Few would dispute that we are now living through the death throes of a long-serving government. Those who once wielded power with almighty swagger are long gone.
Boris Johnson is not even an MP. His former deputy, Dominic Raab, now virtually silent on the backbenches, is standing in the general election. So is Theresa May, one of a number of prime ministers in this mad sequence of leaders who were fleetingly influential before falling into Brexit hell.
Dominic Cummings howls from the sidelines when, just moments ago, he was powerful enough to remove Chancellor Sajid Javid, another former senior minister who is leaving the Commons in the election.
By then the number of Tory MPs who have bowed out in hurt will break all records. There are many more who will be announcing their departures in the coming weeks.
but current end of the century The mood becomes very dark. Consider the decadent images of recent months, from a Conservative Party conference where Priti Patel was seen dancing happily with Nigel Farage, to Liz Truss talking to Steve Bannon at a conference of the right wing in the US – one such The incident that alerted Donald Trump to Pragmatics, and the former Tory vice-president, Lee Anderson, joined the Reform Party just weeks after recording a video with Rishi Sunak praising their joint patriotic devotion to the UK.
Tory grandees in the House of Lords delayed Sunak’s plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda, an idea he considered too expensive when he was Chancellor and which his current Home Secretary called “nonsense”. The bill eventually passed through Parliament, but with much talk of a local election nightmare as well as a challenge to Sunak, there is little time to celebrate.
Some rebels simply want him out and Penny Mordaunt in, others want to impose an “electoral war cabinet” of senior right-wingers including Patel, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Robert Jenrick on him as the price for not holding a leadership election. want.
To understand how this decadent collapse compares to the demise of previous governments, we need to look back with forensic objectivity. It is easy to forget how fragile some of Sunak’s predecessors and their parties were as we live through the end of a long volcanic period of one-party rule.
Labor lost power in 1979 and did not return for 18 years. The ending was humiliating. James Callaghan lost the Commons confidence vote and had to call an election. He even lost that unique prime ministerial privilege of choosing the date most suitable for the ruling party.
The election followed years of industrial turmoil, rising inflation and intense cabinet divisions over all major policy areas, from the level of public spending to state ownership, Europe and defence. These battles were fought by vocal political giants, not by the pygmies fighting at this time.
There was support from all the veterans in the Labor Party. One of them, Tony Benn, sometimes voted against government policy in the party’s national executive, even though he was a member of the cabinet. By 1979 the sense of the end was pervasive even to Callaghan, who detected a “sea change” towards Margaret Thatcher that was unstoppable.
In some ways, Thatcher’s fall in 1990 was far more dramatic. She had won another major victory three years earlier and yet she was losing control of her party. There were major rebellions against some of his major policies.
Privately, Cabinet ministers suggested she had gone a little crazy, which was one of the few allegations not made against Sunak. The Tories began losing by-elections with greater swings than now. By November 1990 she was gone, an act of suicide that still haunts the Conservative Party and reinforces their old worship that grows more intense with each new leader.
Thatcher soon left, but the Conservative Party managed to win the 1992 election. Yet John Major’s experience after his election victory was very close to that of Tory prime ministers who ruled after 2010.
From September 1992, when Britain left the exchange rate mechanism, he began to frustratingly navigate his way through one nightmare after another. The party and his cabinet became increasingly divided over Europe.
The media speculated vigorously for years that Major would be replaced by Michael Heseltine or Ken Clarke or Michael Portillo. In 1995, Major stepped down as Tory leader while still Prime Minister, a humiliation that has not been experienced by many Prime Ministers since the 2010s.
“We are in office, but not in power,” former Chancellor Norman Lamont warned in his resignation speech, harking back to the words of an ally of Major’s in the 1992 leadership contest. The Tories were assassinated in 1997 and were out of power until 2010.
The decline of New Labour was clear, vivid and had tragic symmetry. The dance between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown defined how Labor triumphantly won and also how it governed.
Finally, when Brown was Prime Minister, dancing became fun. Some of Blair’s followers repeatedly called for Brown’s removal as Prime Minister, even when he officially led after the 2008 financial crash. They were eager to see David Miliband in Number 10, without fully establishing whether Blair’s former senior aide was prepared to lead a coup or was working on the exact path that brought their hazy fantasy to fruition .
The last coup attempt occurred in January 2010, an election year. It’s not far from what could happen to Sunak if the local elections go as badly as feared.
As memories fade, the severity of these falls from power appear less dramatic than the times we are living through now. In each case, the explosions were deep and painful for those involved.
But herein lies the catch. Having considered in detail the moribund condition of previous post-war governments, the current historical decline is considerably worse. Despite great internal tensions, not a single member of Callaghan’s cabinet resigned over the policy. He maintained discipline and a sense of unified purpose. Callaghan’s personal ratings were higher than Thatcher’s in the 1979 election.
Under Theresa May, cabinet resignations were occurring on an almost daily basis. Sunak has lost Raab and Suella Braverman, although Raab’s demise had nothing to do with policy differences.
When Thatcher fell, the cabinet regrouped and effectively presented itself under the leadership of Major and Chris Patten as party chairman. Major’s subsequent decline was brutal and the Conservative Parliamentary Party discovered in the 1990s an appetite for rebellion that it has not lost since.
But Major led a strong cabinet. Ken Clarke was a popular chancellor. Michael Heseltine was a powerful Deputy Prime Minister. He continued to protest against Blair, more or less the most powerful leader of the opposition in modern times.
The same applies to Brown’s rocky leadership. When he appointed Peter Mandelson as his deputy, the two warring factions came together, with Mandelson being seen as the embodiment of a Blairite despite his early friendship with Brown.
The financial crisis gave Brown new purpose. In the 2010 election, David Cameron did not win an overall majority, despite enjoying a far more moderate media reception than Keir Starmer – much less critical coverage from the BBC and non-Tory newspapers, with outlets simply assuming he would ” “One-Nation” was the modernizer.
end of the century The moods are common, but none like this one as Sunak struggles pitifully, fifth Tory PM since 2016. Some describe the collapse of the Tories in the early 1960s as similar, the strange departure of Harold Macmillan shortly after the dismissal of large numbers of cabinet ministers in the “Night of the Long Knives”, the Profumo affair and other dramas. Role.
Yet the flamboyant Harold Wilson managed to win only a small majority in the 1964 election and the Tories maintained discipline. He also did not move against his shy leader Edward Heath when he caused him a major defeat in 1966. Now volcanic eruptions are taking place on every front.
Despite the threat posed by reform, leading Tories love nothing more than spending time with Farage at public events. Cynic number 10 is in discouraged chaos, a mood that feeds on itself.
Some Tory MPs and their newspapers are clamoring for Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. Others insist that this would be too big a step. There are conflicting calls for cutting taxes and increasing spending on defense as well as on depleted public services.
Ultimately all ruling parties collapse. What the current Conservative ruling party is going through is a deeper existential crisis than the fleeting collapse that the Labor Party experienced in opposition in the 1980s.
Neil Kinnock then began a long, tense march to the point where Labor was coherent and broadly unified on ideas and policies, even if it did not win the election. Can the Conservatives do the same and will it take them 18 years to bounce back?
Where will the Conservatives turn next? No one knows for sure, and it’s another sign of a government collapsing like no other government in modern times.
Steve Richards’s latest book is Turning Points: Crisis and Change in Modern Britain. He presents the podcast Rock N Roll Politics