Things can always get worse

As I was saying, way back in July, it is hard to love the Conservative party. Every time it tries to navigate another bend in the road it ends up causing a disaster even its most ardent critics could not have foreseen. ‘Things can’t get any worse,’ said rebels in the party while Boris Johnson was still PM, before the summer. Then we were introduced to Liz Truss. Now, within weeks of her taking office, you can hear members of the parliamentary party saying with vigour: ‘She has to go.’ At which point I feel the country wanting to place our collective heads in our hands, yell and walk away.

Does anyone have time for all this? Does the Conservative party just plan to hold endless leadership contests in perpetuity while the country looks on?

At such moments it is easy to wish the whole thing gone: the whole inefficient, complacent, forever infighting party. I find that watching the Conservatives in conference does not banish this thought. Yet of course our system does not allow for this. Were we Italy, the Netherlands or any number of other countries, the Conservative party would have gone the way that so many dysfunctional parties have. In our system it stays in place, primarily if not solely because of the alternatives.

Next election, as ever, there is the possibility of a hung parliament and some Labour-SNP pact, which carves up the United Kingdom by means fair or foul. Or there is the simple prospect of a Labour landslide. And it is this possibility that is becoming, by the day, ever less scary.

In London in recent days there has been a constant refrain. People are saying that it is perhaps time for the Conservative party to spend some years on the opposition benches, if for no other reason than to stop the infighting and scheming and to help them realise that the price of political failure includes political defeat. They will have been in power for 15 years by the next election, and by that time even a very successful government would be looking stale and in need of replacement.

Besides, this logic goes, the Labour party of today is not the party of Jeremy Corbyn. Sir Keir Starmer is a recognisable type of Labour moderate. He has even turned his party around in just a couple of years from a party that waved Palestinian flags to piss off Jews at its conference to one that actually sang the national anthem, albeit with the lyrics printed out on cards.

By any measure this is a change of scene. So if Starmer comes in at the next general election, it’s not the end of the world, you hear. He won’t be Corbyn. He’ll be a sort of charisma-less Tony Blair.

The problems with this argument are several. First, look at the people around Starmer. We have Angela Rayner, who rotates between foul-mouthed schoolyard bully and psychotically charming pseudo-moderate. We have David Lammy, who by my count has now gone through several versions of himself: first the Blairite moderate version; then the demagogue version, who showed himself more than capable of whipping up crowds in the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy; now back to posing as a moderate. Which Lammy will we get after the next election?

Then there is the rest of the current parliamentary party – a party which pretends to have moderated but which went to the polls at the last election, lest we forget, supporting Corbyn to be prime minister. It is hard to forget that detail – the fact that these same people seriously campaigned to make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister.

Finally there is the great unknown. For if Labour are to win at the next election then they will have to gain a whole bunch more seats. And who knows what the hundred or so new Labour MPs will be like? Has the party candidates list been flooded with Blairites in the past couple of years? Has it filled up with people who accept the 2019 results and have taken certain lessons about tacking to the political centre? Or is it filled with very left-wing, if not actually Corbynista, types? I don’t know who knows the answer to that. Perhaps we won’t know until after the election. It’s a heck of a chance to take. Yet it seems like a chance that many people will deem worth taking if the result is that the Conservative party goes away and cools down for a bit.

What is it that made the Conservative party of the past decade or so even more unpleasant, unruly and ineffectual than usual? Perhaps it was the Brexit vote: the sheer number of fallouts, both political and personal. The loss of a generation of entitled Conservatives who believed that if they could not hold the top offices of state then there was no point remaining in politics at all. And I suppose it is the sheer exhaustion that comes from a period of politics played at such a constantly high pitch.

Still, I have long been suspicious of the claim ‘It can’t get worse.’ I would have said that one of the central insights of conservatism is the wisdom that things can always get worse. Many people thought that life under the Shahs couldn’t be worse, only to be introduced to life under the Ayatollahs. I am not by any means comparing Sir Keir to the Ayatollahs, but it would seem to me that a Labour government led by people who are pretty unhappy with the Brexit vote and inclined at some point to take Britain back into the EU would provide a sort of final, fatal kick to a country that desperately needs to get out of this political rut.

So like a lot of us, I suppose, I am torn. I want the Conservative party to be punished, and yet the instruments of punishment are unappealing. I suppose that last fear is what the Conservatives are banking on to save them – as always. Yet somehow I don’t feel it is going to work this time.