'Tis but a scratch! Spinning electoral defeat
Politicians will always seek the sunniest interpretation, but some Conservative reactions to the local and mayoral elections just sound detached from reality
This genuinely will be a short essay, I promise. Last month I wrote about the importance of being able to distinguish between what you want to happen and what, reasonably, you can argue is likely to happen. Politicians will inevitably seek to portray events in the light most favourable to their cause, and that’s neither surprising nor in any way discreditable. After all, a large element of politics is how you frame a selection of facts to voters in a way that is both attractive and coherent.
There is also a media culture which is hyper-vigilant for signs of division, difference of opinion within parties, or defeatism. In April’s essay, I mentioned a newspaper story about the SNP’s prospects in which Dundee East MP Stewart Hosie was quoted as saying “I’m not worried about the polling at the election”. He pointed to declining Conservative fortunes and suggested that the Labour Party was not profiting from this as much as it could in Scotland, all of which he wove together to stay upbeat about the SNP’s likely electoral fate, both at the forthcoming general election and at the next Scottish parliamentary elections in May 2026.
Is Hosie being excessively optimistic? Yes, probably. The SNP is sliding downwards in the opinion polls, Scottish Labour is gaining and the resignation of Humza Yousaf as first minister will not have helped. But Hosie is also not stupid or deluded. He has been an MP for nearly 20 years, was depute leader of his party for a time and twice held the demanding Treasury brief. In terms of articulation and thinking, he’s very much one of the ablest SNP Members at Westminster, and he will know that the story he was telling the press was neither complete nor the most plausible set of outcomes.
What else could he have said, though? If he had been absolutely frank, told the reporter that it was true the SNP was finding the going hard at the moment, adduced several obvious reasons for that and admitted that, while he personally was optimistic and nothing was set in stone, it did look like his party would lose support at the next election, it would have been a massive story. You can see it now: “SNP chief admits party heading for defeat”. That would have been an unfair characterisation, but I have no doubt it would have been the prevailing one. And we all have to bear some responsibility for the development of this Pollyanna culture, in which politicians cannot admit nuance and must see only the very best construction of events. They may be talking nonsense, but we have taught them that it’s what we expect.
Inevitably, this Panglossian instinct has been very much in evidence among Conservative politicians when assessing the results of Thursday’s local and mayoral elections. Let’s be quite clear: it was a very bad day for the Conservatives, their worst electoral performance by some measures in 40 years. They were trounced in the by-election in Blackpool South, lost the mayoralty of the West Midlands and saw nearly 500 council seats fall. This was not wholly unexpected. Everyone knows that the government is very far behind in the opinion polls, often as much as 20 points behind Labour, the prime minister has not found a convincing way to connect with voters and the fatigue of 14 years in office is showing on the whole party. As polling guru Professor Sir John Curtice summarised, “the big message from the local ballot boxes so far is that the Conservatives remain in deep electoral trouble”.
Now, there are arguments which can sensibly, if perhaps optimistically, be advanced by Conservatives to say that catastrophic defeat at the general election is not yet inevitable. We are probably six months or so away from a poll, and a lot can happen in that time. Equally, it is possible, though unlikely, that a period of chastened reflection would allow Rishi Sunak and his advisers to rethink their approach and take on some of the criticisms implicit in how the electorate voted. I attach no blame to Conservative MPs who propose these lines in public because it is natural to want to remain optimistic and to avoid cementing voters’ notion that the election result is a done deal.
But you can go too far. There is a danger that a maniacal focus on seeing the good will make you sound deluded, out of touch with reality and, quite possibly, rather dismissive of the electorate. A striking example was Lia Nici, the MP for Great Grimsby. She has been an ardent defender of Boris Johnson, and that may be part of what led her to attempt an extraordinarily intricate interpretation of the election results. The voters “want to see real change in the country and they want the Conservatives to be able to continue and get on with their manifesto that we promised them in 2019”.
