This week Tory fortunes became a numbers game, and the worst is unlucky fourteen

Fourteen.

That’s the number currently guaranteed to furrow a Tory MP’s brow.

Right now that’s not hard to do. Ask them how things are going. Honestly, and at the risk of the glee it inspires in our opponents, the Parliamentary Conservative party is not in a good place, being both febrile and jittery. And numbers are a major reason for that.

14 per cent in a poll would signify near electoral wipe out.

The last Ipsos poll at the weekend had the Conservatives third on 15 per cent, a figure that might leave them with roughly 12 MPs. If that wasn’t worrying MPs enough a percentage point lower in the next batch of polling will really set them off.

Whilst one of Kemi Badenoch’s team pointed out to me, quite correctly, that polls are snap shots, some are simultaneously different, and overall only form part of the picture, that’s what you say when the polls aren’t great. And they aren’t. Numbers matter.

14 years is how long the Conservatives were in Government, and just the two words “Fourteen years” have become the go-to line of criticism for anything the Tories say or do, now. Perhaps the hardest thing to absorb is it’s also still flung at the current party by some its own members, former supporters, and those that in July 2024 just stayed at home.

It is also Keir Starmer’s life raft pushback – when he’s already adenoidally intoned “£22bn black hole” – to throw out at PMQs. It’s like an earworm, that not only can I hear the words ‘fourteen years’ in my head, but exactly how he says it.

In conversation with one Tory back bencher this week they warned:

“Honestly, I think we are doing a lot to try and win back public trust, but they are still not really ready to listen, or to trust and my fear is they’ll only truly come back to us when we’ve shed everybody who was part of that 14 years.”

Now we both acknowledged this was neither realistic nor an aim, more a concern because were it to be true it would rule out all the shadow cabinet, the leader, her leadership rivals in 2024, and crucially their experience of Government.

This is of course is the central dichotomy. Experience in Government is a double edged sword. Blamed for one’s role in a Government but because you had a role in Government you know how broken the system is, and where exactly it is broken and thereby the best chance to draw up a plan to fix the system.

Because the unpopular truth is we didn’t break the system, we just didn’t deliver as much as we should, because it was already broken. Experience is a crucial component of a credible fight because it’s what Reform crave and know they don’t have. Big momentum, polling numbers, friendly headlines – as one journalist put it to me “they’re just a focus of interest for us and our readers because they are more interesting than the rest right now” – all of this Reform have. Experience – is the thing Farage admits they lack. It showed in one viral clip this week from Nottinghamshire. And yet that’s the same ‘experience’ he’d pin the Tories down with, for as long as he can. And he can unless we break out.

Labour, and I’ve said this before but just let it sink in, had been in Government just six months when the media started reporting that internally they were admitting: “Cummings was right” about the ossification of the system and how political will is managed out of the way. Andrew Gimson’s latest book review details how the last, not current, Labour Government – at whose feet some of these problems can justifiably be laid – found a system that just did not want to deliver.

The problem for any Government is, as some have put it, that ‘you can’t fix a car or a plane whilst you are driving it’. Sir John Redwood’s column today contains this:

“In government decide a policy, plan its implementation, get a trial up and running, then talk to the public about it. Announcing it without the details, scrambling to put in place the parts and then finding it is late, above budget and not very good is not a great model – but all too common.”

When Kemi says she saw in Government how the system worked against politicians she really does know whereof she speaks, as do very many of her MPs, all of whom get equally condemned for simply being on the pitch when the final whistle went.

So what, if anything, can they do about it.

First, recognise that most of those who like to use it have a vested interest in doing so. I’ve said before Reform and Labour need to keep saying it, because it helps block any chance of Tory revival. One of Farage’s key advisers told me yesterday:

“Your brand’s so tarnished you’re never coming back”

He might be right, I hope not, but he also needs that to be right. He wants it, sure, but also, it’s a message he wants to land. ‘Give up, quit the field, you’re done’. It’s both a military and political tactic as old as time.

Second, and it was said a lot nine months ago but needs re-amplification. When opponents paint that period as an endless list of failures they know, and more importantly Conservatives should know – it simply isn’t true. That isn’t to deny there were crucial things the public cared about that weren’t delivered – and they gave their brutal verdict at the ballot box about that – but the Tory record of fourteen years in government was not blanket failure. It just wasn’t.

Yesterday my eldest had to move student houses, a removals process that whilst I was happy to help was about as much fun as a kidney infection! However my eldest was educated during the Conservative period in office, and benefited hugely from the improvements in educational standards over that time. It’s why they’re now a student.

Third, get a bit of historical perspective. Three years after going into Government, and that’s half his time as Prime Minister, David Cameron was still blaming Labour for the economic inheritance he’d received, and if you look at PMQs reviews of the time, the tide was turning on its efficacy as a defence. In 2013 he told the Commons directed at Ed Milliband:

“His entire approach seems to be ‘we made this almighty mess, why are they taking so long to clear it up’– well, we are clearing it up!”

Stamer hasn’t made it to twelve months and the ‘look what you made us do’ responses are going stale. Just not for the public, stale enough, however, Labour’s troubles are not lessened by our own.

The fact is we’ve allowed the ‘Fourteen years’ attack to symbolise a false picture of total failure, to be a drag anchor on the party getting any lift whilst trying to demonstrate it really is under new leadership and isn’t the same.  However, numbers matter and it would seem we can’t wait around for people to wake up to that.

Something needs to change.

At this point I’d make an observation. If the diagnosis of why we lost – we’re still waiting for that review – is basically that we failed to deliver on public priorities, to govern with Conservative values and indulged in far too much infighting then I can’t see the logic of trying to use the latter to solve the former.

However, and it’s a message that should and I discover has echoed in Shadow Cabinet, that something does need to change, in order not least for the numbers to change. Fourteen years in Government may still pin the Conservatives into an electoral corner, but not finding, and fighting a way out now could see it become fourteen years of opposition.

Labour and Reform’s tactics change; there’s no reason why the Conservatives shouldn’t try something different to change the numbers.

I just hope there’s a plan to do that.