If the candidates for the Tory leadership sound much like ministers in the last year of the Conservative government, it’s because the leadership campaign started well before Sunak lost the election. But they lost that election very badly. To many it seems odd that the leadership contenders, at least publicly, appear in complete denial about this loss, and are carrying on as if it hadn’t happened. Given the nature of the leadership election, that puzzle quickly becomes why Conservative party members appear to be in disbelief about why they lost so badly.
It is easy to say that this is what happens when a party loses after being in government for so long. Many compare the current contest to what happened after Callaghan was defeated in 1979, or Major in 1997, or Corbyn’s victory in 2015. I think these comparisons are not very helpful. Let me start with the comparison that tells us very little. Corbyn’s victory in 2015 was five years after the previous Labour government, and it happened not because the membership were in denial about why they lost power in 2010 but because many ministers were in denial about the appeal of austerity.
You could argue that Labour lost in 2010 because of its large budget deficit and their failure to prioritise reducing that deficit. [1] It is certainly true that the Conservative victory in 2015 owed a lot to the almost total acceptance by the media that reducing the deficit was more important than declining living standards and a pathetic recovery from recession. Perhaps as a result, the consensus among shadow ministers in 2015 appeared to be that Labour had to accept even more of the austerity agenda than they already had.
But that consensus was wrong,
