Jacques Arnold: How the Tories failed last year to absorb the Farage phenomenon and learn lessons from Canada

Jacques Arnold is a former Member of Parliament, and author of a history of Britain’s Parliamentary Constituencies.

The catastrophic general election of 2024 was richly deserved, but has left the British people and our economy prostrate before a malevolent, yet electorally hollow, Labour government, more than capable of ruining this country and obliterating its prosperity and its history.

The vast Labour majority is the direct responsibility of the Conservative Parliamentary Party.

This disaster has deep roots.

They spent years enjoying the featherbedding of the Blair reforms, plotting, posing, and discarding Leaders, culminating in the defenestration of Boris Johnson, resulting from a torrent of ministerial resignations, precipitated by the treachery of the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak.

The embarrassing Liz Truss episode followed. Thus, they destroyed the massive electoral coalition, created by Johnson, squandering the 80-seat majority he had achieved in 2019.

The public were baffled by the defenestration, and appalled by the episode, and responded with a loathing which led to the 2024 battering, itself exacerbated by Sunak’s request for an early dissolution, without consulting his Cabinet colleagues, leaving the Party unprepared andvulnerable.

Since the start of this century, the parliamentary selection process has been corrupted.

In a search for “modernity”, the tried and tested system of selection by merit, introduced post-1945, was dumped. In its place, emerged a woke system, with its exclusive A-list. This prioritised fashionable criteria and of course cronies. They rejected and discouraged applicants with proven records of successful previous business and professional careers.

This was illustrated by the dumping of the logo, the muscular arm carrying the torch onwards, replacing it with the insipid blue/green scribbled tree, while diluting our blue fighting colours to a pallid tint.

The parliamentary party increasingly became composed of mediocrities, political insiders without experience of the real outside world, lacking quality.

What titans might have emerged otherwise?

As the general election approached, a proposal was put forward for a “coupon election”. Taking a leaf out of Lloyd-George’s book, a committee of sound Conservatives and Reform UK Leaders could have been convened, to choose a preferred candidate in each constituency, to be awarded the coupon, which would have been publicised, and thus avoiding the splitting of the right-of-centre vote.

In the event, Nigel Farage, resenting the 2019 cooperation, which he considered betrayed, rejected the proposal, and the Conservatives proudly and complacently ignored it. What saved Lloyd-George in 1918, was spurned in 2024.

What betrayal? In 2019, Nigel Farage offered to withdraw unilaterally all Brexit Party candidates from Tory-held seats, and he delivered, heightening our 80-seat majority win. He also asked for a deal whereby he would also do so in Labour marginals that were Tory targets. In exchange he asked for a clear-run (with Conservative candidates standing down) in ten Labour-held Brexit Party target seats.

The Conservatives apparently prevaricated until rejecting the deal at the last moment before nominations closed.

Had the deal been agreed, the Tories additionally would probably have taken the scalps of:

John Cruddas (Dagenham & Rainham – maj. 293, Brexit vote 2887); Zarah Sultana (Coventry South – maj. 401 Brexit vote 1432); the pugilist Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale – maj. 562. Brexit vote 2887); Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract & Castleford – maj. 1276. Brexit vote 8032); and Ed Miliband (Doncaster North – maj. 2370. Brexit vote 8294). The price of arrogance?

The 2024 catastrophic result is worth analysing.

For the first time in history, first-past-the-post worked against us. In addition to 53 straight losses to Labour, the intervention of Reform UK in Tory-held seats resulted in a further 128 losses to Labour, 27 to the Liberal democrats and two each to the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens. This shows the acute damage inflicted on the right-wing of politics by the failure to reach an agreement in the run-up to the election, due to self-indulgent pride on both sides.

Interestingly, had such an arrangement prevailed in seats where the Reform UK vote exceeded the Tory vote, and Reform would have been the only right-wing candidate, Reform UK would have won a further 16 seats, admittedly seven previously Conservative, but significantly, nine previously Labour seats.

A roll call of a few names, of prominent parliamentarians defeated only underlines the scale of the disaster: Liam Fox, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Grant Shapps, Liz Truss, Damian Green, Robert Buckland, Simon Clarke, Penny Mordaunt, Theresa Villiers, Mark Harper and David Davies to Labour; Alex Chalk and Lucy Frazer to the Lib. Dems; and Douglas Ross to the SNP.

