“Time … to die.”
All these moments … are like tears in rain.
At 10 o’clock on Thursday night we’ll know for sure. Over the chimes of Big Ben, the BBC will reveal the results of the Curtice/Firth exit poll¹. The opinion polls haven’t moved in months, so we think we already have a clear idea what the broad strokes of the outcome will be. The rest of the night will be mere detail and finishing (with some potentially tasty dollops of schadenfreude). We’re expecting 14 years of Conservative government to end in a twisted, mangled heap. Even now though, when they are clearly so far beyond any kind of redemption or hope at all, isn’t there still that terrible nagging, residual reptilian brain fear sitting there, poking at the pit of your stomach, warning that the self-proclaimed natural party of government, the one that has been the most electorally successful in this country’s history, and that has tried every trick in the book to gerrymander results its own way², might find some way of clinging to the power it craves more than anything else? Your rational brain says it’s now surely too late for any of that; the only thing that remains in any doubt is the scale of the defeat that awaits it.
And it is all their fault.
For all the talk about “handing Labour a supermajority”³, and the begging and wheedling, they know they’re spent. The pleas get shriller and ever more desperate the closer we get to polling day. They keep trying to throw back to the old-time Tory “greatest hits” jump scare campaigns, but it’s useless (and not even that competent, judging by the car crash of a PPB I happened to see last Friday evening that looked like it had been done as a task in The Apprentice by someone who’d been very vocally fired in week 3). In the end, this is all they have left because the one thing thay cannot campaign on is their record. Their pitiful, horrific, disgusting record.
When David Cameron stood with Nick Clegg in the Downing Street Rose Garden in 2010, I’m not sure any of us could have seen the scale of the upheaval and damage to come. The Brown government emerged, battered, but standing from the financial earthquakes of 2007–2008. But the fear had been planted, and like any incumbent government, they faced the growing calls that the time had come for “change”. That’s what the glib, shiny-faced, slick “hug a hoodie”, Cameron-rebranded Tories promised. Even though people had tired of the New Labour years, you couldn’t say there was a huge enthusiasm for the empty PR vacuity of the 2010 Tories. It didn’t matter: the door was left ajar, and Nick Clegg was co-opted to help push it open.
The years that followed have been brutal. Worse yet, that brutality has fallen hardest upon those who were least able to defend themselves from the predations of the powerful. The foundation upon which all the woes that have beset us was built on the inital ideological burst of Cameron/Osborne austerity. There was a gleeful spite with which the social contract that had underpinned British society in the post-war period was continually holed. It’s strange to think of any of this as ‘Conservative’ at all, really. For all its apparent tooth-and-claw Hayek marketism, Thatcherism as espoused by its source was still deeply social conservative (small c), according to the values of her upbringing. The adherents of the Thatcher creed mutated though, and forgot the moral core of familial and individual obligations that held much of that traditional Conservatism together. All they remembered was the pursuit of wealth, power, and control. If the existing social order had to be left in ruins to do it, what of it? After all, it wasn’t going to disadvantage anyone of any great importance, only the little people. The strongest, and most deserving (i.e. them) would prosper. That was the language of the 2010s, with George Osborne retooling the old Thatcherite wedge of the deserving and undeserving poor as “strivers against shirkers”. It was easy to finish the job then then, because all you had to do when talking to any one group was to tell them they were in the former group, while everyone else was in the latter. Divide and conquer.
However, if you keep using division as a weapon, the enemies mount up, and at least some of the promises you make to each camp you lie to have to be delivered. The problem is that to do so requires a degree of competence. Even in 2015, while you might have thought the Conservatives were venal, and amoral, there was still some sense of basic competence. But then 2016 happened, and everything went to clattering off to hell in a flaming skip.
Looking back, the EU referendum was a disaster waiting to happen. After the division caused by the Scottish Independence referendum in 2014, you may have thought there would at least be some pause to consider whether in anything other than the short term, this wouldn’t be a terrible, damaging way to conduct politics that would store up a bunch of trouble. No. Cameron’s tactical attempt to head off his own party’s right-wing turned out to be one of the worst strategic political decisions in living memory. The seething resentment built up against the complacency and disdain of his government seemingly didn’t figure in his mind when he made himself the figurehead of the Remain campaign, and then proceeding to be exactly the worst kind of figurehead for it. This was something of an achievement, consdiering that only a few months before “UK membership of the EU” wasn’t even registering on most voters’ priority lists as one of the major issues facing the country.
