It is possible that, five days before the United States chooses its next president on November 5, the United Kingdom will choose a new prime minister. Unlike America, Britain (following a cynical and unsuccessful experiment with fixed-term parliaments in the 2010s) can have a general election out of the blue, but one is required to happen in the next year. In the Westminster village, the popular view is that it may occur on Halloween, but that can be but a guess: even the tradition that British elections are held on a Thursday is only that, a tradition. Under the Quinquennial Act of 1911—now in force following the repeal in 2022 of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act—a general election must be called not later than five years to the day after the outgoing parliament first met. That means by December 17 this year, and it must be held within twenty-five working days of its calling—therefore, by January 28, 2025 (a Tuesday, for what it’s worth).
The present administration . . . resembles a crippled dog whose owner is reluctant to have it put down.
But no one believes that the present administration, which increasingly resembles a crippled dog whose owner is reluctant to have it put down, can drag on for that long. The ruling Conservatives are between fifteen and twenty points behind the Labour opposition in most opinion polls. A big ministerial reshuffle in the autumn has fulfilled the old adage that a reshuffle never won an election; this last one certainly won’t. Promises to make better much that is wrong in Britain remain almost entirely rhetorical. Many Conservative MPs, even in the party’s heartland, fear losing their seats; meanwhile, fifty-three of the eighty-three MPs (out of a total of 650) who have announced they will not fight again are Conservatives, most of them relatively young and running up the white flag. It is only the fact that Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, has all the charisma of a paving slab that seems, for the moment, to be preventing a landslide such as the one Tony Blair secured in 1997, when his party had 418 seats to the Conservatives’ 165. And even that could change. As it is, no one seems to expect Labour to lose. And although autumn remains the favorite time for the poll—to allow tax cuts expected in the budget on March 6 to have time to work their magic on the economy and on the morale of the public—some MPs are convinced that, as things probably can’t get better, it would be best to have the contest in April or May, to get the punishment out of the way. This would allow the Conservatives to start rebuilding in opposition as soon as possible, and in a comprehensive way unfeasible while in government, and would give Labour an early opportunity to show that they will find it no easier to govern Britain in the present circumstances than the Conservative Party has. Such an early poll seems, however, less likely than an autumn one.
For all the problems besetting his party, the present prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is at least something of an improvement on his recent predecessors. A Conservative-led administration has been in power since 2010: in coalition with the Liberal Democrats until 2015, and in the past nine years on its own. The consensus—especially among Conservative supporters—is that it has achieved precious little. The great event of those fourteen years—the decision by the British public, in the largest vote ever held in the United Kingdom, to leave the European Union—was accomplished in the teeth of opposition from the then–prime minister, David Cameron, and most of his colleagues. Cameron left office in a huff hours after this defeat, but it was not to be the last British public life would see of him, of which more in a moment. His successor, Theresa May, was incapable of making a decision and thus incapable of uniting her party and of leading it. Miraculously, she lasted three years before her parliamentary party threw her out. Her replacement was Boris Johnson, who also lasted three years and whose name has now become a byword among many for lying and incompetence. He left office in chaos, and subsequently Parliament itself in disgrace, resigning from the House of Commons a year after leaving Downing Street when it became apparent he risked being suspended from the house for so long that his constituents could force a by-election. The suspension, which was never enforced because of his resignation, would have come on account of his lying to and intimidation of the committee examining his breach of lockdown regulations during the pandemic: lockdown regulations that his government had instituted, of course. And then, just when the Conservative Party thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse, it chose (perhaps it is fairest to say in the middle of a collective nervous breakdown) Liz Truss to
be its leader.
She lasted forty-nine days: the shortest duration of any prime ministership in British history. Her crime was sheer incompetence. Nothing happened for the first fortnight or so of her brief tenure in office because of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Then, however, there was a financial statement in which her administration promised £45 billion in tax cuts, with no indication of where the money to make up that deficit in government revenue would be coming from. The markets, of which Truss claimed to be a disciple, reacted accordingly. The final days resembled a particularly bad West End farce.
Stupidly, however, the party believed Truss’s promises of an economic miracle.
