Three things the Conservative Party can learn from Labour

There are many tedious things in politics, of course, but one of the worst has to be that no one learns from anyone else’s mistakes. Politicians do not learn from their colleagues and they do not really learn from their predecessors either.

They watch someone step on a rake and get knocked out then, weeks or months later, they decide to step on that very same rake just to see what happens. Hell, sometimes they end up stepping on the same rake twice, just to make sure that they really did get it wrong the first time round.

It is maddening as they are, after all, the people in power and what they choose to do or not do ultimately ends up dictating our lives. This is why I would like to help: there are lessons the Conservative Party could learn from – shock! horror! – the mistakes of the opposition. They probably won’t, but it is worth trying to lay them out. Here goes.

A divisive leader, disliked by the country but loved – loved! – by a healthy portion of the party membership. An ensuing leadership contest in which this figure looms large. A candidate who served in a prominent role on that member’s frontbench, and decides to show a bit of leg to those who loved the previous leader. Not a lot of leg; just enough of an ankle to keep them interested.

We know what happens next, don’t we? Keir Starmer was elected as Labour leader after serving as Corbyn’s Brexit shadow secretary. In the campaign he painted himself as politically close to Corbynism, just about, with a wink and a nudge, and now the left of the party feels betrayed.

There has been a civil war quietly simmering in the party for years now, and whenever Starmer distances himself from the man who came before him, all hell breaks loose. On the other hand, he remains tainted enough by Corbyn that other parties can still attack him on his shadow cabinet record.

Truss has had a similar trajectory, selling herself as a sort-of, just-about ally of Johnson in order to win over Tory members. It is a tightrope she has decided to walk on; winning may be easy, but governing will be harder.

Are you a Conservative Party member? Would you like an extension to your house, maybe, or the power to drink as much as you like without getting a hangover? If you vote for him as your next leader, Rishi Sunak can and will make that happen for you.

Well, probably – he’s not announced those pledges yet, but they can’t be too far off. In a bid to salvage his campaign, Sunak has been announcing policy after policy over the past week or so. Few of them sound like him; in fact, several of them are full fat U-turns on positions he’d held previously.

Leadership contests will always include their fair share of pandering to the members, and it is true that several of Sunak’s new policies should appeal to the true blues, but that is not how politics works. As Corbyn’s Labour found out in the election of 2019, there can be too much of a good thing.

Though the public supported many of the party’s policies individually, they did not approve of the shopping list approach to the campaign. Announcing new idea after new idea after new idea makes it look like you are panicking and probably do not have an overarching plan, and these are not things people want from political leadership.

I mean, this one should be self-explanatory. “The party is not the country” is something we heard pretty much continuously during the Corbyn years, and it is only fair that it is now applied to the other side.

Britain is, at time of writing, falling apart. The health system is collapsing, public services aren’t working, keeping a roof over your head has become an extreme sport in swathes of England, and climate change gets more concerning by the hour.

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It is, in this context, quite absurd to be watching the Conservative bubble passionately talk to itself about various tax cuts and whether transgender people are a danger to society. Do they even know we can hear them?

Still, annoying as it is for the rest of us, alarm bells should be ringing on their side. A party that isn’t in touch with the country will not remain in favour with said country for very long.

Well, I’ve done my bit. Now to hope that the powers that be read this and decide to…oh, who am I kidding. The rake’s over there, go on.