Despite Harold Wilson’s unconvincing attempt to appropriate the label for Labour, the real ‘natural party of government’ until 1997 was the Conservative party. From the time Lord Salisbury took office in 1886 to the moment John Major left it 111 years later, the Tories managed, alone or as the dominant partner in a coalition, to hold office for 80 years. No other political party in history has been able to rival the electoral success of the Conservative party.
As remarkable as the Tories’ ejection from office in 1997 was, however, what makes this defeat potentially unique is the party’s inability to recover from it – so far.
In the past, the party always had a cunning ability to quickly bounce back. According to Anthony Seldon, in his recently published Recovering Power: The Conservatives in Opposition Since 1867, this rested on a tried and tested formula: ‘It traditionally avoided recriminations, changed the leader, rejuvenated its organisation, and adapted its policies to appeal to the middle ground.’
Take the Tories’ three worst defeats of the last century prior to 1997. In 1906, the Conservatives suffered a humiliating electoral drubbing at the hands of the Liberals. Four years later, however, the Tories managed to deprive the Liberals of their parliamentary majority. It took the Tories only five years to reduce Labour’s massive 100-plus parliamentary majority of 1945 to just five seats at the 1950 general election. A year later, the Conservatives were back in power. And having been beaten decisively by Labour in 1966, the Tories went on to win a majority of 30 in the general election of 1970.
It is against this background, therefore, that the Conservatives’ performance in May needs to be set. The Tories did, of course, secure a net gain of 31 seats and succeeded in recovering some of their more traditional territory, including outer London suburban seats like Wimbledon and Enfield Southgate; former home counties bastions like Guildford; and provincial strongholds such as Scarborough and Shipley. But the Tory tally of 197 seats is still some way short of the 209 figure won by Labour under Michael Foot in 1983.
The collapse in the Tory share of the vote also underlines the lack of progress the party has made since it lost power eight years ago. Since 1997, the Tories have lifted their share of the vote from 30.7 per cent of the vote to just 33 per cent, and if we take votes won rather than seats won as a measure of performance, the Tories’ improvement is slowing, not increasing. The Tories raised their share of the vote more under William Hague’s leadership during Blair’s first term, than it did under Michael Howard’s during the prime minister’s second.
Placed in a historical context, this share of the vote looks particularly anaemic. Throughout the 20th century, the Tories only polled below 40 per cent of the vote on four occasions – in 1929, 1945 and twice in 1974. In the 1950s, the party polled in excess of 48 per cent of the vote in three successive elections. And even when three-party politics began to re-emerge as a feature of British politics during the 1980s with the rise of the Liberal/SDP Alliance, the Conservatives were still able to poll comfortably over 40 per cent of the vote.
With this in mind, Conservative talk about their gains in this election also rings rather hollow. As Geoffrey Wheatcroft, whose The Strange Death of Tory England was published earlier this year, argues, the Conservatives trumpet the fact that they now have a seat in Scotland – where they had a majority of seats only 50 years ago. They talk about their gains in urban areas when – except for some notable victories in London – they remain essentially shut out of cities like Liverpool and Birmingham, which they once dominated.
One of the Tories’ newly elected MPs, the former Times columnist Michael Gove, admits that even the party’s ‘tiny step forward’ of raising its vote by one per cent is ‘less impressive than it seems’. Gove warns: ‘Conservative support fell among women, young voters and professional people. The party’s profile is becoming older, more masculine and less well-educated. Our core is becoming harder to break out of.’
To a degree, perhaps, the Conservatives are victims of inertia, what Max Hastings, former editor of the Daily Telegraph, terms ‘the natural condition of the British electorate’. Voters have to be extremely angry in order to evict a government, reasons Hastings. In each of the great sea changes in British politics – in 1945 when Labour won a parliamentary majority for the first time, in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher embarked on 18 years of Conservative rule, or in 1997 when Tony Blair drew it to a close – it was clear that voters were ready for a change and eager to elect a new government to right perceived wrongs.
As Seldon notes, some Tories also argue that other ‘external factors’ – Labour’s decision to occupy the centre ground, the scale of the landslides in 1997 and 2001 and the strength of the economy – have made it uniquely difficult for the Conservatives to recover. On this view, there is little that William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, the three individuals who have led the party since 1997, could have done to improve the situation. However, as Seldon also suggests, this ignores the fact that they have overcome such barriers in the past. The Tories were probably more split in 1906 than in 1997, but they managed to pull level with the governing Liberal party by 1910. Few can argue that as leader of the Opposition, Winston Churchill did not face an effective prime minister in Clement Attlee. Nonetheless, by 1950, the Tories had wiped out Labour’s huge majority of 1945.
Of course, it is possible to recognise the fact that the Conservative party’s leaders since 1997 have faced a particularly difficult set of external circumstances while also faulting the multitude of strategic errors and tactical blunders that all three have committed. Each, to be fair, however, has also been attempting to lead a party that appears not to want to be led. Crucially, the Tory party has lost what Wheatcroft believes to have been the key to its past success: ‘a ferocious survival instinct and an endless capacity for reinvention’.
Let’s not forget that it was the Conservatives, the party of the aristocracy, that adapted to (and benefited from) universal suffrage; it was the Tories, the party of laissez-faire and minimal government, that came to embrace the postwar welfare state; and it was the Conservatives, the party of Empire, that presided over the rapid decolonisation of the 1950s and early 1960s.
Since 1997, the Tories’ appear to have misjudged repeatedly the predominately liberal character of the country with which they were once so in tune. That, combined with perpetual infighting and an obsession with ideological litmus tests on the issue of Europe – which has twice prevented them from electing Kenneth Clarke, the party’s most popular politician by far, as leader – appears to bear out Wheatcroft’s contention.
It is, however, not for nothing that Enoch Powell was able to declare in 1981:’There is one thing you can be sure of with the Conservative party, before anything else – they have a grand sense of where the votes are.’ If the Tories recover that sense, however, the direction from which they challenge Labour at the next election may not be the one that the party expects.