Sunak, who had been the chancellor of the exchequer under Johnson until a resignation that precipitated the latter’s downfall, had tried to become leader in his place. Stupidly, however, the party believed Truss’s promises of an economic miracle, rather than Sunak’s more cautious approach. Following the Truss debacle, the Conservatives at last realized the national laughing stock they had made of themselves. Sunak was installed within days, unopposed. No one forced him to become prime minister; he is an intelligent man, as well as a competent one, and he knew very well the poisonous legacy he would have to handle. Nonetheless, the theme of the sixteen or so months that Sunak has led his party and the United Kingdom has been one of missed opportunities. He has certainly not been dishonest, and it would be fairer to brand him as over-cautious rather than indecisive or incompetent. But his administration is regarded as ineffectual, especially when it comes to addressing the main problems facing Britain. His party lags in the polls not least as a consequence of this perception.
Some of those main problems facing the United Kingdom are unique, while some are common throughout the West. In the former category come a burden of taxation higher than at any time since the late 1940s, not least because of over-generosity and wastage during the pandemic; failing public services because of poor political and official management; shoddy infrastructure because of investment becoming a lower priority than rampant and poorly directed welfarism; and a growing law-and-order problem, blamed on earlier cuts in police but having as much to do with poor police leadership. In common with other Western democracies, Britain has an underperforming economy (though, unlike Germany, Britain has no recession and is likely to escape one); grave international tensions caused mostly by the Russia–Ukraine conflict; and underpowered armed forces that are, along with those of several other European countries, making less than their necessary contribution to nato and therefore to the security of the West. Resting somewhere in between domestic and international policy problems is that of seemingly uncontrolled illegal immigration, with a massive backlog of asylum claims and an apparently nonexistent deportation policy for those deemed ineligible to stay in Britain. All of these things, especially economic management and national and border security, are what the Conservative Party is supposed to excel at. As such, it has monumentally crashed.
Illegal migration is perhaps the government’s worst failure, and it persists despite Sunak and his senior ministers using every possible opportunity to claim it is being tackled. There is already a housing shortage, and emergency accommodation for these people (many of whom turn out not to be genuine asylum-seekers, therefore having no right to be in Britain) is expensive. They strain an already buckling National Health Service, and there are neither the school places nor the specialist teachers required for their children. One particular group—Albanians—is now said by the police to have taken over organized drug crime in every English city apart from Liverpool (give them time). Almost all the illegal migrants arrive from France, which claims to be cooperating with Britain but allows the flow to continue and, with huge social problems of its own, is patently delighted to be rid of such people. The British government’s incompetence on the question of border control must be seen to be believed—the courts have blocked a plan to have asylum seekers processed in Rwanda, of all places—and, short of televised daily deportation flights for the next few months, it is hard to envision how the matter can be meaningfully improved.
He called a northern town a “shithole,” which was not tactful.
Sunak’s reshuffle removed one incompetent home secretary, Suella Braverman, and replaced her with another, James Cleverly, who seems to spend most of his time in media interviews apologizing, usually for ludicrous things he has said. He called a northern town a “shithole,” which was not tactful, and told a joke about feeding his wife a date-rape drug. Sunak appointed Grant Shapps, a man with no experience of military matters whatsoever and whose sole talent appears to be to agree with those who employ him, to be the defense secretary at a time when the forces are gravely underfunded and Britain risks being sucked into a war. But perhaps most bizarrely of all, Sunak gave David Cameron a peerage and made him foreign secretary in his new cabinet, despite Cameron’s main foreign-affairs triumph being to have accidentally paved the way for Britain to leave, against his wishes, the European Union. Lord Cameron (as we must now learn to call him) is widely disliked in his party and is associated with the collapsed empire of the Australian financier Lex Greensill, for whom he used to work and who is still undergoing investigation and facing lawsuits. Even in a parliamentary Conservative Party as barren as the present one, there were MPs capable of being foreign secretary. When asked why Sunak brought Lord Cameron back, a minister told me “he wanted to do something for him.”
And in the first days of 2024 a new threat, long feared, was confirmed. The Reform Party—the reincarnation of ukip, which led the successful drive to get Britain out of the European Union—has confirmed it will seek to fight all 632 seats available in England, Scotland, and Wales at the coming election. If it does, that move could trigger a slaughter of Tory MPs, as it will split their vote. The Reform Party’s trump card could be to install Nigel Farage, the architect of Brexit, as its leader, in which case matters could become even worse for the Conservatives. The Tory Party is already pleading with Farage to support them and not Reform, or at least to have Reform stand only against sitting Labour MPs. Neither of those pleas seems likely to succeed. Things are so desperate on this front that some MPs are suggesting Sunak should offer Farage a peerage and give him a ministerial job to bring him onside. I doubt that would work either. Farage understands that many British Conservatives have had enough of their delinquent party and want it punished. Farage has been their executioner of choice before, and they would be quite happy for him to do the job again.
