There is a morose mood in the Conservative party. It isn’t just that the Tories expect to lose the next election – they fear that the coming defeat might be definitive, a result from which they never recover. One recent multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) poll forecasts that the Tories could be reduced to fewer than 100 seats – their lowest ever haul – with Labour predicted to secure an unprecedented 250-plus seat majority. Tory grandees are consequently gloomy. The former Brexit negotiator David Frost has called it a “desperate situation”. Charles Moore, the former Telegraph editor and Thatcher biographer, tells me the party’s condition is “probably worse than I’ve ever seen it”. Some are billing the next election as an “extinction-level event”. Rishi Sunak’s single-minded obsession on forcing through the Rwanda scheme appears, in this light, like a desperate attempt to distract himself and his party from the approaching abyss.
Some Tories may feel the party has reached its nadir as an electoral force, but such apocalyptic language is nothing new. In fact, fear of extinction is part of a long Conservative tradition. “It will be interesting to be the last of the Conservatives,” Lord Salisbury, one of the party’s longest-serving leaders, wrote glumly in 1882, as the age of mass suffrage loomed. “I foresee that will be our fate.” (Almost a century and a half later, he’d be relieved to learn that his great-great-grandson is leader of the House of Lords.) In 1945, on the brink of an unprecedented landslide victory, Labour candidates spoke openly about wanting “the complete extinction of the Tory party”. Then, six years later, the Tories returned to power and stayed there for the next 13. In 1974, amid the broadly progressive contours of the postwar consensus, the political scientist Andrew Gamble foresaw a future in which the Conservatives could be condemned to “the museum of Fantastic Zoology”. And here we are. “People often talk about the death of the Tory party, and it doesn’t happen,” Lord Moore told me.