This is exacerbated by the many who simply retired for a variety of reasons, amongst whom, Sajid Javid, Dominic Raab, Nadhim Zahawi, Bill Cash, John Redwood, Ben Wallace, Michael Gove, Kwasi Kwarteng, Theresa May and Greg Clark – collectively a massive loss to the stature of parliament.

What of the future?

The parliamentary party is severely hollowed out. However, the shortcomings of the previous parliament remain, in boiled-down form. The party in the country settled for Kemi Badenoch, a previously second-rank politician, who nevertheless is a determined instinctive Conservative, sound in her beliefs, who is rising to this unprecedented challenge.

Her problem is the nature of the residual parliamentary party. Her shadow cabinet is a mixture of high-talent and mediocrity. Her survival as Leader is questionable, particularly after council and devolved assembly elections next May, when the parliamentary party is in danger of panic, leading to yet another leadership election; even excluding the party members in the country.

Disastrously, the high-handed dismissal of Reform UK persists, presumably influenced by the illusion created by the disparate strengths of current parliamentary representation.

On the other hand, Nigel Farage, a former enthusiast for proportional representation has lost that enthusiasm, in light of the scale of current opinion polling, which leads him to the belief that our current first-past-the-post system will deliver him a majority next time, and the keys to No. 10 Downing Street.

His previous comradely view of the Conservatives has changed to bitterness, now tinged with contempt.

However, four years is a long time. It is unlikely the current polls will persist. Boredom is a factor, opinion may move on, and not necessarily in a Conservative direction. Harold Macmillan’s “Events, dear boy” remains relevant. From today’s perspective, a deal between Reform UK and the Conservatives remains highly unlikely, whatever the potential benefits for both of such a deal.

Faint hopes of an implosion of Labour seem slim to zero. Turkeys do not vote for Christmas. It is more likely we will go into the next general election without a deal. The election of right-of- centre MPs, will be unrepresentatively diminished. The new multi-party scenario may wellproduce a bizarre set of unrepresentative results.

The prospect of any right-wing government, will not arise if Labour has a majority. If they do not, there will be a mad scramble to devise coalitions with any of the Liberal Democrats or Greens, or even of Jeremy Corbyn’s new party.

On the other hand, if the right prevails, either in the form of Nigel Farage’s dream of a Reform UK majority, or of a majority total of Conservative and Reform MPs, that will be the moment of truth, particularly if Nigel’s team has a larger number of members.

If a larger Conservative number, the party Leader, and potential Prime Minister, will have to swallow his/her pride, and invite Reform into a coalition with senior positions in government. If the Conservatives are the potential junior party, they will have to eat humble pie, and join acoalition. In either case they must do so in the national interest.

By that time the consequences of this incompetent Labour government will have put the financial, economic, social and security fabric of this country in the greatest peril.

The lesson of the history of the Conservative & Unionist Party, at 200+ years old, has been flexibility in the pursuit of power. Over that period, we have coalesced with, and absorbed, the Liberal Unionists, Churchill’s Constitutionalists, and the National Liberals.

There are lessons to learn from Canada. The experience of our counterparts there carries salutary echoes of our own recent experience.

There, the historic Conservative Party hit the buffers in 1993, going from an absolute majority to only two seats. This was despite an earlierattempt to modernise, re-labelling themselves as the Progressive Conservatives in 1942. In the 1980s a right-wing split developed in western Canada, where a newly created Reform Party of Canada steadily developed into a dominant position in the western provinces. Despite a small re-birth of the Progressive Conservatives in the east, the Liberals dominated Canada.

The Reform Party hoovered up the residues of the Conservative Parties in the west, and re-labelled themselves as the Canadian Alliance in the year 2000. They became the Official Opposition in the Canadian House of Commons. Frustration with the national dominance of the Liberals led eventually to the merger of the Alliance with the Progressive Conservatives in 2003, as the Conservative Party of Canada, with the former Alliance leader, Stephen Harper, as Leader of the united Party.

Three years later, in 2006, Harper led the united party to victory and became Prime Minister, serving three terms in that office.

No doubt, there were bruised egos along the way, but look what they achieved! There are clear lessons to be learnt. Not least that of the origins of the leader of the rejuvenated Conservative Party of Canada.