Here’s a paradox for you: Britain is a conservative country that hates the Conservative party. As our American cousins vulgarly say: “Do the math.” On 4 July 24 per cent of those who voted supported the Conservative party, and 14 per cent supported Reform: a total of 38 per cent of those who turned out. Just 33 per cent supported the Labour party, which nonetheless used its third of the vote to win two-thirds of the seats in the House of Commons, giving it 412 out of 650. Reform has become the most successful vehicle for a protest vote in our history. It may only have won five seats but it had more votes than the Liberal Democrats, who won 72. There will be a time – and it may be soon – when we have to talk again about reform of our apparently unfair electoral system. But for the moment, we need to wonder how the predominantly conservative temper of Britain, and particularly of England, is going to be kept under control.
This is a question for what we used to call our two major parties but must now call Labour, the party of government, and the Conservatives, a pulverised and squabbling rump with the lowest number of MPs in its history. The Conservatives’ defeat, a direct result of the preposterous premiership of Boris Johnson, possibly the greatest conman in British political history, came because they failed to understand how conservative the people they failed to govern are. Reform, which only became a serious force a month before the election, when Nigel Farage agreed to come out of his television studio to lead it and to fight a seat, did explicitly understand the conservatism of the people. That was why it did so well. If the Conservatives do not take this conservatism seriously – either by reverting to a Reform-style programme or sitting down with Mr Farage and his friends and coming to some arrangement for the future, then they are finished. There is unlikely to be any enthusiasm, apart from among kamikaze artists such as Suella Braverman, for Mr Farage and his friends to be absorbed within the Conservative party; and it is even less likely that Mr Farage and his friends would want to join this sinking ship when they have such momentum of their own. But if the Right wants to govern in this country in the near future, it has to, if not unite, then at least coalesce. Otherwise, it might as well give up now.
The Labour party needs to observe the conservatism of the nation for different reasons. Its massive majority is, as has been much remarked, based on exceptionally shallow support. This is 1945, not 1997: if the conservative heart of Britain is affronted by what happens in the months and years ahead, the Starmer administration will be lucky to get a second term. If it does manage that feat, it may be by a narrow margin that precipitates a second election in short order, as happened in 1950 and 1951. The notion of a succession of landslides is almost certainly nonsense. For if the Conservative party is not capable of organising matters to ensure that the right-of-centre overturns this majority based on just a third of the vote, it will mean Reform and its momentum will.
It is worth recalling, in this year that marks the centenary of the first Labour government, that embracing the forces of conservatism in the Labour movement is nothing new
In the opening hours of the Starmer administration the symbols and language of innate conservatism were abundant. The new Prime Minister took care to be photographed with each of his new ministerial colleagues in front of the union flag. Wes Streeting, his exceptionally able Health Secretary, persisted in a rhetorical line he had adopted since before the election was called: the problems with the NHS were not a question of spending more money but of spending the vast amount already expended (around £182bn annually in England alone) more sensibly than it is currently. No sooner had she taken office as Home Secretary than Yvette Cooper, photographed again in front of a union flag, said that her first priority was to establish a new Border Security Command to tackle illegal migration: identified as the killer issue that did for the Conservative party and provided the roar for Reform.
These early initiatives by various ministers were compounded by an intervention by Sir Tony Blair, who still holds the record for presiding over the greatest Labour victory in history, in 1997. He emerged shortly after the election, in an article in the Sunday Times, to warn his successor about the need to pursue the policies of conservatism (somewhat ironically from the man who, in 1999, told his party to take on and defeat “the forces of conservatism”.) Sir Tony has clearly matured considerably and, in the manner of so many people, become more right-wing as he has aged. In his article he warned Sir Keir about the dangers of not controlling migration and not enforcing law and order (“tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”); and of not being hoist by the petard of “wokery”. One interpreted from the last of those imprecations that Sir Tony was unimpressed by Sir Keir’s apparent inability, during the campaign and beforehand, to be clear about whether one could be a woman without having a cervix, or a man without having a penis. Such matters could provide a massive stick with which either to beat an unpopular government or to help make it unpopular in the first place.
It is worth recalling, in this year that marks the centenary of the first Labour government, that embracing the forces of conservatism in the Labour movement is nothing new. It was the priority of that first administration, led by Ramsay MacDonald, to show it could govern responsibly. The main means of doing that was to control public spending and taxation. This was accomplished by the then chancellor of the exchequer, Philip Snowden, who was a man of Gladstonian convictions when it came to economic policy. The government also distanced itself from the hard Left (this was, remember, barely seven years after the Russian revolution) in case it was tarred with the brush of Bolshevism. So successful was it in doing this that it engineered its own downfall by having a prominent communist arrested for subversion, and causing a row; in order to ensure the removal of the government someone had to forge and promulgate the Zinoviev letter, which made it look as though the Labour party was being funded by Moscow. When the party came back into power in 1929, Snowden returned as chancellor and brought back with him his strict monetary principles. This had considerable impact because of the Slump, meaning Snowden eventually had to propose a huge cut in public spending, including a reduction in the dole. It was a measure that broke the second Labour government, casting MacDonald as a “traitor” in the eyes of the movement – not least because he then accepted King George V’s commission to form the National Government that ultimately rescued Britain from bankruptcy. In the manner of Sir Tony, when prime minister, who apologised for slavery, perhaps Sir Keir could show his innate good sense by apologising for nearly a century of his co-religionists vilifying poor old MacDonald.
Inevitably, as Starmer sticks to his conservative line – to try to keep happy the millions who did not vote either for him or for anybody else – he will aggrieve the radicals in his own party. Demands for higher spending, led by unions whose members work in the public services and who are concerned not least for their own self-interest, will become louder and louder. There will be continued divisions over foreign policy, notably attitudes to the behaviour of Israel in Gaza. Labour failed to win seats because of organised opposition on this question; Mr Streeting very nearly lost his seat because of this issue. Had Labour won, say, 40 or 45 per cent of the popular vote, this wouldn’t matter: but the fragility of its position, another paradox in a House of Commons where it holds 412 seats, means it has to handle every difficulty as though it could be a terminal disaster. The public has become used to treating governments with disrespect and contempt. The new one may be treated no differently, and with a similar outcome.
Simon Heffer is a historian, columnist for the Telegraph and Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham
