Britain’s Conservatives Are About to Lose Big

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8 years ago, the U.K. and the U.S.
went through very similarly shocking votes. The U.K.
surprised people around the world by voting for Brexit. Breaking news.
British Prime Minister David Cameron is stepping down in the wake of Britain's stunning and historic vote to leave the European Union. That was in June 2016.
And then in November of that same year, Donald Trump was elected. Secretary Clinton has conceded to Donald Trump.
This concession took place in a phone call. Both countries seem to be in a more nationalist mood, pushing back against massive global change.
Now, in 2024, the two countries are also going through elections only a few months apart. Only the UK may be going in a very different direction.
I'm Hannah Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic.
And today, we're going to dig into the UK elections with London-based Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis. All polls show that the Conservative Party, also known as the Tories, is headed for a massive and bruising loss, while the Labour Party is threading the needle in a really effective way.
And then, waiting in the wings, a populist right-wing faction. Hi, Helen.
Hello. Hey.
So your election is coming up way sooner than ours. Yeah.
We're having a six-week election campaign, which I would highly recommend, rather than the American one, which seems to last about three and a half years. It's true.
It's kind of unimaginable. And I feel like you guys are rudely holding your election on American Independence Day.

Like, should we read anything into that?

It's rude.

Yeah, I think that ship has sailed.

I don't think you can be re-independent again, I'm afraid.

Oh, boy.

So everything I read about the election says that the Conservative Party will lose, like really, really, really lose. That has been the picture in the polls since about 2022, is that the ruling Conservative Party, the centre-right party, has took a knock back then and has never really recovered.
And everyone sort of naturally assumed, you know, well, the Conservatives have got this incredible campaigning machine. As soon as the general election kicks in, the polls will narrow.
And actually, the story is that they really haven't. The Conservative campaign has been a disaster show top to bottom.
You know, this was a party that once styled itself as the natural party of government. And it is a complete basket case.
You know, as we're talking, several people around Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, have been accused of placing bets on the election date using insider information that they gathered. That's the level of sort of minor league crackpottery that we're talking about.
OK, I just want to slow one thing down. He called for elections.
A lot about that not only is not obvious to an American audience, it's not obvious to anyone, like why he would call an election now when they were so behind. So maybe just start with the basics.
What does that mean that your current PM can call an election? And why did he do it now? So one of the prerogatives of the British prime minister, there was a brief pause in this, but currently, is they get to choose when the election date is. And so he went out into Downing Street, outside the Prime Minister's official residence in London, to announce that he decided to call this unexpected surprise election.
And it poured with rain. And he hadn't taken an umbrella, so that was bad.
So all the pictures were called things like, you know, Drowning Street and stuff like that. Bad.
And then there's been, for the last couple of years, actually since Brexit, there's been a protester who has stood outside over House of Commons or Downing Street, often playing very loud songs through a loudspeaker. And the song that he was playing, very obviously in the background of Rishi Senek giving that speech, is D Reams' Things Can Only Get Better, which is the anthem for the 1997 Labour landslide.
This is proof that the plan and priorities I set out are working. And if you know that song, you could hear...
Rishi Sunak started speaking, it started raining, and then you could hear the verse of that song building and you knew what was coming. And it was just this sort of sense of terrible, yawning horror.
But this hard-earned economic stability was only ever meant to be the beginning. So one thing after another, these gaffes have just piled up.
And the thing that's been really interesting about it is normally you'd expect the Conservative Party to get a relatively easy ride from the print press, which in the UK is very right-leaning. But even they have been forced to concede it's going really, really badly.
Right. So but why if it's going so badly, why would he call the election now? Like I thought he had a little while to go before he absolutely had to.
So Rishi Zanek had months and months left to go, but he decided to go early. And there are a couple of theories about why he did this.
One of them was that he expected worse economic news to come out over the summer. So inflation has been stubbornly high.
Actually, it's ended up dropping slightly. Interest rates, the worry would stay high and that more people would come off fixed-term mortgage deals that they'd gone on to when interest rates were much lower and therefore their mortgages would jump dramatically and therefore they'd think that the economic picture was bad and be likely to vote against the government.
And then also the summer is the peak time for small boats arriving carrying asylum seekers and illegal immigrants from France into Britain. And that has been a big campaigning issue of the Conservatives.
One of their pledges in government was to, quote, stop the boats. And they've been completely unable to do that.
And I think will always be unable to do that for the same reason that, you know, the rouse about the border wall with Mexico, you know, you can clamp down on it, but you will never stop people trying to make those journeys because, you know, the rewards for them are so high and their situations are so desperate on the other side. So, you know, all of those factors, I think, made him think that things were only going to get worse over the summer.
And he was just constantly going to be asked, you know, when are you going to call the election? When are you going to call the election? And maybe you should just get it out of the way. Yeah.
I mean, you're just describing Rishi Sunak's tenure. But the interesting thing about this moment is that they've been in power for 14 years.
I mean, it just seems like a huge, crashingly huge moment, like they're just falling off a cliff. It's extraordinary.
I mean, my entire career covering British politics has been under conservative rule. And the thing that's really important to remember is that David Cameron was the Tory prime minister from 2010 to 2016.
And that was, you know, it was a tough era of austerity, but the government was relatively kind of stable. It was a coalition and then a Tory majority.
Then Brexit happens in 2016. And after that, in relatively quick succession, you have Theresa May who can't get a Brexit deal through.
And then Boris Johnson does get a Brexit deal through and then collapses in a chaos of having partied through COVID, basically,

