Alexander Bowen: If UK Conservatives want an icy wake up call they should reflect on Norway’s election

Alexander Bowen is a trainee economist based in Belgium, specialising in public policy assessment, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.

The last fortnight has been, by some margin, the best fortnight for the Conservatives since the general election.

To start with there was Britain’s recreation of the North-American half of the Seven Years War, with deputy chief Rayner’s scalping – a huge win that appears to be having its own butterfly effect already. The kind of butterfly effect that might lead to Chief Starmer’s own shrunken head being deposited at the feet of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.

More importantly, it’s a win that the Conservatives can actually take credit for, with CCHQ being seemingly responsible for originating the story and Party Chair, Kevin Hollinrake, doing a fantastic job of getting the story into the news and keeping it there.

On Thursday that North-American-style scalping descended rather appropriately on Washington when it was revealed that the Prime Minister knowingly appointed the seeming best-friend of the world’s most notorious sex-trafficking paedophile to Britain’s most prestigious ambassadorial role – displacing a universally popular career diplomat in the process.

The dead paedophile’s pal being “worth the risk” gave Kemi Badenoch the content needed to deliver what every media outlet, from the Critic to the Guardian, is calling either her best PMQs or her first good one.

Yet where are we?

In the only poll conducted midway through the Mandelson scandal and entirely post-Rayner, two stories that really ought to have moved the needle at least a little in the Tory direction particularly when coupled with the general weirdness of Reform’s insomniac convention, the Tories are down. 15 per cent Conservative, 19 per cent Labour, 12 per cent for the LibDems & Greens each, and 34 per cent for Reform.

That 15 per cent figure… well it’s eerily similar to what another Conservative Party achieved in the UK’s North Sea neighbour Norway. 14.7 per cent. I say this then; if you want to see what 2029 could look like, look at Norway. There are parallels a plenty.

An immensely unpopular Labour leader, Jonas Gahr Støre, someone who, like Starmer, is greyness given flesh and who enjoys as Farage might term it, the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low grade bank clerk, narrowly won re-election with 28 per cent of the vote. A figure that whilst not their worst ever performance – that being in the local elections 2 years earlier – isn’t exactly close to the kind of historic dominance social democrats once enjoyed in their poster child.

The Conservatives meanwhile were dogged by the long hangover of their own period of government – having in 2021 been turfed out after their longest ever period of control – and were unable to separate themselves from it.

Whilst at first that had been a plus – Norway’s stable inflation pre-2021 being a glowing counterpoint to the peaks of 2022 and 2023 – the buildup of scandals that come from having the same unchanging leadership for 20 years was too much. That same Johnson era malaise lingered with fines for breaking the Covid rules they set up (also at a birthday party) and investigations into insider trading. Moving on was hard so they just didn’t.

Indeed, their electoral strategy was to keep the same leadership but to make the campaign a whole lot more embarrassing. Rock your body TikTok videos, DJing Norway’s version of Leeds Fest, endearing? Absolutely. Cringe? Yep. Effective? Eh

Worst of all once the Conservatives started falling behind in the polls, particularly after Norway’s answer to Keir Starmer replaced their woeful Finance Minister with former Norwegian Prime Minister and former NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, a doom loop began.

As I wrote previously for this site, politics is about momentum, and once voters started fleeing more followed. By the end of the election the Conservatives weren’t even being treated as a major party being invited to only one of the five Prime Ministerial debates. Election and results websites were, mid-way through the campaign, deleting the Tory leaders head in their head-to-head graphics and replacing it with the leader of the other major right-wing party.

That other party, the Progress Party, were the real winners of Norway’s election. 24 per cent of the vote, up 12 percentage points, and the largest party of the right by a near double digit margin. It’s a win largely attributable to a simple platform and a competent leader.

The platform: fewer taxes, fewer foreigners, fewer environmental rules, fewer criminals, less waste, and better healthcare. It’s a platform that sounds distinctly like Reform’s. Though the parallels end there.

Say what you will about Farage but his interest in policy and its particulars seems minimal if plausibly functional at a push, and his experience of getting things done outside of campaigning is functionally zero. That’s true of basically all of Reform’s team, little interest in policy, no experience in government (at least not any good experience), and an understanding of public finance and public economics that would be enough to bring a tax lawyer to tears.

Sylvi Listhaug, the leader of Norway’s Progress Party, though has a kind of auto-credibility. She worked her way up over 25 years from working in a care home to finance her studies, to directing Oslo’s social services system, to being the most effective Immigration Minister in Norway’s history.

Her record in that role – cutting asylum applications by 90 per cent, speeding up returns, creating mass processing centres, cutting down residency rights, implementing controls on internal Schengen borders, mandating integration, and encouraging voluntary returns all whilst saving money – gives her an automatic credibility on the topic. People know that when it comes to two of the biggest issues – healthcare or immigration – she knows what she’s doing and she knows how to be effective.

Can the same be said for anyone in Reform? I doubt it.

If there’s any lesson for the UK from Norway’s recent election then let it be this – party systems are far more fluid than we suppose. If the Norwegian Conservatives can fall to third place, you best believe it can happen here. There is no such thing as an inevitable return to the two big parties even if the absence of a Reform equivalent of Sylvi Listhaug can be some comfort.

In the end having a good couple weeks is great – but it’s not registered and it’s not enough.