Sleaze and Incompetence will only get you so far...

The commentary around the recent travails of the Conservative party seem to revolve around the point that Boris Johnson is incompetent alone and that it is his personal responsibility for the plight that the country and by extension the Conservative party, finds itself in.  He is providing a helpful scapegoat for a group of people who lack any form of self critical faculty and can only blame external factors for the terrible state of things, incapable of examining themselves or their own views.

 One of the most popular lines you can find in the Independent, The Guardian, The Financial Times or anywhere else you choose to search in the non-Murdoch / Mail / Barclay media complex, is that the sleaze and Christmas parties which the government has been mishandling over the entire time it has been in office is finally cutting through.  The parallels are drawn with the Conservative government of the mid-1990's, where David Mellor (sex), Jonathan Aitken (perjury) and Neil Hamilton (perjury and corruption) and more created a perception of decline and sleaze which led to the Labour victory under Tony Blair in 1997. These apparent one-off sleaze events destroyed the faith of the public in the political class and lead to a mass defection of voters to the Labour party.  There is a certain amount truth in this but I think it speaks to a certain logic within centrist commentary, that their way is the one and true way and that it is only personal failure which causes people to seek alternatives.

But the problem with these analyses is that they feed off the self-referential nature of those analyzing a situation without sufficient distance from that situation; those involved in an event or situation inevitably attribute greater importance to those factors with which they were most involved and of which they were most aware at the time.  The news and print media are the most straightforward means for referencing things in an analysis (see this blog) and so when people write commentaries they inevitably refer to these things and when people are asked in focus groups or similar opinion gathering exercises, they will tend to refer to these aspects as key in their decision making.I would argue that there are others factors at work influencing people's attitudes to the Conservative politics which are playing out.  These are primarily around the fact that the Conservatives fundamentally don't provide people with the things they want, and that instead of returning to their default mode (VOTE CONSERVATIVE; BLUE GOOD), people are seeking alternatives.

Any political party has to deal with this inherent tribalism and it is why old school social democratic and socialist parties were much more than a set of policies and a party political organization but were more social organizations including clubs, social settings, culture, art and more.  The modern technocratic Labour party does not achieve this because it is more targeted and driven by politics technocrats who think in the narrow aims of what can be immediately influenced by press releases, policy positions and other dynamics within the gift of the political executive of the party.  

 The North Shropshire By-Election is an excellent example of the desire for an alternative to the Conservatives being sought by a frustrated electorate, battered by perceptions of sleaze but continually dealing in their daily lives with incompetence in government which is a function of desperately poor political decision-making and mismanagement.  The news media which the majority of this electorate will be consuming will be providing them with a host of reasons for these things, but their lack of frame of reference for how to address them means they grasp for the nearest alternative, which is either the Liberal Democrats or the Reform Party.  It's not so much about the sleaze, albeit this provides a handy frame of reference when asked, but more about a gradual slide in the standard of living which is influencing this decline.  However this is difficult to explain in a focus group.  Easier to say that you are "shocked and disappointed" with Christmas parties or trips to Barnard Castle or illicit lobbying or whatever the next thing is.

The true dynamic here is that The Conservatives managed to pull off the trick in 2019 of pretending that they hadn't been the ones in charge for the preceding 9 years and demonizing their opposition, with the help of an especially pliant media infrastructure.  This annulled the possibility of an alternative and positioned themselves as a fresh new alternative to themselves.  Brexit was a handy identity tool around which to rally their voters. They will not be able to pull this trick off again in 2023 or 2024 and in reality, they are tired, sick and incompetent.  The challenge for Labour is not going to be managing whatever nonsensical storm influences the weekends polling in the political-media technocracy but creating the percepction that they can do meaningfully better in government and admitting internally that they're probably going to have to do that in alliance with other parties.  

I don't know whether Keir Starmer can do this and to be honest, in an age of charisma politicians, he certainly fails to get the message across with alarming regularity.  He wont face Boris Johnson as Conservative leader at the next election, Johnson is done, but whoever emerges from the current bunch of incompetent crypto-Fascists, it's likely they wont be any better a campaigner than Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings.  The path is clearer as the Conservatives self-immolate but the alternative needs to be there and at the moment, North Shropshire shows that Keir Starmer, now two years in charge, is making very little progress on this front.

One final thing; whither goes the elderly vote goes the power.  Having witnessed the Conservatives rallying around the anti-lockdown / anti-vaccine cause will terrify some members of their elderly coalition.  If Labour or the Liberal Democrats can nail this down, positioning the Conservatives as the party of health irresponsibility, the Conservatives are truly doomed.  This is a dynamic which is now playing out across a number of Western countries.  Play to the libertarian nut jobs if you want, but you'll get outflanked by Reform or whatever the equivalent is on the right and your elderly vote will desert you.  Good luck with that.  Goodbye "Lord" David Frost.