and broken COVID rules.

And then he's brought down the Tory members,

then choose Liz Truss, who wants to cut the tax rates for top earners,

bring in this very kind of libertarian budget,

spooks the markets and the cost of our debt goes up.

She lasts 49 days, depending on how you count it,

and then they bring in Rishi Sinek, the runner-up to her.

So we... and the cost of our debt goes up.
She lasts 49 days, depending on how you count it. And then they bring in Rishi Sinek, the runner-up to her.
So after Brexit, what it did is you can say Brexit really killed the Tory party. They got everything they ever wanted.
The thing that they'd said was this great impossible dream, the Eurosceptic right, for a long time. And then it was an incredibly poisoned chalice.
Well, it's interesting because it feels like I haven't heard the word Brexit very much in this election. Like what happened to all of those intense politics of Brexit? Yeah, I mean, I interviewed Anon Menon, who works for a think tank called UK and a Changing Europe.
And he said the thing that unites both Leavers and Remainers in the focus groups that we do is they don't want to talk about Brexit. They're bored of it or they're, you know, for the Lea thing that they were promised.
And for the Remainers, it's something that they hated that was done to them. And they feel angry about it.
But they also know the question can't be reopened. That's kind of fascinating to me, because one of the reasons I think that so many people are voting against the Conservatives, and I think the way to see this election is it's an anti-Conservative election, because the votes are going from them to the Liberal Democrats, who are a sort of centrist party.
They're going to Reform, which is a radical right party, and they're going to Labour, which is a centre-left party. But so it's an anti-Tory election and people feel that the Conservatives just messed up and they spent a lot of time, you know, spent three years not doing Brexit after the country voted for it.
And then the big question now, of course, is that really Britain's economy is in a pretty woeful state. Our productivity is quite low.
Our medical waiting lists are very long. The only thing really that would be a kind of instant win would be rejoining the single market, which is what we were in when we were in the European Union.
And that is something that just Labour do not want to talk about because, you know, the idea that Brexit has been betrayed would be a great rallying cause for the kind of radical right again. And so Labour's approach in this election, you might say we're about to have a great big swing back to the centre left.
But that's moderated by the fact that in order to win, Labour have been very, very cautious about their programme. You know, they've basically accepted the kind of spending envelope that they've inherited.
You know, they're not planning to splash cash when they come in at all. And they're also, what they say now, is they're not planning to reopen the question of our relationship with the European Union.
I don't think that's true, but that's what they're saying. You know, it's interesting what you just said about the British economy.
It's not how I think about it. I generally think of the UK as a pretty well-to-do, prosperous place.
I think it's very hard maybe for Americans to realize when the bits of British culture they consume are, you know, maybe it's Downton Abbey or Doctor Who or whatever it might be. But Britain is a much poorer country than America.
By European standards, it's not doing too badly. But by American standards, you know, we do not drive as nice cars as you do.
We do not live in as big a houses as you do on average. And so the public realm has felt like it's really fraying.
At the moment, about one in five people are on a waiting list for medical care under the National Health Service. And that's huge.
There are people in that 50 to 64 age group who haven't gone back to work full time since COVID. Now, that might be that they're suffering from, you know, the after effects of COVID.
That might be that they're, say, waiting for a knee operation or to see someone about their heart trouble or whatever it might be. And they are just sort of stuck on those waiting lists.
And this is a really big problem for the Conservatives, particularly because their voting base is so old. So they're fishing for in a pool of, you know, we'll protect pensioner benefits, we'll protect pensions.
But then also that is exactly the same group that is most in need of medical care and is most probably therefore likely to be waiting, languishing on a waiting list, waiting to see, you know, a specialist doctor. Right.
OK, so this isn't sort of abstract budget issues. These are sort of day to day real life issues.
Was there something, if you look back at conservative rules, so forget about the politics that people look back on and they said, oh, the Tories mishandled the economy in this or that way. And that's why they're even relatively worse off in the last eight years than the US.
Well, this is my personal opinion. But yes, I think the entire program of what was called austerity under David Cameron and George Osborne in the early 2010s was a mistake.