This is ambitiously textured, to say the least. The voters was “real change”, but they also want the government “to be able to continue” and deliver the promises of the 2019 manifesto. Let’s be quite clear, there is a subtext here, and it is the standard ;line of Johnson acolytes: the manifesto of 2019 assumed the status of holy writ because of the scale of the election victory, Johnson was carrying out the wishes of the people, he was unfairly and wickedly brought low by the faint-hearted and ill-intentioned within his own party, and since September 2022 the government has lost its way, abandoned “true Conservatism” and is paying them price in terms of the loss of public support.
It is a thesis I don’t agree with, and indeed I think it’s absolutely corrosive, but Nici is more than entitled to cleave to it. But to try to square the circle and say that the Conservative Party is marching forward and will prevail with a slight correction of course sounds mad. The problem with this kind of reply—wordy, jumbled, contradictory—is that the average voter will hear it and simply stop listening. This, he or she will think, is a politician so wedded to a party line that a sensible conversation is impossible and pointless. It shows no humility, no willingness to engage, so generosity of spirit and no intellectual curiosity.
Inevitably, every Conservative MP must give a verdict on the election results in the unspoken context of the prime minister’s future. For all the speculation last week, it seems at the moment that there is not a critical mass for a leadership challenge, but the question hangs over everything, and any MP will answer any question while trying tacitly to answer that broader question too. The response of Martin Vickers, MP for Cleethorpes, was very much in that light. “Divided parties don’t win elections. The government can’t change direction now—we’ve set our course.”
Again, one can see what Vickers is trying to say. He is stressing that the Conservative Party must appear united to the electorate and that any attempt to remove Sunak would be counterproductive. Those are both reasonable propositions. But consider how it comes out: the Conservatives “can’t change direction now” because they’ve “set our course”. This raises two issues. The first is that he, consciously or otherwise, implies that the government is trapped, unable to change direction. That gives the impression, which is not wholly inaccurate, that it is at the mercy of events.
The second point is this. One could interpret Vickers’s statement as saying “We have suffered a substantial electoral setback, losing 500 council seats, a by-election and a major combined mayoral authority, but the lesson we take from this is that we should not change our approach in any way”. That sounds odd: worse, it sounds in equal measure dismissive and deluded. What kind of mentality takes a serious drubbing as confirmation that the party is on the right course?
I don’t want to seem too harsh on MPs. I know that they are under enormous pressures from a number of directions to speak and act in certain ways and not to say certain things. But that is not risk-free. In January, I wrote in City AM that politicians had retreated behind the bland safety of familiar slogans, but that their incessant repetition not only drained them of meaning but made politicians seem like a different breed from the rest of us, unable to talk normally and only offering strange, semi-meaningless collections of words instead of debate and discussion.
I think we are seeing another aspect of this here. When politicians offer analysis which is so obviously staying blind to what happened, which is carrying optimism beyond any kind of credible limit, they show themselves as Westminster versions of Monty Python’s Black Knight. When he loses an arm, the knight insists “’Tis but a scratch”, he is immune to King Arthur’s entirely fair observation “Look, you stupid bastard, you’ve got no arms left!”, and when he is left with only one leg, he shouts “I’m invincible!”
“You’re a loony,” replies King Arthur.
Politicians need to try to sound normal. They need to speak to voters in a language that is not twisted out of recognition by spin doctors, focus groups and the fear of a gaffe on the BBC News website half an hour later. That doesn’t mean Conservative MPs should appear on television ashen-faced and weeping, and agree that all is lost. But if you present an interpretation of events which distorted and which people suspect you know is not true, you are signalling that you do not really want to engage. You have your own narrative, thank you very much, and you will play it out till the end without interference from electors.
That damages individual MPs. It damages their party. It damages the way we are able to talk about politics. And it damages the relationship of trust, already shredded, between elected representatives ands voters. We have to start being honest and straightforward, or we risk politics being entirely subsumed by a strange, ritualistic but ultimately meaningless performance from which no-one benefits.