The Path to a Majority
The Conservative Party now faces the Herculean task of dealing with Brexit without a Commons majority — however, if they spend the next five years restoring people’s faith in them, they can win in 2022.
UK Politics
Matthew Waterfield
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In the last six months, the Conservative Party has gone from being an unassailable juggernaut, buoyed by their popular leader and divided opponents, to a fallen giant, in power but almost irrevocably weakened. The 20% poll leads they once enjoyed have now vanished, and surveys now put them more or less on par with an insurgent Labour Party.
The reasons for this astonishing change in circumstances are well known; May’s reputation is in tatters following her robotic speeches and galling U-turns during the election campaign and the damage done to the May brand has dragged the party down with her. All this has been accompanied by increased criticism of the Conservatives’ policies and their approach to Brexit, which has drained support away from then.
She now presides over a minority Conservative government, propped up by 10 Democratic Unionist MPs, and has a working majority of 13. The room for manoeuvre she once had is gone and it’s likely we’ll soon be watching as scenes reminiscent of the dying days of the Callaghan government unfold in the Commons, with votes going down to the wire and late night sittings becoming a regular feature of Parliament.
However, although the Conservatives may be about to spend five years going through hell, there is light at the end of the tunnel. By 2022, the party may be able to woo back voters by negotiating a successful Brexit deal, installing a respected new prime minister and coming up with a range of new, inventive, popular policies.
Perhaps the most important element of this triad is who will be the next Conservative leader. Ever since the exit poll was released on 8 June, there has been intense speculation regarding who will replace Theresa May when she inevitably goes at some point in the next five years. But the main contenders — Boris Johnson and David Davis — are both unsuitable candidates and would struggle to win an election.
Both are weighed down by the immense amount of baggage they’ve accumulated during their long political careers, namely Davis’ 2005 Conservative leadership campaign and Johnson’s long history of provocations — his recent articles and interviews laying out his vision for Brexit are prime example of this. And more importantly, both serve as reminders of the Leave campaign that alienated so many Conservative remainers, and with either of them in power, key marginals like Enfield Southgate, Canterbury and Kensington would remain in Labour’s hands.
During David Cameron’s time in office, journalists and politicians alike would confidently predict that the next Conservative leader would be an MP first elected in 2010. The coronation of Theresa May proved them wrong, but with young voters making their voices heard more than ever, it would make sense for the next prime minister to be a younger parliamentarian, possibly someone from the 2010 or 2015 intake.
Hopefully voters won’t associate this new leader with the incidents and proposals that have damaged previous Conservative governments and that they’ll be able to appeal to young people in a way that May never could. The politician who best fits the bill right now is Sajid Javid, the Communities Secretary — he has made housing reform, a crucial issue for young people, a key priority of his, and the fact that he confounds people’s expectations of a typical Tory, being a working class Muslim from ‘the North’, won’t do him any harm either.
The most pressing issue for the government at the present is, of course, Brexit. The next few years will be dominated by the process in which we leave the EU and how it’s handled will determine the fate of this country for years to come.
Therefore, there are a few things that the government must now do. Firstly, it should ensure that there is a transition period — this will allow for a smoother exit and give Remainers confidence that the Conservatives are still the party of business. Secondly, it must set an end date for the transition period — if the next election occurs during the transition period, then there must be an end in sight so Leavers don’t feel that the government is trying to “keep Britain in the EU by the back door”.
Lastly, the government must tread carefully around two interlinked issues: how much we are going to pay the EU as we leave and the way in which they let the public know how much we are going to pay.
The amount we’ll have to pay over the next few years cannot be known just yet, but a nation that’s just voted to leave the EU will not be happy to see taxpayers’ money flowing from Britain to Brussels, however much the final sum is. Therefore, it is vital that, during the negotiations, the government emphasize at every step of the way that the expenditure is a one-off and that such payments are necessary for Brexit to be achieved.
Finally, the government is experiencing the same problems that all incumbent parties face — they look stale compared to the opposition. However wrong they may be, Labour are aflush with exciting looking policies right now, most of which promise people inviting sounding freebies under a Labour government.
As most of Labour’s voters are too young to remember the economic carnage that these policies caused when they were in place in the 1970s, they will continue to vote for Labour until they’re offered a viable alternative by another party.
For example, the housing crisis is limiting young people’s ability to get onto the property ladder and, while Labour’s offensively simple proposal to ‘build more houses’ is clearly akin to a happy thought rather than a well thought out policy, the Conservatives need to come up with an effective, costed policy themselves.
With Theresa May’s policy guru, Nick Timothy, out of the way, it’s now the time for other right wing intellectuals to come to the fore of politics. Websites like ConservativeHome and CapX are abuzz with new proposals about how to improve the lives of ordinary Britons and the party would do well to have a closer look at some of them.
Also, there are plenty of Conservative MPs out there who’ve put a great deal of work into formulating solutions to more overlooked problems — for example, the ‘1001 Critical Days’ manifesto, the brainchild of Andrea Leadsom, contains some fascinating insights regarding the first few years of a child’s life and her work should receive more attention than it currently does.
The implementation of these sorts of ideas could show the public that the Conservatives still have plenty more to give the country and that the government is constantly looking for ways to further enrich their lives, rather than just handle Brexit and manage the economy.
The next five years will undoubtedly be tough for the Conservative Party and the prospect of a hard-left government, unconstrained by EU regulations, now looms over us all. But if the Conservatives enter the next election with the right leader, an appealing Brexit deal and a raft of interesting new proposals, then they will have a chance to regain the majority that slipped through their grasp earlier this year.