That was a time when interest rates were low. We could have borrowed money to invest in public services.
Instead, they went through a big programme of cutting back the state. In Britain, local authorities are responsible for social care.
So if you need at-home care, either as a vulnerable adult or as a child, those things are in the gift of councils. And so council budgets have been stripped back hugely.
You know, they probably did have some fat in them coming out of the Labour years. And, you know, they coasted downhill on some of that.
But the gaps have really begun to show now. Things do look quite threadbare, I think.
All right. So we've discussed the Conservative Party and what went wrong during their time in power.
So what would the country look like under Labour? That's after the break. All right, Helen, we've talked a lot about the Tories, but it seems like Labour is the one that are about to be in control.
So what's up with them? Well, Labour has had an absolutely wild transformation in the last five years. In 2015, Labour lost to the Conservatives.
You know, I think one that they were perhaps hoping to win. And at that point, the members elected Jeremy Corbyn, who was a lifelong backbencher, you know, thorn in the side of the Labour leadership.
He was a socialist, he was anti-war, he was anti-imperialist. You know, he came from that very particular left, hard left tradition.
And he was absolutely terrifying to the conservative press. You know, it turned out he did not too bad in the 2017 election, admittedly against a very poor opponent in Theresa May.
But by 2019, people had really bought the idea that he was, A, not up to it, and B, you know, kind of a radical leftist, essentially. Right.
And so Keir Starmer was selected as Labour leader, not entirely promising a complete break with the Corbyn years. He said that Corbyn hadn't done enough on anti-Semitism within the party.
But he certainly didn't come in saying, I want to smash up every bit of Jeremy Corbyn's legacy. But that is what he's done.
So he is basically a centrist. Well, is he? This is the question.
If you look at his life and record, you know, he was a human rights lawyer. As a teenager, he was at school with Andrew Sullivan.
And Andrew Sullivan says, you know, I was a kind of Reaganite and he was a Euro communist. Interesting.
Yeah. So, you know, he has obviously been on a political journey, even himself.
And the question is how much of that is, that's where he thinks the voters are and how much of that is a genuine conversion. But essentially what happened was that the team around him identified the fact that the only way to win the election was to move to the centre, which is what Tony Blair, the kind of great Labour leader who won in Labour terms, you know, won this massive majority in 1997, and said elections are won from the centre.
And so the analysis that Labour made was, we don't want to pile up votes in the cities, you know, in university towns. Where we want to win is we want to win back that red wall of those northern English seats.
Every voter we win back from the Conservatives is kind of worth double, given that we're the only two parties that might lead the country. And so they moved really definitively to the centre, both in economic terms and in cultural terms.
Starmer and his deputy, Angela Rayner, took the knee during 2020 and posted a photo of themselves doing that. And I don't think they would do that now.
You know, now they'd be much more likely to be talking about, you know, how important the English flag was and patriotism is and all those reassuring messages to voters in the kind of the middle and small C conservative voters. Interesting.
So what does that look like in practice? Like take culture war issues. I mean, they're very much alive in the US.
Did they just tamp them down and sort of not talk about identity culture issues? They've tried to neutralize that as much as possible. So take gender, which is a subject that I cover a lot.
The other Labour candidates, when they were standing for election in 2020, signed a pledge to prescribe a couple of feminist groups saying that they were kind of anti-trans bigots. Keir Starmer declined to sign that pledge.
He signed a milder version of a kind of trans rights pledge. And ever since, Labour has tried to tack a course down the middle of saying, of course, women have some legitimate concerns, but we're also a party of equality.
I don't think they've entirely threaded that needle yet because J.K. Rowling has been criticizing them for kind of sitting on the fence and not really, you know, fully committing to one position or another.
But they've certainly moved a long way from where they were under Jeremy Corbyn on that issue. They've moved a long way from where they were in Jeremy Corbyn era on, say, immigration.
You know, our support for Ukraine would be another one. Israel has been a particularly tricky issue for Keir Starmer because there are lots of Labour MPs with very strong Muslim populations in their wards.
And for those voters, we know that Gaza is a big issue. And Labour was quite slow to call for a ceasefire.

