What doomed the Conservatives - an insider’s view

Saturday, 6 July 2024

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party is expected to lose in the upcoming election, but the polls have been wrong before.

Hayden Munro was campaign manager for New Zealand Labour in 2020 and 2023. He has been assisting with the UK Labour campaign.

LONDON | OPINION: In the end it was a crushing landslide.

UK has now joined New Zealand, Australia, France, Canada and the US in a growing list of incumbent governments who saw their support crater after leading their country through the pandemic and the inflation wave that followed.

At a time when populist and far right parties across Europe are winning more and more elections, the massive majority for Keir Starmer’s centrist Labour Party is a bit of an anomaly.

So what do the results tell us?

Firstly, this reckoning for the Conservatives has been years in the making.

From Liz Truss, to Brexit, Britain under the Conservatives has suffered.

From austerity to Brexit to Liz Truss, Britain under the Conservatives has suffered more than a decade of economic self mutilation.

There is a deep sense the country is broken.

YouGov polling at the start of the campaign showed that the public thinks that on almost every metric - from the economy to infrastructure to housing to crime - things are worse than before the Tories took office.

More than anything else, that is what has doomed the Conservatives.

On top of this has come a series of ethical scandals - symbolised best by Boris Johnson and Number 10 staff holding boozy parties while Queen and country followed Covid lockdown rules.

It started with Sunak announcing the election date in the pouring rain.

And as if all of that wasn’t enough, the Conservatives have run one of the worst election campaigns in living memory.

It started with Rishi Sunak soaked in the pouring rain as he announced the election date. No one had thought to check the weather forecast or get the poor man an umbrella. It didn’t get any better from there.

Election campaigns in the UK are much bigger and much more expensive than in New Zealand.

But the battle between parties is still the same - it’s all about researching a winning message, sticking to it with focus and discipline, and then out-organising your opposition with a better ground game and better advertising.

In this, the Tories were totally outgunned. Labour raised more money, knocked on more doors and ran a much slicker campaign operation.

The betting scandal that engulfed the campaign’s final weeks tells you all you need to know. Trying to make a quick buck by gambling with insider information, Conservative MPs and staff actually gave away the election date, one of politics’ most carefully guarded secrets.

Boris Johnson’s boozy lockdown parties didn’t help.

Labour’s campaign team were monitoring the betting markets for intel on when the election would be and when they saw the spike of bets on a July 4 date, they rushed to buy all the best advertising slots before the Conservatives had even announced the date. It was emblematic of a campaign coming off the rails.

With the Tories in such a state it’s tempting to ask if this is a victory that Labour and Keir Starmer actually earned, or was it one that fell in their lap as Rishi Sunak and his party self-destructed?

The answer is that Labour were only in a position to benefit from the Conservatives’ collapse because they had done the work to change.

A poll in the final week of the campaign showed that if voters were asked to pick today between Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour and Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, even after everything that has happened, the Conservatives would still win.

Starmer’s victory has been built on winning back the Brexit supporting working class voters who dominate the swing seats of Middle England.

The type of voters who have historically been the reliable electoral base for Labour parties - but who have drifted away in recent years and who are prone to supporting right-wing populists instead.

These are the voters that people like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Marine Le Pen court so effectively.

Starmer has made a very concrete policy pitch to these voters - focussed on fixing the NHS, creating jobs, building new homes, hiring more police and keeping the economy stable after years of chaos.

It’s basic, day to day stuff. And that’s by design.

Starmer talks about a Labour Party, and ultimately a Labour Government, back in the service of working people.

It’s not rhetoric that will get people rushing to the barricades. But after years of Westminster chaos, declining standards in public life and everything feeling broken, it resonated with the people Labour needed it to.

Starmer must now hope his government can deliver the practical improvements in people’s lives he has promised - and that he can be successful in raising the standards in Westminster.

If he can do that, he will have given other progressive parties around the world a playbook for winning back, and holding, the support of voters who have left them.