There are many myths about the Brexit vote, but lots of the people who eventually voted to leave the EU were generally angry with a system that they felt had let them down for any number of reasons. There were a lot of them, but almost all of them were nothing to do with the EU, and more about systemic problems here. The intervening time has made this even worse, with broken promises of “levelling up” and helping “left behind” communities made blithely to keep them onside, then dropped when it was deemed no longer expedient to need to. This is not ancient history. Reform, who are little more than UKIP/Brexit Party⁴ with a questionable paint job, are using the same kinds of rhetoric to ramp up the toxicity of a number of issues to polarise potential voters in areas where they think they’ll get a hearing. The superficial nationalism is there to the fore of course, as is a focus on the so-called “culture wars” issues, like immigration, and identity politics. Nigel Farage, ever the serial repellent self-publicist⁵, has bounded back in to cause trouble, but he’s had the enthusiastic support of the likes of the execrable Lawrence Fox, and Richard Tice, as well as helpful client media outlets⁶ and commentators who are willing to fall in behind them. That kind of wedge campaigning is just another variant of the binary “strivers/shirkers” thing, just playing out with different version do “them v us” to audiences who are already distrustful of a political system that seems like it’s increasingly not fit for the modern era.
Anyway, the Leave campaigns (by whatever means they were able to muster, and that is a whole other can of worms we won’t go into here) were able to weaponise that successfully. It was easy to blame foreigners, and the EU, for many of the systemic problems caused by own own political leaders. So they did, and it worked when it needed to for them. Sadly, we know the rest.
So there we found ourselves as a country, the morning after the referendum, with Cameron standing outside Downing Street, trying to be statesmanlike in his valediction, waxing lyrical about being the captain of “a Great Ship”. He was somewhat less forthcoming about him being the one most responsible for setting the course, running the ship aground, then running for the lifeboat, leaving the rest of the crew behind to deal with the consequences.
What did we get to replace that? Theresa May, the champion of the “hostile environment”, that’s who. Now, you’d have thought that voting for leaving the EU might have led to some kind of period of intense reflection and planning, and some time for us to decide what the shape of our future relationship with it might took like, wouldn't you? Of course not. It took just nine months for the UK to invoke Article 50, but there was no discernible sign that anyone in government had given any thought to the problem at all in that period, at least not judging by anything anyone in the UK Government said or did at any time after. As a result we got paralysis, with Parliament constantly arguing about the terms of Brexit, while simultaneously kicking all sorts of other problems down the road: little stuff like the state of the NHS, social care, public transport, public services, education, rising inequality, refugee influx in the face of rising confict in many parts of the world. And they were just the headlines.
The growing and evolving disaster provided us with the next staging point. A public tired of the constant Sisyphean toil of Brexit looked to the person who promised he would “Get Brexit Done”, and placed the whole thing in his hands. The only thing he didn’t mention was just how badly he’d do it, like the cowboy builder wandering in with his jeans showing the crack of his arse, coming in to build your new house extension. Here is not the place to detail the many and serious failings of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Outside of the fiction of his own memoir to come, there will be much written in the future about the lasting damage he has done to this country. But Johnson wasn’t the only cause. He was primarily the symptom of a Tory party who had lost its own moral compass and had settled on an instrumental approach to keeping its hands on power. But what he did do was transmit his own opportunistic, ethically questionable nature to the wider party’s culture. He remodelled the Conservative Party in his own image. It became a party that decided that any sort of sensible pragmatism, or attention to boring stuff like details, was to be sacrificed on the altar of true belief. The end result was the 2019 cohort, and a party packed with zealots and chancers, who were welcome as long as they fell in behind the “big dog”, and cleaved to the expedient Cult of Brexit. The pragmatism and detail part was the worst loss, because this meant losing clarity of thought when it came ot negotiating issues of competence like trade arrangements and border controls for movement of goods and services. It’s telling that now, in 2024, the UK is still not prepared in logistical, process and systems terms for things like customs control, and it’s costing us heavily. But no, sign a deal, any deal, say it’s done, then move on to the next short term fix, and empty promise to keep people happy for the time being. That was Johnson’s whole attitude throughout his political career writ very specifically, and we are still feeling the consequences.
