Throwing the Contest
From the moment Rishi Sunak called a general election for 4 July in the UK, the pace at which the Tories have been covering themselves in ignominy seems to have accelerated. It started with his announcement, done hastily in the rain outside Number 10 Downing Street without so much as an umbrella. He promptly went to the Titanic museum in Belfast. Late last week, it turned out that Tories in a position to hear rumblings from Downing Street used their insider knowledge to place winning bets about when the general election would be set.
Don’t take my word for it that they have been an unbelievably blundering political party. Click here to read a handy summary of the main missteps published by the Independent before the betting scandal was even in full swing.
This has many people wondering how they can be so incompetent—and how there is anything still standing in this country after 14 years of having these people in charge.
This has me wondering something more outlandish.
What if they are being this absurd on purpose? What if they want to be absolutely, positively certain they lose this election?
Why?
Nearly everything about the UK has deteriorated since the Tories took over in 2010.
In theory, government wasn’t entirely theirs. In theory, at first they governed in coalition with the Liberal Democrats. In practice, Tories routinely steamrolled over the Lib Dems. Many voters hoped the Lib Dems would have a moderating effect on any Tory extremes (including me, although in 2010 I didn’t have citizenship and voting rights yet). When Lib Dems couldn’t do that, voters punished them in the next elections, decimating them at the polls.
The entire package of what has happened in this country since 2010 sits at the Tory party’s feet. It’s all theirs. It’s a staggeringly broad catalog of bad things happening. One way or another, they’ve infuriated an awful lot of the nation and left coffers so depleted that setting things right again looks like a generation’s worth of hard work.
If I were in their shoes (which is very hard to imagine, but let’s try), I wouldn’t want to win this election. I would want to lose it so decisively that nobody could accuse me of being in a position to make policy in the upcoming government.
The next government has so much remediation to do that even if there were unlimited funds, it can’t be done fast enough to make people happy. Another general election will have to happen no later than five years down the road. By then, if I played my cards right, people could be unhappy with the new government because they will not be able to fix everything that soon. I would stir them up through the media to make sure they feel that way. I’d position the party to lie low for a few years and then rise from the ashes, promising to fix everything faster and relying on the public’s short memory to forget who trashed it all in the first place.
The USA has been through comparable political cycles. Once, a government on its way out there let an economic crisis develop unhindered, expecting it to blossom in the early going of the next administration. Unfortunately for the connivers, they misjudged their timing. The crisis hit before the next administration got sworn in. (Somewhere in Heather Cox Richardson’s posts at Substack, she discussed that episode in detail. You can read an interview with her about it here.)
So… maybe I’m not entirely crazy to be thinking about this.
If it’s what they have in mind, I hope it backfires on them.
Sad state of affairs in both our countries