Where are we now?Back on 4th of June I wrote a quick tweet/FB status update reading:
Funniest outcome: enough letters go in to have a No Confidence vote against Johnson, he then wins it, and then the Conservatives catastrophically lose the two by-elections.
I was then absolutely delighted to see all of this come to pass.
A friend asked me what next, to which my reply was "Infighting, lots of infighting." Which, again, I am delighted by.
An overly-long digression about where Conservative Support has come from in the last few yearsWhat *almost* won the 2010 election for the Conservatives was at least a pretence of reform. David Cameron promised a Caring Conservative Party, who worried about the melting icecaps and wanted to "hug a hoody". Enough people believed it that they won the most votes, but they needed a coalition to take power.
What won the 2015 election for them was a mixture of them promising an EU referendum (in order to defang UKIP, who were eating their vote, a problem which would have been much smaller under a better voting system).
Things then get very wobbly for them in 2017, with Theresa May calling a snap election that was seen as going very badly for her, in order to get Brexit done. She actually added over 2 million votes to the Conservative totals, but as Labour added 3million under Corbyn they still ended up in a desperate position, with Johnson then able to launch his coup on the party in order to Get Brexit Done.
And that slogan got them a rather larger majority in 2019 - not because Johnson actally got significantly more votes, but because Corbyn's support collapsed.
My point being that from 2015 to now Conservative support has been higher because they owned The Brexit Project. And, by and large, support for Brexit has collapsed.
16% of people in the UK think it's going well.. 30% of Leave voters think it's going well. 33% of Conservative voters think it's going well. That's not enough support to be able to just shout "Brexit!" and win an election any more.
To the point where Labour, after very-carefully avoiding talking about Brexit since we actually left have now started
talking about what they could do better (Not going nearly far enough, of course, but that's Labour for you).
Where next?Johnson doesn't want to go. He's annoying large swathes of his party, but not enough to have lost the vote of no confidence. He might lose it if it was taken again now, but that's not certain, and to have it again now they'd need to change the Conservative leadership election rules. Which might happen after
the 1922 Committee election. I strongly suspect that Johnson will fight to the end. Which is great for anyone who likes to see the Conservatives tear themselves apart.
And after that, anyone who stands to replace him will either be a full-on Brexit extremist (and unlikely to carry the country with them) or will cause large chunks of their party to go to war with them over Brexit. Both options sound fine to me.
I don't see us getting an election before January 2025 unless something changes very significantly. The widlcard will be if Johnson decides that he's happy to throw the Conservative Party to the wolves if it means he has a chance of keeping power and
avoiding the investigation into his repeatedly lying to parliament. And, I see that, once again, people are hoping
The Queen will save them. Which doesn't seem like the kind of thing that she does, to be honest. And it seems that
the Conservatives are preparing for an election.
When we get a general election then it looks very-much like the Lib-Dems will eat away at the Conservative heartlands, Labour will retake much of the Red Wall, and we'll end up with a coalition of chaos wherein the Lib-Dem price for a deal with Labour is
Proportional Representation with no referendum.
All of which gives me what I want, so I'm pretty happy about it. It also makes it very likely that something will go catastrophically wrong, because I have no luck with these things. So we'll see :-)
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