And that's been something that's been thrown against some of their candidates in, say, some of the Birmingham seats, for example.

Does J.K. Rowling have influence in a UK election?

Yes.

I mean, in cultural terms, yes.

You know, she was the splash on The Times when she wrote that piece.

Interesting.

But, you know, I don't think she will move an enormous amount of votes just simply because I think Labour is piling up votes where it needs to be. And I think although it's, you know, gender is an issue that matters to lots of people in the UK, I'm not sure how many people, you know, would vote on culture first rather than economics.
And I think that's the lesson that conservatives have learned in this election, is that, you know, culture wars are all very well when, you know, there's nothing else to talk about. But most people are not going to vote on a culture war basis if they the main thing that they're worried about is I can't pay my mortgage and I've been waiting for two years for a hip replacement.
Right. So it's it's it's just economic issues like economic issues rule the day.
But now Labour is going to inherit all those economic issues. So do you get the sense like they have some plan to deal with these difficult things? Yeah, I mean, I think I think you will have an incredibly difficult job because the fundamentals of the British economy are in a bad way.
And the levers that you would pull are rejoining the single market and also building an enormous number of houses so that young people can more efficiently distribute themselves and live in the places where there are jobs. And both of those policies have big losers to them.
You know, lots of people's entire wealth now, particularly older people, is built into the idea of their house. You know, that's their nest egg.
That's their pension. That's how they might hope to pay for social care if things go really wrong.
And they don't want to have any, you know, and also they, you know, they like their view. They like their amenities.
They like everything being as they bought it. They don't necessarily want a big tower block next to them or whatever it might be.
And so, you know, he's going to have real difficulty in, you know, enacting policies that have losers. Right.
One thing we haven't talked about and completely left out of this potential future picture is the Reform Party. Can you explain what that is and what's going on with them? Because it's important.
So if you've ever seen a kind of guy with a slightly kind of froggy smile beaming next to Donald Trump, that is Nigel Farage. You guys are so much liberally meaner than we are in certain ways.

It's so delightful.

Anyway, yes.

I mean, that's who he is.

Someone pointed out he looks a lot like he's been wearing this white blazer,

white striped blazer, which is kind of cricket blazer.

And he does look like the bad archaeologist in the Indiana Jones films.

Yeah.

Anyway, he is an extraordinary character in British politics. He was involved in a party called the UK Independence Party.
So he's privately educated, then he went to work as a city trader. And then he got involved in Eurosceptic politics throughout the, you know, the 90s, when that was a kind of fringe obsession of the right of the Tory party.
And he served several terms as a member of the European Parliament, all the time campaigning

for Britain to leave the EU. And then he really kind of came to prominence when that tendency

picked itself up in the Conservative Party. And it became the thing, if you wanted to become a

Conservative Member of Parliament, you said to the selectorate, you know, you said, of course,

I'm very much in favour of leaving the EU, whether you meant it or not. And so we ended up in this

