The Strangely Unnoticed Death Of Tory England

Also this week: the further adventures of Charley in austerity Britain; and some maps of Britain’s rail usage.

A friend of mine, who I won’t embarrass by naming, used to speculate that it wasn’t the possibility of being remembered as the last Conservative Prime Minister that haunted David Cameron: it was the possibility that John Major would be remembered that way. At the time, with the Tories in coalition and it not being clear where a majority would come from, it seemed entirely plausible he’d be remembered instead as the guy who helped usher in something new. This seems, in retrospect, quite funny.¹

My friend was, of course, wrong, at least twice. He was wrong in that there have been an incredible four Conservative Prime Ministers since then, and it’s a measure of the party’s recent sanity and stability that four Tory Prime Ministers before Cameron takes you back to the fall of Harold Macmillan, in October 1963. But he was wrong, too, in his fairly reasonable assumption that David Cameron was the sort of man who might be capable of reflecting on his actions and place in history, and everything that happened in 2016 and after suggests otherwise.

All of which is a way of saying you should perhaps take what follows with a fairly hefty dose of salt. But:

It feels entirely possible that Rishi Sunak will turn out to be Britain’s last Conservative prime minister. The next election is nearly four years off, and things can change. Even so, a 13-month old Labour government is plumbing unprecedented depths of unpopularity, yet the traditional alternative is polling even lower, averaging 18% and struggling along in third place. A chunk of the Tory party’s support has always stemmed from the natural party of government schtick, the idea that those who don’t want Labour really better get in line to stop it. (Labour’s support has of course been a mirror of this.) Coming third is thus an existential threat.

That does not mean that Sunak will be the last Prime Minister from the right, or even the last who served as a Conservative MP, of course. Long-term readers may recall that last year I got rather too into the Canadian election of 1993, in which the ruling Progressive Conservatives lost all but two of their seats; I was thus terribly disappointed when, in last year’s UK election, the Tories won 121 seats and survived as the opposition. Even though it was by some distance their worst result ever.

But Kim Campbell wasn’t the last Prime Minister from the Canadian right. It took the merger of what was left of the Progressive Conservatives with their rival on the right, which was called – yes – Reform, to form the Conservative Party of Canada. But in 2006, the new party won the election, and Stephen Harper became Prime Minister.

There are a number of reasons we don’t need to worry about something like that happening here any time soon, including but not limited to ideological differences, the tainted brand of the Conservative party and the personality of Nigel Farage. In Canada, the realignment on the right took 13 years; here, it’s only been one. But nonetheless, if I were in charge of Reform’s comms strategy, and I had some high profile Tories chomping at the bit to defect to the team with the momentum, I’d be planning to announce them in the week of the Conservative party conference this October.

At any rate: right now it feels entirely possible that Britain has had the last ever Prime Minister who will govern under the banner of the Conservative & Unionist Party. It may not happen; it may not even be the most likely outcome. But it is as easy to imagine the party dying as it is to imagine it recovering.

The reason I mention this is not to gloat, not least because the idea of a Conservative government led by, say, James Cleverly is a damn sight less terrifying than that of a Reform one led by Nigel Farage. No, the reason I mention it is because of the weird lack of media commentary on the fact. In the run up to last year’s election, the papers were stuffed with columnists pretending there was some uncertainty around the outcome; umpteen columns appeared with openings that can be paraphrased as, “Whisper it soft, but it’s just possible Rishi could do it.” (It wasn’t.)

Now the exact same people are writing breathlessly about the Reform surge, without noticing either that they were quite catastrophically wrong, or that something momentous might have occurred. Obviously this is all tied up with a very deeply held view that the Labour party is somehow illegitimate, but nonetheless it is striking that the coverage switched seamlessly from “Obviously the Conservative party is fine” to “Obviously the Conservative party is dead” without ever stopping to note that it’s dying. The discourse has taken a quantum leap, passing from one state to another without bothering to touch any of the points in between.

This is odd. The Conservative party used to style itself not as merely the natural party of government but as the world’s most successful political party. It’s entirely possible we are witnessing its death – yet few are discussing how or why this happened, or what it might actually mean. Few, indeed, see fit to even mention it.

I think, were it my party, I might be a bit annoyed about that.

Signed and dedicated books, available now!

As I may have mentioned, a new and updated edition of my first book, 2021’s The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything, is published next month. This is obviously tremendously exciting for all of us, but especially for you, potential book buyers of the world.

That’s because the lovely people at Backstory, the independent bookshop/bar in South London’s finest Balham district, have come up with a nifty service. Just click here, and you can buy a copy that I’ve signed and dedicated to whomsoever you wish. How cool is that?

Please note that at present this only applies to the Compendium. But if demand is big enough, we may be able to work something out on the other books. Let me know.

Charley’s Further Adventures in Austerity Britain

Reader, I have let you down. A few weeks ago now I wrote about Charley In New Town, a 1948 public information film in which the eponymous Charley – a cheeky cartoon chappie with a quiff and a “stone the bleedin’ crows, guvnor” accent – taught the inhabitants of austerity Britain² all about the wonders of the Attlee government’s housing policies. In reply, my old mate Mark Clapham alerted me to the existence of a second film by the name of Charley’s Black Magic – which despite sounding like a Dark Knight-style gritty reboot of Charley franchise, was in fact a nine minute film concerning the government’s coal policies.

As it turns out there were seven of these things – something I really should have known because, when I googled for more information, I found an article on the topic written by me.³ They were made by the animation studio Halas & Batchelor, and commissioned by the Central Office of Information at the express request of the chancellor of the exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps, who actually gets a script credit. They are, in other words, the literal equivalent of Rachel Reeves deciding to commission Aardman Animation to explain her tax policies⁴, which would probably be a good idea since someone in government should really be trying to in some way sell government policy shouldn’t they?

Nor did the government’s role stop at commissioning the films. They were shown in cinemas, before the main features; but there was limited capacity for such things, notes the BFI: