Postmortems on the corpse of the Conservative party are much like those on real bodies: tiresome, grisly and involving large amounts of shit. The few surviving Tory MPs were last seen whimpering about where the blame lies: was it botched Brexit, Partygate, crashing the economy, going too far right, not going far right enough or a decade of open contempt for the electorate?
The answer, as anyone who’s had to solve a murder on a snowbound sleeper train trapped on a mountainside in 1930s Croatia knows, is that they all did it. Or to put it simply: hell hath no fury like a public scorned. The grinding of the Tory party into a gritty, unpleasant paste spread very thinly over the benches of the House of Commons was a pleasingly savage act of electoral vengeance from a populace that had been assumed to be supine for too long.
If history teaches us anything it’s that you’ll probably be fine treating the public like docile cattle… right up to the point at which it’s suddenly all guillotines and wearing two shirts on the scaffold and basements in Yekaterinburg.
The one disappointment of election night was that the coverage stole the necessary catharsis from us by rarely showing the counts and the wilting politicians. Instead, TV concentrated on studio pundits grinning or gurning as they learned the final count that no channel was actually bothering to show. You can’t have a Portillo moment if you never cut to a minister about to lose their seat. We were deprived of our citizens’ right to see candidate after candidate staring blankly at the returning officer, bottom lip trembling, while Colonel Fartington of the Penge Independent Farters’ Association danced around them with toilet rolls, blowing an air horn.
But I’d challenge our electoral folk narrative when we cite Portillo losing his seat as the key event of the 1997 elections – the moment we knew that the bastards wouldn’t only lose, they were going to be humiliated too. The moment of true anarchy happened at the count in Putney when David Mellor struggled to make his concession speech heard over the chants of “Out! Out! Out!” from James Goldsmith. You could feel the potential for change crackling across a draughty church hall in Wandsworth as Mellor croaked: “Up your hacienda, Jimmy!” Bliss was it then to be up at 1.30am clutching a very bad bottle of Bulgarian red wine…
History is full of warnings for our leaders not to take the public for granted. This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned in this column the Defenestration of Prague (my favourite defenestration). For those who don’t remember, the most famous defenestration of Prague is the third one, in 1618 – I know, you spend ages waiting for one defenestration of Prague and then three come along at once. When Ferdinand of Styria said Protestants could no longer build churches on the royal estates and dissolved their assembly, they marched up three flights of stairs in Hradčany Castle and luzzed the emperor’s messengers and their secretary, Philip Fabricius, out of the window.
History is full of warnings not to take the public for granted
The falling Catholics were saved either by divine intervention or by landing in history’s most propitious metaphor, a dung heap underneath the window. Emperor Ferdinand II later ennobled Philip as Baron von Hohenfall, Baron of Highfall, which seems a little unnecessary. It would be like King Charles making Richard Hammond the Duke of Supercrashes. Or posthumously dubbing Rod Hull the Earl of Aerials.
Rulers themselves can be vengeful, too. One of the great historical revenge-takers was Peter the Great. When he suspected that his wife was having an affair, he had her putative lover beheaded. So far, so run-of-the-mill Russian autocrat. However, he is also said to have had the head pickled and put in a jar in his wife’s bedroom, so she would have to look at it every night, like the world’s worst bar snack. Revenge may best be served cold, but in this case it could also be served with some pork scratchings and half a pint of mild.
As our new government busies itself with making the blandest announcements possible in the most banal voices from the most non-threatening lecterns, they would do well to remember how swiftly a huge majority – for getting Brexit done – can turn into the worst defeat in the party’s history when voters are disappointed.
It’s worth noting how little it can take to provoke a popular revolt. There was the time the ruling classes threatened to turn Kent into a royal forest (Jack Cade’s Rebellion, 1450), when they closed the tin mines (the Cornish Rebellion, 1497) or when they held parties at 10 Downing Street while bereaved families around the country were unable to have proper funerals for their loved ones.
It feels like we’ve exhausted our capacity for tolerating fools. There’s a spectre haunting Britain and it’s the ghost of just-wanting-someone-to-do-something-not-awful. But it’s difficult to give the ruling class what they deserve when the roads are so full of potholes that they are impassable to tumbrils.
The public, of course, can be as fickle as it likes. That is the joy of democracy. One can never be sure what the spark will be that turns your proposed poll tax into the burning down of the Savoy Palace and murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury (Peasants’ Revolt, 1381).
Yes, we are unknowable mysteries, but we do deserve competence. If, at the end of his time in power, Keir Starmer finds himself hanging by his feet from a lamp-post, he should consider that he has done his job fairly well if that lamp-post still works.
Nathaniel Tapley is a comedy writer and performer on the TV shows you hate