Then COVID hit. At this point, the effects of austerity became clear. Several years before, Jeremy Hunt, who’d been Health Secretary at the time, had disbanded our pandemic planning response operation on cost grounds, presumably to fund some fractional tax benefit to someone who wouldn’t even notice the change. The NHS didn’t have the capacity, or the resources to lay in advance supplies in the quantities needed. The secondary benefit of this for any party hangers-on was the speed with which PPE contracts were handed out to anyone who could form a company quick enough to promise to supply it, whether they actually could or not. Not only was the lack of due diligence a perfect avenue for financial malfeasance, but again it spoke of a basic lack of competence in office.
That lack of competence is striped through the previous fourteen years, along with contempt, and malice. While it does not fully explain how both Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak (who’d only entered Parliament in 2015) were promoted through the ranks with an alacrity which strains the seams of belief (in retrospect particularly, but it did even at the time), it does tell you something about a political culture that prizes loyalty, and compliance over any particular talent.
When Johnson’s own failings, transmitted to the wider Conservative Party finally caught up with him, we entered the final acts of this litany of pain. We shall, like history, not dwell long on Liz Truss. She was a brief mad interlude, like dropping a tab of very bad acid at a festival, and waking up later to discover you’ve done an enormous shit in your pants (or perhaps more than one), and scratched the word “CHEESE” into your forehead with a pair of compasses.
Rishi Sunak rose quickly, and with little friction. He was a Leave supporter, but had not been too shouty about it. During COVID he was Johnson’s Chancellor. We now also know he was undermining the scientific advice being given by the like of Chris Whitty and Patrick Valance, introducing “Eat Out to Help Out”, seemingly on a whim. When Johnson was dispatched, Rishi spotted his chance for the top job but had lost out to Truss⁷. Now he found himself there almost by default, because no one thought another protracted leadership fight had great optics. Like his immediate predecessors, perhaps Sunak had loved the idea of becoming Prime Minister, rather than actually having to do the job. The reality of doing the day to day work of running the country seems to appeal less to him than he thought it might, if reports about his distaste for certain aspects of the role are to be believed. At first, it may have seemed comforting for his party to have a cosplaying technocrat as a supposedly steady hand at the tiller, exuding all that clever-looking ‘spreadsheety’ stability⁸. Sadly, when it became clear he couldn’t even be trusted to look like an actual human in a posed photo-op, not quite understanding how the rest of we mere mortals pay for stuff in shops, the comfort seemed to dissipate quite quickly.
Every decision, every calculation seems to have been precisely calibrated to be as inept and ham-fisted as possible. It’s almost like he’s doing a performance art piece to demonstrate just how badly to be Prime Minister. Some of his first words were about integrity, and standards, but his first actions flew in their face when restoring Suella Braverman to public office. The Rwanda policy seems to be a good example of his ineptitude because it’s almost the perfect mix of performative cruelty matched to staggering incompetence with taxpayers’ money. It was a policy he supposedly did not like as Chancellor, but embraced with an almost obscene zeal once he took the top job, and reinstalled Braverman to oversee it. You can add to that his willingness to jump into the same “culture war” pool that Farage and his fellow right-wing travellers so enjoy swimming in. His government have been intent on pushing the “low tax” line, when it’s clear that the public look around and see public services and infrastructure in the process of collapse, and seem to prefer the idea of actually spending some money on them to be able to live in a country that still sort of works. The prevarication about HS2, and the masterstoke of announcing the second leg to Manchester wouldn’t be built at the Tory Party Conference in Manchester, was a magisterial piece of performance trolling. When you add the tin ear he has displayed when being told repeatedly about falling real incomes and the spiralling cost of living, you can understand why more and more of the electorate think he has no real handle on the lives most of us lead. There simply isn’t enough space to list all the fuckups. Even here, in this lengthy screed, there isn’t room for anywhere near a comprehensive list. And now, the way the election campaign has been run is just the way his government has been run, only at slightly different scale.
