After 14 years in power, Tories can't dodge responsibility for their mess, says James O'Brien

30 September 2024, 12:41

James O'Brien considers where things 'went wrong' for the Tories at the general election | LBC

The Conservative Party Conference this year is more notable for who's not there than who is, both journalistically and possibly politically.

What has gone so wrong for the Tories?

Yesterday, the inimitable Adam Bienkov found himself at a fringe event literally titled ‘What Went Wrong?’ And the panellists under that question looked to me like reasonable answers, though that probably wasn’t the intention.

This morning, as I scrolled through social media, I found a YouGov poll where they polled Conservative members about what they think went wrong, or more to the point, why they lost the 2024 general election. I have a feeling the political anoraks among us will see this as further proof of the disconnect between the membership and the public.

Remember, it was the members who brought us Liz Truss and her magnificent administration. Nine days. The Lady Jane Grey of our time. The Economist worked out that the shelf life of a lettuce was roughly equivalent.

If you exclude the period of national mourning for the late Queen, Truss still managed to do an untold amount of damage in such a short amount of time. Yet the members preferred her over Rishi Sunak.

This weekend, I had to double-check the extraordinary praise Liz Truss received from people whose careers remain unaffected. People like Trevor Kavanagh at The Sun, Alistair Heath at The Telegraph, and the editor of the Daily Mail. They were all queuing up to declare it a brilliant fiscal policy.

Farage called it the best budget he’d ever seen, and the Institute of Economic Affairs was over the moon. But within a week—or actually hours—before Kwarteng even sat down in the Commons, the wheels had come off.

Yet, according to Conservative members, that debacle wasn’t a significant reason for their defeat. It barely factors into the top five reasons they give for what went wrong in 2024. There’s no mention of the election, Liz Truss, or the trust and confidence the party haemorrhaged. It’s remarkable, really.

YouGov cleverly compared the answers from Conservative members with those from the general public, and the difference is striking. Conservative members think the failure to tackle immigration was a major reason they lost in 2024, but that doesn’t even make the top five for the general public.

As the Conservatives gather in Birmingham to reboot—and I think that's the right word—they all seem to agree on the massive challenges the country faces. What’s fascinating is that they’ve been in power for 14 years, so much of the mess they’re talking about is their own doing.

It’s unprecedented to see people who have been in government admit how bad things are without acknowledging their role in it.

Do we need to recalibrate what opposition means? Because the idea of being in charge for 14 years and then running on a platform of ‘things are awful, but we’re the ones to fix it’ feels pretty new.

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