The title of this post might seem like a daft question, because it has so many plausible answers. As a result, endless articles have been written listing some of these, explaining how Conservative doom was all but inevitable. But, at least from those I have read, one factor is often missing or is underplayed. That factor is bad luck.
I know this isn’t what people want to hear. Anger at this government is off the charts, and as a result it is much more satisfying to place the blame for their current polling position in their own hands. Furthermore, there is little doubt that the governments over the last fourteen years have been off the charts in terms of incompetence and harm inflicted, and my last post detailed just one part of that. They certainly deserve to be where they are because of their own actions.
Unfortunately, none of this ensures defeat at the ballot box. Take 2015 for example. Austerity was a disaster in terms of public service provision, macroeconomic performance and living standards, yet the Conservatives won that election. They had the good luck that real wages started increasing a year before the election, so they could push the ‘hard work paying off’ line. More importantly, the media completely bought the necessity of austerity, so voters were badly informed about how stupid and damaging it was.
In 2019, when Johnson won a large majority in parliament, few people predicted it would fall apart so quickly and end so badly, even if we thought he deserved such a fall. Indeed as many people wrote in 2019 about how the Conservatives had put together a powerful electoral coalition as are writing about the inevitability of defeat today, and to be plausible the
