'Enjoy the tap water, Bramley!' Week #6 Part Two, the General Election post-mortem and how the Conservatives were lucky it wasn’t worse
For those who'd been following political events in the United Kingdom over the last several years, there was nothing ‘that’ surprising about the exit poll that was revealed on Thursday July 3 just after 10pm.
It was more or less the impending disaster that people had been warning the Conservatives about since as early as 2022, and even then, the Conservatives could take heart knowing that it wasn't ‘as bad’ as some had predicted.
Back in January 2022, few within Conservative Party circles could believe what they were seeing when they noticed that the difference between the two major parties was 8 points. By then, it had been a little under two years since the party’s lead was considered“unassailable.”
It was September 2021 when, for example, The Times carried the headline ‘Boris Johnson eyes another decade in power.’
By 2024, it was facing down the prospect of an “electoral massacre” where among some of the more dire predictions, the Conservatives would be left with as few as 13 MPs - essentially the Canada ‘93 scenario; the precedent where the Progressive Conservatives suffered the worst ever result by a governing party in the Western world, losing almost all of their seats.
For months, Downing Street would insist that there would be a “narrowing” in the polls the closer the United Kingdom got to the day of the general election. In the months preceding the election, Rishi Sunak would predict the outcome of a hung parliament before warning of super majorities, and they would find comfort discussing concepts such as “shy Tories” or the number of voters who, from internal analysis, would say they were still uncertain of who they would vote for. This, it was hoped, would offer them a “narrow path to victory.”
Despite this, the polls would remain resolutely static. Across 130 polls conducted between May 22 when Sunak called the general election, and July 2, the average difference between the two major political parties was 20 points. There was no “narrowing”, it was virtually the same as it had been for months and Labour were on course for a considerable majority.
It was in March 2024 when Conservatives would ask the question, ‘what if the polls are right?’ when they began to seriously consider the probability of a significant Conservative Party loss. There were warnings even before this, however, that some Conservatives had reconciled themselves to a period in the wilderness. Some said it would be for a generation.
One former cabinet minister who said that their party had “gone mad” and had signed a “death wish” with voters put the situation more bluntly back in January. Reflecting on a helpful postcode checker that accompanied an MRP poll conducted by YouGov at the time, indicating the scale by which Conservatives would be defeated at the next election, the former minister said: “I’m going to be elected but I’ll be surrounded by corpses.”