"I believe it is good practice as a columnist to keep track of when you have been wrong, and the thing I have got most emphatically wrong over the past few years is the Conservative party's prospects. I was convinced that the party that still won elections despite the chaos and instability of Brexit, not to mention the calamities of austerity, could get away with anything."
"I even believed that if it lost power, as it did last year, the risk of a Tory restoration was still very high. What I did not foresee was the most successful political party in the democratic world, by some measures, coming so close to extinction this quickly. As the Tory party conference gets under way in Manchester, with rumours abounding over the weekend about diminished attendance, the polling increasingly suggests that Britain's next general election will be a contest between Labour and Reform."
"That is quite the turnaround for Britain's natural party of government. But (you knew there was going to be a but) it might also be the case that the fundamental judgment I made that there was always going to be a powerful, difficult-to-dislodge political force on the right still stands. Because in many ways, the contemporary Conservative party has not died, it has only mutated to its next form. So much of the fertile ground that Reform thrives in now was tilled by the Tories."
The Conservative Party's electoral prospects have collapsed much faster than expected, moving from dominant governing force to near-extinction. Polling suggests the next general election will be a contest between Labour and Reform. Many Conservative policies, rhetoric and tactics have migrated to Reform, carrying pugnacious, jingoistic and separatist politics. Brexit-era normalisations produced permanent contempt for political opponents and hardened immigration into a performative problem. Conservative measures such as David Cameron's 'tens of thousands' pledge and Theresa May's 'go home' vans helped mainstream harsher immigration approaches. The contemporary Conservative party has mutated rather than vanished, leaving fertile ground for Reform to thrive.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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