This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The worst result in its history. It’s something to roll round the mouth. Maybe it’s like Rex Mottram’s glass of proper brandy:

The cognac was not to Rex’s taste. It was clear and pale and it came to us in a bottle free from grime and Napoleonic cyphers. It was only a year or two older than Rex and lately bottled. They gave it to us in very thin tulip-shaped glasses of modest size.

“Brandy’s one of the things I do know a bit about,” said Rex. “This is a bad colour. What’s more, I can’t taste it in this thimble.”

They brought him a balloon the size of his head. He made them warm it over the spirit lamp. Then he rolled the splendid spirit round, buried his face in the fumes, and pronounced it the sort of stuff he put soda in at home.

So, shamefacedly, they wheeled out of its hiding place the vast and mouldy bottle they kept for people of Rex’s sort.

“That’s the stuff,” he said, tilting the treacly concoction till it left dark rings around the side of the glass. “They’ve always got some tucked away, but they won’t bring it out unless you make a fuss. Have some.”

“I’m quite happy with this.”

“Well, it’s a crime to drink it, if you don’t really appreciate it.” He lit his cigar and sat back at peace with the world. I, too, was at peace in another world than his. We both were happy.

But whatever it is, and whether it’s for connoisseurs or not, it’s a very familiar taste, and it sees many people in their happiest of places. For the worst result in the history of the oldest, most successful party on Earth means yet another Tory leadership election.

Amazingly, the hysteria that the Tories might be reduced to double figures, perhaps even coming third in the House of Commons behind the Liberal Democrats, has resulted in something it’s still hard to credit: complacency. “It could have been worse” is the gut reaction by a plain majority of Tories. “And Reform could have done better” goes cynically hand in hand with that hunch.

Complacent Tories shake their lethargy off to do just one thing: erect colossal straw men

Let us ask some questions then, as the Tories gear up for a summer talking about themselves and the parts their play-actors will posture.

Why will Reform go away? That it will — “how divisive Nigel is! he always loses them! they’ll split before conference!” — is certainly the instinctive, worldly-wise, working assumption of most front-rank Conservative politicians. But why? What will the Tories do to make them go away?

Will they mouth safely in opposition things they don’t mean, didn’t do in office and assuredly won’t, should such lies one day work and see them returned to office (if not power)? Why will that dissolve Reform, who’ll be saying the same (and maybe even meaning it), but without the Tories’ pitiful record dragging behind them?

Who will do it? Who they are is what they do. The hands of David Cameron, George Osborne, Michael Gove and Douglas “Dougie” Smith have been the ones laid upon Tory candidates, producing such MPs as they have. They couldn’t provide even basically competent government, and they’re not close to being an adequately Tory opposition now.

Why will more of the same work? That, however, brings us immediately to what didn’t actually work.

It turns out, the plethora of shameless pro-Sunak Tory pundits notwithstanding, there was no “narrow path to victory”. No matter how much self-solace is offered with guff like “loveless majorities”, Labour’s lead wasn’t soft. It was in solid parliamentary fact, huge, skilfully accomplished and entirely up to the job ahead of it.

Complacent Tories shake their lethargy off to do just one thing: erect colossal straw men. By far the tallest of these concerns who lost the last election. Which was, should anyone have forgot, the worst defeat in Tory history. But that was, it now seems, the fault of the Tory right!

It’s unfair to pick on any one goonish noise-off in particular, and thus it’s entirely necessary for us to do so. Take, then, serial failed Tory candidate and sometime David Davis leadership campaign manager, Iain Dale. What did he squeak when Sunak sacked his most Reform-adjacent cabinet member, the then home secretary Suella Braverman, and instead disinterred David “great investment” Cameron? “Daddy’s home.” Just as usefully as before, and as soon off again.

The Tory party, however absurdly it’s asserted, did not lose the last election because it was “too right-wing”: it suffered its worst ever defeat because the conservative voters it took for granted, and did nothing for, had somewhere else to go. That new home hasn’t gone away.

Insanely doubling down on a uniquely disastrous “core liberal Conservative vote” strategy will end the Tories as a party of government and turn them into a gadflies’ sect — much like the Liberals have been for the last century.

The Tories have to get back the votes they have lost: those are demonstrably to their right. Hoping that Farage will stymie his own chances — “he doesn’t, deep down, want to be a big dog” — is arrogant, unimaginative folly. Expect more of it once the Tories have their new leader.