After another by-election disaster, the Tories must face facts – the British public is done with them

A national mood is an amorphous, elusive thing, but you can recognise it when you collide with it. For Britain, this is one such time, and it is something that is making its political presence felt to the governing party. The mood is summed up in the social media sphere as #GTTO – get the Tories out. It is quite tangible, even in Middle England.

Despite valiant attempts by Conservatives to blame the electorate for their own failures, the dismal showing by the party in a run of parliamentary by-elections cannot be put down to bad weather, local factors, and an ephemeral protest vote. All those things did no doubt have their psephological effect in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire; but the sheer scale and the nature of the Conservative collapse cannot be so easily explained away. The way figures such as Greg Hands and Gillian Keegan talk about the routs in Staffordshire and Bedfordshire, it is as if it’s the voters who’ve let them down by not turning out to save them from humiliation. That is, of course, precisely the wrong way around.

The Tory party has to take responsibility for what has befallen it, and needs to make a much more serious effort to understand why people dislike the government so very, very much. Some hate the Tories, some view them with contempt, others have given up. As ever in a democracy, the fault lies with the elected and not the electors. When a governing party starts to get mixed up about such basics, a rude awakening is inevitable. That happened, again, in the early hours of Friday morning.

So what went wrong? Certainly, the last few weeks haven’t been a showcase of unity and competence. The Tory conference was the last major set-piece occasion before the election at which to relaunch the party, and it was an obvious failure. It will puzzle historians for some years to understand why the party decided to announce the cancellation of the HS2 rail extension to Manchester in a converted rail station in Manchester, and then schedule a by-election in a constituency (Tamworth) that has been dug up for the project that has now been scrapped.

The idea of pitching the prime minister as the “candidate of change”, openly denouncing the records of the last five Tory premiers, was an eccentric one at best. “Time for Change – Vote Conservative” after 13 years in power was never going to make intuitive sense, and so it has proved. The lurch to the populist right, abandoning the net zero commitments that were a central part of the Tory mission for two decades and a series of random “culture wars” to be fought against trans rights and for motorists were merely puzzling. Cost of living crisis? What cost of living crisis?

For much of this, Mr Sunak has to shoulder his share of the blame – the buck stops with the leader. Yet it is also true that he is unlucky in his policy inheritance, and the factional, perma-plotting, deluded rabble he has the misfortune to try to lead. A glance at the trajectory of the opinion polls since the 2019 general election makes very clear precisely when and why the Tories began to lose public confidence and, to be fair, it was before Mr Sunak took charge.

The first inflexion point came with the start of the Partygate revelations, from which Boris Johnson found it impossible to extricate himself. The second turning point was the ruinous mini-Budget hatched by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng during her ridiculous (and mercifully brief) tenure at No 10.

The first scandal shredded the Tory reputation for integrity (never unassailable at the best of times); the mini-Budget wreaked the same damage on their record of economic competence.

In neither case was Mr Sunak a major player. True, he was chancellor, and fined for showing up at the notorious “ambushed by a cake” birthday party; but he was conspicuous by his absence from the rest of the misbehaviour. On Trussonomics, Mr Sunak was a vocal critic and warned his party of precisely the disaster that awaited them if they ever attempted such an exercise in punk Thatcherism. So it proved.

A party is about more than one person, even the leader, and even now Mr Sunak is more popular than his party, though his personal ratings have been slipping. It is the party as a whole, with such toxic personalities as Suella Braverman so prominent, that has alienated the voters – and it’s a process that, aside from the freakish “get Brexit done” election of 2019, has been proceeding for some time.

There is a negativity, a sourness, a lack of generosity and, yes, a certain nastiness about the way the Tories project themselves. In their last spell in opposition, Theresa May warned them about being perceived to be “the nasty party”. In the Cameron years, they wanted to "let the sunshine in", in contrast to the dour Gordon Brown. They stopped, for a time, “banging on about Europe”. They became more normal, and more resembled the country they purported to lead. They even went “woke” – no more or less than an acknowledgement of social and racial injustice. They offered hope, even if it was fanciful.

All the public hears from them is rancid rhetoric about invading migrants, internecine warfare, stigmatising the poor and minorities, and denying climate science. Probably most corrosive of all, though fairly nascent, is the party’s close identification with Brexit. Back in 2016 and after, when charlatans such as Mr Johnson and Michael Gove promised desperate voters hopes about “levelling up” that would never be fulfilled, Brexit was a winner, and the unique one-off coalition of voters assembled at the "get Brexit done" 2019 general election gave them a famous victory.

Now, though, Brexit has been exposed as a failure, and to be associated with it is a drag on the Tories’ already feeble popularity. It’s “done” and electorally irrelevant. With the pandemic, also badly mismanaged but now gone, the Conservative administration lacks a “project” with which to chalk up achievements, give it a sense of purpose and reinvigorate itself.

The tragedy is that not even the Tories themselves talk about the kind of country that they’d like to build over the next five years. That’s partly because they know they won’t be doing it anyway, and partly because they’re out of ideas and talent, and they’ve grown too distant from the mood of the nation they presume to serve. It is a collective failure of a party that’s been in government for too long.