How to Lose an Election Two Years Early – there’s no happy ending in this Tory romcom | Isabel Hardman
Iin the romcom How to lose a man in 10 days, Kate Hudson’s journalist is hired to write an article about how she puts off a boyfriend with erratic and often rude behavior in record time until he feels he has no choice but to dump her. The Tory party has yet to interrupt a boys’ poker night to weep over the death of a ‘love fern’, but the way it runs its leadership contest smacks of a similar desperation at being dumped by the electorate.
Is this the guide How to lose an election two years early? Are the insults hurled between camps the behavior of a party wanting trust in voters when its leaders seem to have no trust in one another? Is the power vacuum over the livelihood crisis exactly what needs to happen as the leadership race rages on, or is it a sign that everyone at the top, including the couple vying for the takeover, is low on energy and unwilling to leave Anything to get the situation under control?
Political parties exist to gain power and get things done, but that doesn’t always mean they really want it. By the late 1990s, the Tories were so jaded and disorganized at the end of their long reign that sacking from government seemed almost like a kindness, like an elderly driver having his license revoked after too many near misses. Labor breathed a visibly sigh of sadness when it lost that election in 2010 – and so many of its senior figures today speak privately of how “it took us this time to regroup and figure out what we stood for”.
Following Boris Johnson’s 2019 victory, Conservatives believed they had found the political alchemist’s dream of being able to regenerate in government rather than in opposition. Some of them think this is still the case as the competition brings to light exciting new faces like Kemi Badenoch, Tom Tugendhat and Penny Mordaunt. They now hope to use this alchemy to win an historic fifth term in power. But the way they are currently behaving suggests that privately they would quite like the next term to be out of the comfort of the opposition where they wouldn’t have to make difficult decisions for a while.
Confused by the twists and turns of the competition, many Tory MPs are wondering if Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak want a functioning party that can govern for two more years and then win another election. One MP moans: “If you have a wound you can cauterize it like Boris did to my colleagues whom he sacked over Brexit in 2019. Painful, but it probably works better than the alternative of letting the wound bleed. We bleed.” The bleeding will continue long after the contest is over because Truss and Sunak have said enough about each other and their party’s record in government to stop Sir Keir Starmer writing his own critique this side of Christmas . Even before the battle narrowed to the last two, other leading candidates such as Badenoch and Mordaunt were providing the opposition with plenty of fodder by saying the public services the Conservatives have run for the past 12 years are in a “desperate state”. . These are not the statements of people who regard their party’s brand as the most precious thing.
Even those who have declared their support for either are unsure the Conservatives will be able to regain their composure after this fight. Others who have signed up publicly for campaigns tell me they wish they could be miles away from “all of this.” By “this” they think they mean the bloody leadership contest, but I wonder if they also mean about their party in general, banging around without ideas or motivation.
Sunak sees the danger of this being true: he and his media frontrunners repeatedly warn that the election of Truss would hand the party over to the opposition. They argue that voters will not forgive Conservatives for focusing on tax cuts rather than more effective measures to combat runaway inflation. If his analysis that Truss’s pitch is just what Tory members want to hear is correct, then the fact that she is the frontrunner would suggest that party members are also less interested in winning than they have been for a long time. Sunak chose to talk to the country first rather than the party, and that gamble looks likely to fail. One of his supporters suggests that the autopsy of the Ready for Rishi! Election campaigning would also be that of the next Tories’ election victory because it would suggest the party has retreated into a comfort zone where it champions what it wants, not the electorate.
Other Tory MPs – not just those who support Truss – argue that Sunak’s failure shows the party has had enough of technocrats and awkward backroom chatter. The “technocrat” accusation is leveled not only against Sunak, who is not a very political politician, but also against the advisers he works with. Among the shadowy figures who have twisted MPs’ arms to get them to support Sunak is Gavin Williamson, who enjoyed being Chief Whip a little too much when he held the position a few years ago. Johnson’s camp murmur that the sunny and likeable Sunak is more aware of the arm twist than he cares to admit – although they remain deeply bitter over how the former chancellor dramatically left the government and contributed to the PM’s departure. On the other hand, the Truss campaign insists that it only offers a positive vision while trying to find a new insult for Sunak. The most amusing thing about the last few days was that he was like Gordon Brown: a comparison that would seem ridiculous at any time, but especially during the week when the former prime minister was the only one who had anything interesting to say about the magnitude of the cost of a living crisis and also what an appropriate response might be.
Brown’s repeated interventions over the past week revealed Starmer’s absence from the cost-of-living debates. The Labor leader has been on holiday but it’s not clear if returning from a hiatus will mean he’s suddenly showing a hitherto hidden level of political courage and creativity. The vacation wasn’t really the problem: Starmer’s caution was there long before he even packed his suitcase. The leadership race has given him the perfect space to rise as the Tories are too small-minded and self-absorbed to offer the big solutions this country needs. But as one Truss supporter says: “It shows how useless Labor is that the guy with all the ideas is the guy who was the worst Prime Minister this country has ever seen.”
Starmer has spent the last few months “framing” various issues ahead of a party convention where his allies hope he will show he really has what it takes to win voters over. For now, voters still seem to be in the position of Matthew McConaughey’s character, Benjamin Barry, who’s trying to hold onto his bet that a girl will fall in love with him within 10 days, even though she’s doing everything to throw him off the trail . Labor is just a few points ahead in the polls, despite the Tories throwing tantrums that Hollywood directors would find unrealistic. And Starmer seems satisfied that he has shown enough audacity in doing just the much-needed detoxification work in his party, including kicking Jeremy Corbyn out. That’s not enough to make voters fall for your party after their own long period of bad behavior.
Every romcom is worth the money, including How to lose a man in 10 days, ends with a chase, preferably in a car, where one of the main characters realizes they made a terrible mistake in abandoning the other. Once that competition is over, there won’t be another feelgood plot twist like this in September. The new leader will have neither the time nor the political space to go on a kiss-and-makeup tour. “We will not get a honeymoon, minimoon or even a candlelight dinner,” says a minister. “It’s going to be extremely hard right away.” The Tories sack Brown as the leader who restored the Labor Party to its preferred state of opposition. But to do justice to the former prime minister, he did everything he could to prevent the financial system from collapsing. It’s not clear whether the Conservative Party will put the same effort into the current economic crisis or actually win the next election.