Is that a Conservative death rattle I hear?

It is rare to spot “a good election to lose” in the wild, so when two come along at once you know something is up. Two articles were published in recent days that quoted anonymous Conservative MPs saying that it might do the party some good if it were defeated in 2024 and could spend time rebuilding itself in opposition.

First James Forsyth, writing in The Times, said that “some Tories are beginning to whisper a heretical thought”. A few hours later James Kirkup in The Spectator referred to “a couple of people who’d be good bets for cabinet rank some time in the next decade” and said “both have concluded that losing power at the next election would be no bad thing”.

Both sets of defeatists (or perhaps they overlap) give similar reasons for their calculation: the economic outlook is terrible; the Conservatives have been in power for a long time; a minority Labour government wouldn’t last.

This kind of chatter is the death rattle of a party. The last time I remember people talking like this was when Labour was losing the will to power before the 2010 election. Whichever side of politics you are on, this kind of pessimism is bad news for your side. Winning isn’t the only thing in politics, but it is the condition for achieving all the things that matter, and so if you are serious about it you should always be trying to win.

I thought Labour gave up too easily in 2010, not just before the election but afterwards, partly because the party was fatigued by the compromises needed in government. Just because a Conservative-led coalition was straightforward, while a Labour-led coalition would have been more difficult, should not have been a reason to give up. If Gordon Brown had resigned straight away and if David Miliband or Alan Johnson had been mad for power, either of them could have kept David Cameron out. But they weren’t crazy enough, and their party wasn’t hungry enough, to stay in power.

Forsyth reports that some older Tories point out that it would have been better for their party if Neil Kinnock had won in 1992. Labour would then have had to deal with the European exchange rate crisis later that year, and would have enjoyed no landslide election victory five years later.

To which the obvious ripostes would be (a) hindsight is a wonderful thing and (b) if John Major had had a more flexible policy on the exchange rate mechanism, the humiliation of a forced devaluation could have been avoided.

There is no such thing as “a good election to lose”, just the wrong policies.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator