular enough by 2018 for Theresa May to promise to bring it to an end. Boris Johnson later declared that it was over already, never to return.
Those were opportunistic political postures and not realistic budget forecasts. Even if the intent was sincere, the combined effect of Brexit, Covid, war in Ukraine and Liz Truss conspired to dig Britain into a deeper fiscal hole than it was ever in under Labour.
Not all of that is the Tories’ fault, but enough of the mess is homegrown that voters look dimly on attempts to shift the blame overseas. That is one message from a report newly published by Michael Ashcroft, the former Conservative party deputy chair with a sideline in opinion polling. His detailed survey makes bleak reading for the government on many levels.
A substantial majority, including among 2019 Tory voters, agree with the view that “Britain is broken, people are getting poorer and nothing seems to work properly”. That is not a view that tends to reward incumbency.
Drill deeper into the data and that mood reveals a more profound problem for a party that has suspicion of government intervention encoded in its ideological DNA. The small-state impulse isn’t shared by the public. Asked to judge a range of forces in terms of whether they are good or bad for Britain, voters prefer government to big business. They trust regulation and the green movement more than free markets and capitalism. A majority of Tories support public ownership of utilities.
There are nuances to complicate the picture. In some attitudes, Conservative policy is aligned with the mainstream – suspicion that an inefficient state hands out too much to immigrants and layabouts, for example. But the overall picture suggests a 13-year crusade against the supply of government has done nothing to diminish demand. The Tories’ campaign prowess is undeniable but election victories have made remarkably few converts to the winners’ creed.
Now Sunak has no new ideas and nothing to say about the problems facing Britain, most of which are the product of choices made by the party he leads. This is the point of no return, when Conservatives realise that renewal in office is not possible, and that they need to be in opposition almost as much as the country wants them out of government.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