weird position where the pressure was so great on the Conservative Party to grant a referendum that David Cameron put it in the manifesto for 2015, hoping that it would be traded away in any coalition deal with the Lib Dems, unexpectedly won a majority in 2015 and then actually had to do it. At which point, Nigel Farage sort of bloomed onto the stage.
He then helped win this incredible victory for Brexit. And that was, you know, that was the prime minister thought that was a bad idea and people voted for it anyway.
And the prime minister then had to step down. So Nigel Farage is sort of most associated with the core, you know, the pure core of Brexit, Brexiters.
Yeah. Right.
And then he seemed to get bored of the kind of tiny piddling politics of the UK and started going to the Conservative Political Action Conference, you know, the very big right wing jamboree. CPAC.
Nigel Farage was at CPAC. So I'm getting a picture of someone who's endlessly trying to differentiate themselves while the Conservative Party is endlessly trying to co-opt him.
Yeah, kind of. Yeah.
And I think he was also very useful for that. As I say, the print newspapers, which are still very powerful in British political culture, what they found Nigel Farage and his various incarnations useful for is for stiffening the sinews of the Conservative Party, you know, saying, well, if you don't give the proper Brexit, you know, if you don't cut back immigration, then people are going to vote for Nigel Farage.
Look how incredibly popular he is. And he has got incredible name recognition.
I was looking up, you, Garth, found that 98% of people in Britain have heard of him. He is an incredibly popular figure with his supporters.
And this has been a problem for the Conservative Party, which I think is analogous to the Republican Party, which is the non-radical, disruptive, drain the swamp, you know, tear it all down, I want to see the world burn elements, have lost the ability to argue for their own values as a positive thing. The centre-right has just lost the neck for making compelling arguments for its own policies in their own right.
And that's something that I think that both the Republicans and the British conservatives have kind of struggled with lately. Interesting.
OK, that is very similar. He's not the leader of the party the way Donald Trump is, but he's the leader of a kind of energy, whereas the conservative party has failed to articulate itself or any other vision, whereas for him, you know what he stands for.
Right. Okay.
So just to end exactly where we started, there is a chance then that 2024 ends with Nigel Farage having power, Donald Trump having power, and at least in charge of the right-wing parties? Well, that's the complicated wrinkle here, which is Nigel Farage's Reform Party is expected to win at maximum four seats. I think he might very well become a member of parliament.
But realistically, what they're most likely to do is act as a spoiler. You know, in seats that are a marginal between, you know, that once were a very safe conservative seat and now Labour are a strong challenger, if the Reform Party takes 5,000, 10,000 votes, you know, that once were a very safe Conservative seat and now Labour are a strong

challenger. If the Reform Party takes 5,000, 10,000 votes, you know, that will hand that seat

to Labour. So he isn't in power so much as he is.
Yeah, he's a dealmaker and a kind of deal breaker

for the Conservatives. But you're right, he does have an enormous amount of power because he will

just be in Parliament with all the privileges that that means after this election. And the Conservatives will be going through a leadership election because Rishi Sunak will leave.
And one of the big questions for the next leader will be, you know, would you let Nigel Farage join the Conservative Party? Right. You know, where is the future of your party? What do you think he's got right and is popular that you've got wrong? And so, you know, I think Britain has been relatively unusual in Europe in that there hasn't been this big radical right surge within the system in terms of getting seats just because of the way that our electorans work.
But if you look across Europe, you have Giorgio Maloney in Italy, you have Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, you have National Rally, which used to be Front National in France, you have Viktor Orban in Hungary. You know, there are big populist right parties that are doing extremely well.
Right, right. And so far, we haven't had that energy represented in Parliament in quite the same way.
Right. And the question is, a bit like Trump and the Republicans, is there some vision of this in which Nigel Farage manages to make the Conservative Turkeys vote for Christmas and reverse take over their party.
Now, I think they'd be mad to do that, but they have done a series of other things that I also think are mad. So I can't possibly rule it out.
Right. OK, so we don't know the actual details, but what we do know is there's a populist right force, both countries.
There's a conservative party slash Republican party looking for an identity. There's a Labour Party that's doing well in the UK, and we don't know what happens to the Democrats.
So those are basically the three forces in play. Yeah, I think you can look at the picture and see some of the similar underlying forces.
And the twin things about what do voters want? There are obviously a big block of voters in both countries who want competence, right? They want a government that they basically don't have to think about. They want things just to work and not really have to hear about politics.
And then there is a sizable block of voters in both countries who are angry and disenfranchised and want a bit of energy and chaos and want, you know, kind of some of the system to be torn down. Right.
So those are both competing factors in both countries, I would say. Right.
Okay, well, I understand this so much better now.

Thank you so much, Helen, for explaining it to all of us.

Thank you very much for having me.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend.

It was edited by Andrea Valdez, fact-checked by Von Kim,

and engineered by Erica Wong.

Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio.

Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I'm Hannah Rosen. Thank you for listening.