Not for the first time, it was Focaldata’s James Kanagasooriam – the analyst who initially drew attention to the Red Wall’s potential to turn blue in 2019 – who put his finger on it before anyone else.

“Labour”, he predicted a couple of weeks into this summer’s general election campaign, “is building a monumental sandcastle”; a massive majority which, because it looked likely to be constructed on the opposition’s ruthlessly efficient targeting of a dog-tired, dog-eared Tory government rather than on genuine enthusiasm for the alternative Keir Starmer was offering, would be more apparent than real.

Polling out over the weekend, as Labour gathered for its conference in Liverpool, suggests that, if anything, talk of it winning a ‘loveless landslide’ back in July underestimated just how little underlying support there was for Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues.  The prime minister’s personal ratings have plummeted (for once the term is actually justified) by 45 points since July, giving him a net rating of -26 per cent.

Admittedly this comes after weeks of unmitigatedly awful headlines generated, first, by Rachel Reeves deciding to axe the winter fuel payment, second, by them (along with sundry Labour ministers) having accepted all sorts of freebies, and, third, by stories which make Number 10 look more like a nest of vipers than mission control.

But still, you’d have to go back over three decades to September 1992 to come across a government (the one led by John Major) coming a-cropper so soon after winning a general election – and even that one took a couple more months longer than this one to hit stormy seas.

Nor was its precipitate fall in the polls just down to lurid tabloid tales of freezing pensioners, posh frocks, and special advisers fighting like rats in a sack.  Instead it was the result of a truly profound economic shock (Britain’s forced exit from the ERM on Black Wednesday) followed in short order by a poorly-handled policy announcement (the mass closure of pits whose future had supposedly been secured by victory over the miners in 1985) that upset voters across the board.

But just because, for Major (in the news again this week), it was never glad confident morning again, does that mean that Starmer, too, is inevitably done for?

For some Tories, at least in private, the answer would appear to be yes.  “He’s hopeless at politics”, “they don’t know what they’re doing”, and “buyers’ remorse has kicked in already” are just a few of the phrases I’ve heard being bandied about recently.

But that is, for all sorts of reasons, far too complacent. And it’s also eerily familiar – characteristic, perhaps, of the widely-held conviction among Conservatives of all stripes that, as Britain’s ‘natural party of government,’ only they really know how to run the country and its economy.

Indeed, while it now seems laughable in the light of Tony Blair winning three elections on the trot in the late Nineties and early Noughties, that comforting (but ultimately illusory) complacency was even in evidence just after what was arguably an even more comprehensive defeat handed out to the Tories by the electorate in May 1997.

As one of William Hague’s advisors put it to me when I interviewed him for my book on The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron, many Tories back then:

“behaved like a disappointed middle-aged wife whose husband’s just run off with his PA and thinks, “Well, give it three or four months and when he needs his socks darned and a homecooked meal, he’ll come crawling back, begging for forgiveness”.”

We all know how that went, don’t we?

True, as numerous commentators never seem to tire of pointing out, Starmer is no Blair. But one thing his occasionally rocky road as Leader of the Opposition did teach us is that he’s more than capable of bouncing back and improving.

Maybe too Starmer doesn’t have to be Blair, anyway. After all, in 1997 the Conservative Party lost eleven percentage points on its performance five years earlier, leaving it on 31 per cent; in 2024 it lost twenty percentage points, leaving it on just 24 per cent.

Nor did it have to worry back then about a charismatic populist on its right flank or, indeed, the equally serious threat posed by a bunch of Liberal Democrats who finally seem to have worked out how best to game the electoral system they profess to hate so much.

But it’s not just the differences between 1997 that should worry any Tory. Along with the seemingly baked-in complacency they’re all-too-inclined to suffer, it’s also the similarities.

First up, the Conservative Party has yet again gone straight into a leadership contest, albeit a long drawn-out one – a process which always seems to encourage contestants into making hasty, ideologically-driven diagnoses and recommending prescriptions that are similarly partial, destined to date badly, and often just plain wrong. I mean, reviving Rwanda? Seriously?

Second, the party looks set once again to pick a leader who still seems to believe that, whatever polls tell us about the voters’ desire (one clearly shared by Labour) to see public services (and particularly the NHS) properly funded, that the answer lies in a smaller state – as well as a leader who remains convinced that they care far more about so-called ‘cultural’ issues than those very same polls suggest they do.

Third, the party is, just as it was in 1997, strapped for cash, meaning it not only lacks the cash to do as much as it needs to do on the research and organisational fronts to get itself back into contention but may consequently rely on donors with views which, even where they’re not dodgy, aren’t exactly mainstream.

Fourth and finally, the party and whoever leads it continue to operate within (and therefore to pay far too much heed to) a media and think tank milieu whose concerns and preconceptions bear far too little relation to those of the average Brit – and far too much to those of their funders and/or their dwindling band of readers.

ConHome, admittedly, can do little about the first three of these four similarities.  But, encouragingly, it seems committed do something about the fourth.

This is vital: there are more than enough places, be they real-life or virtual, committed to parroting and promoting conventional Conservative wisdom – to telling Tories what they want to hear rather than (maybe, just maybe) what they need to hear.  Partying complacently like it’s 1997 won’t cut it. Change the record, why don’t you?

Originally published at https://conservativehome.com/2024/09/26/tim-bale-labour-is-struggling-but-there-are-four-reasons-conservatives-cannot-be-complacent/