Bong! Polls have closed for the May 3rd 2029 General Election. The exit poll shows…a hung Parliament. Reform UK are easily projected to be the largest Party with 275 seats. But still well short of the 326 required for an overall majority. In second place are the Conservatives, with a modest advance to 160 seats. Some losses to Reform UK are more than offset by gains from Labour and the Lib Dems. Labour falls to below a hundred seats for the first time since 1931. Now, we are going over to the count at Birmingham Ladywood, where the Prime Minister is thought to be at risk of losing her own seat….
Much breathless commentary about how “unprecedented” it all is. But soon the focus is on what the Conservatives will do. There had been rather implausible suggestions during the campaign that the new British Government would be an “anti-British coalition”, as the Daily Mail called it, or “a progressive alliance” to use the term preferred by the BBC. Labour, the Lib Dems, the Green Party, the SNP, Jeremy Corbyn and the Islamists, Sinn Féin. A Government of all the talents would be formed – with a shared endeavour of finding out what our enemies want and letting them have it. More power to the EU, climate change reparations, slavery reparations, full authority to sharia courts, a drag queen in every nursery school. All sorts of “progressive” ideas are bubbling around. But the Parliamentary arithmetic makes it impossible. Even if they combined forces, it would only get them to around 200 MPs.
The Conservatives could vote with the other parties to force another General Election. But that is not something the electorate would be likely to thank them for. So the choice is whether to offer a “confidence and supply” arrangement to Reform UK or seek to negotiate a coalition government, with the greater stability that would offer. The personal antagonism between Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch during the campaign makes a coalition an awkward prospect. But the Party manifestos are broadly aligned. Leaving the ECHR to tackle illegal immigration. Substantial and detailed plans for public spending cuts to allow both taxation and state borrowing to be reduced, with robust welfare reform featuring prominently. Net zero repudiated and fracking embraced. Lists of Quangos for the chop. Both manifestos have lots of pledges to “reverse Labour’s disastrous x and reverse Labour’s disastrous y.” Sigmund Freud’s “narcissism of small differences” were applied when it came to election rhetoric. The Conservatives and Reform UK have accused each other of being closet socialists. But there is less of a policy gap between them than between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems in 2010. Which had not, after all, proved insurmountable.
Yet I suspect that the Conservatives, anxious to remain united, would plump for the “confidence and supply” option, should this scenario arise. The hurdle to coalition would not be policy, but respectability. What motivated people to participate in the Conservative Party? For most of us, of course, it is about holding Conservative beliefs. We wish to champion the cause.
But Conservative MPs are a different breed from Conservative Party members. Most Conservative MPs are Conservatives, at least up to a point. But often they travel light in terms of core beliefs. “I don’t think we should be too ideological about this” they might put it. The ambition is more about public service, status, high esteem. About respectability. I realise it might prompt incredulity to suggest such a spur for a political career. But reflect on the Conservative MPs who were, or you can imagine being, head boys – or head girls – when they were at school. Rishi Sunak was head boy at Winchester College. Jeremy Hunt was head boy at Charterhouse. Forget the policies. If they are both re-elected as Conservative MPs in 2029 would they feel a coalition with Reform is, well, respectable? I don’t know whether Theresa May was head girl at school. (I think her school has sadly closed down.) In any case, she is now in the House of Lords. But let’s not be pedantic. It’s about a personality type.
Other Conservative MPs might have got there not because of belief or a yearning for high repute but because they are absorbed by the machinations, the process. Exercising power, or at least proximity to those exercising power, is what captivates, more than the worthy objective about what to accomplish with it. It’s about “being in the room where it happened.” One thinks of George Osborne sorting out the Cotswolds itinerary for JD Vance’s holiday. Power-worshipping trumped everything else. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were other Conservative politicians who enjoyed the thrill of the ride more than intellectual consistency or the approval of polite society.
I don’t mean to be too harsh on these overlapping tribes. It is reasonable to prefer respectability to opprobrium. We can hardly expect those who dislike being involved in politics to be much use at it. Think how much better Kemi Badenoch is doing as Conservative leader since she started enjoying herself in the role. The cohorts I have outlined are overlapping rather than segregated. It is possible for a Conservative MP to be staunch on adherence to Conservative principles, to enjoy the process involved in pursuing them, and to be distraught by those who regard their endeavours as disreputable. David Cameron did seek to pursue some important Conservative objectives as Prime Minister and was effective in doing so. But he’s also a keen snob. (His embarrassing candidates’ “A list” showed scant regard to increase the number of working class Tory MPs.) It is rather easier to see him getting into bed with Nick Clegg than Nigel Farage.
Yet there is a difficulty for those Conservative MPs with only a hazy notion of the mission they are on. Non-political – or rather apolitical – politicians do complicate matters. As do Conservative MPs who are not Conservatives.
Whatever the truth about Farage’s behaviour at Dulwich College, he would not have been a “natural” head boy, would he? I can imagine him getting into scrapes. Pushing his luck. An outcast. A troublemaker. The class clown exasperating the teachers. I don’t think a racist bully. But perhaps regurgitating some racist jokes he picked up from the BBC at the time. Not likely to make it to milk monitor, let alone head boy. That is the human element.
It might never happen. Most polls this year have shown that Reform UK can win on their own. Or perhaps Labour will recover and be returned to power with the resilient Lib Dems. Or the tentative signs of Conservative recovery will continue and lead to victory. On the present showing though, I suspect we will be denied a Reform UK/Conservative coalition not because of the election result. Or policy differences. But because it is all a bit socially awkward.
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