Tories Have Destroyed Their Brexiteer Realignment

'They are now facing heavy defeat and richly deserve that fate.'

Who can remember the day when the Tories “won” the next General Election? It happened on May 6, 2021, to be precise.

A by-election was held that day in the Labour heartland of Hartlepool, some eleven years into Conservative rule at Westminster, with the country still going through the Covid pandemic and bad publicity raging over “wallpapergate” – the controversy about Boris Johnson bending the rules to facilitate a lavish redecoration of his Downing Street flat.

Keir Starmer was just over a year into his Labour leadership and obviously a very different kettle of fish from his extremist predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.

It was against this difficult backdrop that Johnson’s Conservatives overturned a 2019 Labour majority of several thousand and chalked up one of their own of almost 7,000. A seat that had proved out of their reach even in the landslide victory of December 2019 had now fallen into their lap.

It was a devastating result for Starmer. Nothing Labour tried had worked. Not hyping the idea of Britain suffering a worse Covid death toll than other countries, not “Tory sleaze”, not “time for a change” and not “same old Tories favouring the posh and the rich”.

Far from winning seats held by the governing party, as an opposition is meant to do mid-term, Labour had managed to lose one to it.

The idea of Labour posing any kind of challenge to the Tories at the next general election seemed utterly unbelievable. It was reported that Starmer had asked his aides: “Why does everybody hate us?”

A year and a half later the picture could hardly look more different. All Starmer has done is to stop going out of his way to upset socially conservative Red Wall voters. It has been out with knee-taking for BLM and in with Union Flags and the national anthem.

Meanwhile the Tories have very obligingly destroyed the electoral realignment that was serving them so well.

As well as dumping the talismanic Johnson, they have turned their backs on almost everything that won them dozens of Red Wall seats in 2019.

They were supposed to lower immigration but have instead raised it to record levels and finally been found out on that.

They were meant to send back the Channel illegals, but instead are accommodating them at taxpayer expense in 40,000 hotel rooms.

They were going to complete Brexit by out-toughing the EU on reforming the Northern Ireland Protocol. They aren’t any more.

Instead, they have put the tax burden up to the highest it has been since the aftermath of the Second World War and prioritised an unaffordable rush to Carbon Net Zero.

All major facets of the NHS are failing – from access to GPs to ambulance response times, from waiting times in A&E to waiting lists for routine surgery.

Living standards are in freefall. Levelling-up seems more a pipe dream than a serious political prospectus. Every few days another newspaper story arrives exposing the onward march of Woke madness in our public institutions, especially the police.

Standing by the guy who won them an 80-seat majority rather than doing the Left’s bidding by bringing him down might have been a good idea.

But in truth much of the mess was created by Johnson himself, not only via his lack of self-discipline in the face of Covid control measures, but also in the liberal-left political priorities he got swept up in, including the dash to Net Zero and issuing outlandish invitations to incomers from Afghanistan, Hong Kong and later Ukraine while doing nothing effective to stem the Channel dinghies.

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the Hartlepool result meant the next General Election was in the bag for the Tories. It isn’t any more.

They’ve blown it in the most spectacular and astonishing style, in effect sacking their new voters rather than delivering for them. They are now facing heavy defeat and richly deserve that fate.