The shriller climactic notes of the dying Tory campign are also trying to tell us “there’s no enthusiasm for Starmer”. Well, no. There isn’t. Enthusiasm for politicians or politics in the current climate, after being pummelled with the awful for so long, is probably asking a little too much. It’s funny, but I remember the 1997 election, and some of the same things being said before that too. The myth of Blair was very much constructed after the fact. There were concerns about whether a Labour government was up to the job, and of course back then, bad as they were, things were not in as terrible a shape as they are now. Like then, after a period of obvious decay, most of us probably just want someone who will display some minimal competence (we’re not expecting miracles any more), an understanding of the task at hand, and who doesn’t want to treat the political arena as another branch of the entertainment industry. Yes, some people think Starmer is dull. Give me dull and competent over Johnson any time.
For fourteen years we have been governed by the callous, the superficial, and the inept, by privileged chiselers, opportunists, chancers, and zealots who think they are destined and ordained to stand above us. For fourteen years we have been treated as little more than pieces in a private game played by those with little or no interest in the country, or the people, they claim to love, for nothing more than their own amusement and enrichment. It’s been a seemingly endless parade of shithousery, populated by the very worst of the political establishment⁹. The lies, the disdain and the contempt can only keep you going for so long, but eventually they catch up. Very soon, if the numbers we keep seeing are to be believed, the wind will shift, and they will be left to ruminate on their actions in whatever numbers remain. We, the electorate, will hopefully put this poisonous rabble out of our misery.
All these moments … are like tears … in rain.
Time … to die.
¹ Which generally comes close in terms of seat counts at least, even if it’s slightly hazier on the edge cases in close contests, like 1992, 2015, and 2017.
² Most specifically things like boundary changes, the wider nobbling of the Electoral Commission, voter ID legislation, changing the format of mayoral elections to give Tory incumbents a better chance of surviving (that went well, then …), and changes to overseas voter eligibility which they though would favour them.
³ Which is of course meaningless, because we don’t even have them in elections. We didn’t even have them when we really could have done with them in 2014 and 2016 to make referendum results unambiguous. Constitutionally speaking, things are simple: if you can command enough votes to get stuff though Parliament, you are asked to form a governemt. Whether that is through a single party, or by horse trading with others is of no consequence. If your party does have a majority on its own, the only thing the size of that majority determines is how comfortable you as a leader would feel in the face of backbench opposition to anything you’re planning to do. Fifty or 150, it matters not at all above that comfort level.
⁴ And of course they aren’t even a political party, but a company, with opaque funding, and two principal shareholders owning 90% of the stock: Mssrs N Farage, and R Tice.
⁵ It must just be a complete coincidence that Farage happened to wash back up here like a turd on a beach, almost immedately Donald Trump had those 34 verdicts landed on him. Ever the trader, hedging his bets.
⁶ Client media like GB News, which is quite fond of hiring Tory MPs, and Farage. And social media of course. This has been probably the major change since the 2010 election. In the intervening 14 years, the presence of social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok has changed the landscape. Perhaps that was most pronounced in the earlier years, 2010–2016, when these things were newer. I wonder now whether they has quite as wide a pull politically, outside of the people who breathlessly commentate on what’s going on there. Perhaps the deepfake problem is the newest issue looming on us that needs more careful consideration.
⁷ There are any number of reasons why, perhaps, but maybe the shrinking Tory membership had just being praying, like the a cargo cult, that Truss would be another Thatcher. She’d certainly spent most of her available time constructing photo-ops trying to present herself that way instead of, you know, actually being any good at the jobs she was supposed to have been doing. “Pork markets!”
⁸ It’s funny how there’s a distrust of science and numbers in the political culture, and who gets tagged with being an “intellectual”. Though ironically, given what happened later, Truss stared out at Oxford doing maths, before changing track.
⁹ Imagine the sheer delight of never having to hear names such as Jacob Ress-Mogg, Mark Francois, or Lee Anderson again. Just think of it …
