There is an episode in West Wing, when the melancholic Director of Communications, Toby, dismisses concerns about the reputational implications of bombing a recalcitrant Middle Eastern state, saying: “They will love us when we win.” Needless to say, he loses the argument and it is in fact clear that he doesn’t really believe it himself.
This scene came to mind as I was considering the prospects for the Conservatives over the next few days in Birmingham. When parties lose after long periods in power, they rarely learn the right lessons from defeat straight away. From the election of Michael Foot in 1979, to William Hague and the yet more disastrous Ian Duncan-Smith in 1997 and 2001 respectively, the immediate diagnosis is nearly always the wrong one. We should be more left-wing, more nationalistic, more parochial (sic).
Rebound leaders tend to stubbornly double down on the reasons for their defeats, not necessarily because they really believe that the public will grow to love their former strategy, but because the generation of politicians immediately competing for power are too bound up in the approach that has just lost their party the election. The situation demands that the new leadership accepts their failings; instead – whatever the narrative – the prescription is more of the same.
It is hard to see the Conservatives learning a different lesson from their most recent, devastating defeat. Three of the four candidates are deeply implicated in the policies of the previous Government: Jenrick and Badenoch’s critique of Rishi is not that he was pursuing the wrong policies, but that he wasn’t pursuing them hard enough. The fourth candidate – Tom Tugendhat – rather than taking the opportunity to tack back towards the centre, is instead offering more of the same, perhaps recognising that no other offering could cut through with the right wing, populist membership.
They will love us when we win. But the trouble is the Conservative party doesn’t yet want to win again. It doesn’t care enough about winning to set aside its own obsessions and pet policies to think about what the country as a whole might want. So, whether it’s Badenoch or Jenrick (and the membership vote will ensure it’s one or the other) their mandate will be to box off Reform UK by moving further and further into their political cul de sac.
The trouble is that, even if they succeed, there are not enough votes on the hard right to build a winning coalition in a UK election. What’s more, as should be obvious after July, vacating the centre ground to the Liberal Democrats comes at an extreme risk: for every Midlands or Lincolnshire seat the Conservatives might defend or regain by holding Reform at bay, they risk losing another in the South East or South West.
Eventually, after devastating election defeats, all parties realise that to win again they must reclaim the centre ground. Typically, this takes four leaders: Foot, Kinnock, Smith, Blair; Hague, IDS, Howard, Cameron. Labour have just managed it in three: Miliband, Corbyn, Starmer…
In each case, things tend to get worse in opposition before the light dawns and they get better. The question facing the Conservatives is whether they can afford for them to get worse. As the Lib Dems were anxious to tell anyone who would listen at their Conference a fortnight ago, they needed only 26 more gains and another 117,000 voters to switch, to become the HM’s Official Opposition. Were that to happen it is hard to envisage a way back for the Conservatives. As they gather in Birmingham, the Conservatives face an existential threat and yet they look set to blithely carry on down the route to extinction.
They will love us when we win. But they won’t win and – unless things change – and the only love is for their own past glories. And no party has a divine right to exist forever.
