You can grieve over the bodies, the coffins, the funeral rites, but the worst aftermath of death is the autopsy. Who, or what, was to blame?
Focus groups at the start of the campaign were clear. The electorate wanted to blame the sufferings of the country on one thing: 14 years of Tory rule. In Scotland it passed a similar judgment on nationalist rule. Polls showed that Labour’s leader, Keir Starmer, was not especially popular, and his policies did not diverge widely from those of the government. That is why his lectern was decked with one message: “Change”. With that, at least, the electors agreed.
For the Tories now to blame Rishi Sunak for losing an election he never had a hope of winning is pointless. Yes, he called the election too early. Yes, he should have honoured D-day. Yes, the country’s public services are a mess. Indeed, a Tory strategist could even take modest comfort from Labour winning just a third of the popular vote, only about two points more than Jeremy Corbyn garnered when losing to Boris Johnson in 2019. On past form that should have ensured at least a hung parliament. But the Tory vote collapsed. Despite Labour’s Commons majority, the real message of the 2024 election was not “hail Labour”, but “anything but Tory”.
Sunak is the only Tory remotely of a stature to steer his party through the coming months. The opposition benches are now a jungle of once endangered political species. The Liberal Democrats are revivified, the Greens creditably represented. But it is Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party that is the biggest of the new beasts. He has been responsible for a massacre of dozens of Tory MPs. Vote-wise, he was the most generous of donors to Starmer.
How Farage behaves is now critical to the Tories. For 30 years, he has cursed them with his crashing through the undergrowth on their right flank. In a Commons with a large governing majority, voices will count louder than votes. Farage has a loud voice and a boisterous ability to catch attention. He has proved how populist charisma can seduce leading Tories such as Lee Anderson and Ann Widdecombe and hundreds of thousands of once-loyal party members.
Farage and the Tories know he can effectively deprive Tory MPs of seats at elections. This in turn gives him influence over whom they now choose to lead them. Since he began his guerrilla warfare in the 1990s, he has thoroughly destabilised one leader after another.
If Sunak does conduct some sort of autopsy on his defeat, he should not waste time on the seduction of the right. Brexit is no longer a popular rock on which to rebuild his party, nor does immigration rate highly in surveys of voter issues. The election was unprecedented in its volatility, but the Tory vote appears to have been devastated as much by centrist minority parties, notably the Liberal Democrats, as by Reform. That must be borne in mind.
Sunak’s most crucial task lies elsewhere. It is, between now and when he steps down, to ensure, by whatever means he can, that he can revert Tory leadership selection to its MPs, however few, rather than party members. Having just rid itself of one anarcho-egoist in Boris Johnson, the last thing the Conservatives need is another. Means will have to be found for the party to have its say, but Britain is a parliamentary democracy, not a presidency. It should rely on MPs choosing for themselves who it is they wish to see in Downing Street.
Opposing Starmer at the dispatch box in the coming months should not be difficult. He is likely to have only the most modest of honeymoons. Britain’s political stage is papered with sheets of official statistics, all telling tales of inflation, growth, interest rates and deficits. The tedium is enough to make the walls of Downing Street droop. Soon it will be hard to see what real “change” a thumping majority brought about.
This should ease the path of a Tory leader set on regenerating the party for a new age. The one disaster would be a fratricidal war on the right, a war not so much with Farage’s policies as with his personality. That is why Sunak must get new leadership rules in place soon, with a fresh statement of Conservative purpose in the late 2020s and a leader capable of uniting, not dividing, the party in parliament and the country. How Sunak achieves this will be his lasting gift to Toryism.
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Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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