2015 was David Cameron’s annus mirabilis – the year he gained the Conservative majority that had eluded him five years earlier. 2024 looks like a very different proposition. After all, Rishi Sunak has not formed an administration after an election, and the Tories are on their fourth term in government and a fifth leader since 2010, rather than on their first and first respectively.
Nonetheless, 2024 will be the first election since 2015 in which Brexit will have been done. Furthermore, it will pit a Conservative leader who lacks support on the Tory right against a Labour one who comes from that party’s mainstream – and against a new challenger party, too, albeit one without the brio, electoral record or ratings of Nigel Farage’s UKIP.
So it’s not absurd to glance back to 2015 and ask if Sunak might draw lessons from it. What could they be? Cameron entered the election of that year ahead of Ed Miliband on leadership and economy: indeed, Britain was the fastest-growing major country in the developed world (though the Tories lagged Labour in the polls).
Cameron had avoided a recession on his watch. Sunak is on the edge of a technical recession – if not worse – and this Tory term has already seen one (caused by a global pandemic). It’s impossible to know whether the economy will be growing by 2024, though a two year or so recession seems unlikely.
Some recent polls have shown Sunak ahead of Starmer on the economy, though it is far from guaranteed that any such lead will hold for two years – or whether, on the one hand, the Prime Minister will pull his party up towards his rating or whether, on the other, it will drag him down to its own.
Whatever happens, most elections boil down to the Government arguing “better the devil you know”, and the Opposition urging “time for a change”. The core of Cameron’s 2015 campaign was his claim of a “long-term economic plan” for Britain. (Sunak has yet to come up with a slogan to sum up his own approach.)
Cameron pulled it off for three main reasons. First, although UKIP polled 13 per cent, it did so partly by hoovering up votes from the Liberal Democrats: one protest party ate into another’s vote, as anti-establishment voters moved directly from the yellow corner to the purple. And first-past-the-post took Farage’s party down to a single seat.
Next, Cameron stuck to his economic guns. Read his memoir or revisit the campaign, and you will find speeches focused on Europe or immigration absent. He wasn’t going to change the conversation to UKIP’s talking point. Finally, voters distrusted Ed Miliband on the economy.
Reform don’t have Liberal Democrats in government to ravage. They have had no European elections in which to make an electoral breakthrough under proportional representation. And they have no equivalent of a Brexit referendum for which to aim – no such clear-cut event. Which helps to explain why Politico’s poll of polls finds them currently at five per cent.
Nonetheless, that percentage taken largely from the Conservatives could be enough to make a decisive impact on the 2024 result – and Reform might poll more on the day. And it can be argued that Reform does indeed have an issue to campaign on with at least some of the potency of leaving the EU: stopping the small boats.
One pollster I know claims that the Tories banging on about small boats – as Cameron put it about the party and Europe – simply raises the salience of the issue and so provides grist for Reform’s mill. A glance at the 2015 campaign might suggest that Sunak would do best to present himself as the better manager than Keir Starmer, and avoid the boats as a subject at all.
But this would be a very partial reading of events. Cameron didn’t need to watch his European flank in the 2015 campaign because he had already safeguarded it – by pledging an EU referendum some two years before. It’s impossible to know what the electoral outcome would have been if he hadn’t.
However, he won with a majority of only 12 and, given the slenderness of that margin, the absence of a referendum pledge might have wiped it out altogether, as a slice of blue voters turned purple. The point can be contended either way. What can’t is the effect that the absence of a Conservative referendum pledge would have had on the Tory Parliamentary Party.
Cameron would have faced a campaign revolt, with Eurosceptic MPs lining up to back a referendum – as an earlier generation did in the 1997 election by opposing single currency membership. That might have been enough to stall the then Prime Minister’s push, and prevent him from gaining a majority.
Even if it hadn’t, it would then have presented him with a Parliament even more unruly than the one to which he returned. (Remember the long of revolts that plagued him: over disability benefits, Sunday trading, tax credits, academisation and much more.)
If a week is a long time in politics, 18 months is almost unimaginably longer. The last ten years have given us Cameron, Liberal Democrats in government, UKIP, a slim Tory majority, LibDems out of government, Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, the Brexit Party, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss – and now Sunak. Who knows what will happen next?
And, talking of Johnson, the run-up to May’s local elections may see him upstage Sunak as he upstaged Cameron so many times. Left and right media alike have an interest in puffing a leadership challenge and a Johnson return. Left media, because it wants the Tories out. Right media, because it wants to show them who’s boss (and reflect their readers’ disillusion).
Furthermore, Johnson faces a nasty Commons inquiry into whether he misled it over Covid parties, which should kick off in the new year. And he holds a seat in Uxbridge which is less secure than it might be (though don’t rule out his bunking off to some safer constituency).
Neither is it clear that he could command a majority of Tory MPs in a ballot – nor even that he would seek the leadership again at all, even in the event of a post-May Conservative crisis. Some of his supporters may feel that they had their fingers burnt in October, when he stoked their hopes of a return only to dash them.
But whatever takes between now and 2024, there is surely a lesson for Sunak from 2015. Which is to face up to the small boats issue rather than seek to side-step it. As my pollster friend puts it, the Prime Minister should try to “keep it out of the news by doing something about it rather than talking about it”.
A high court judgement on the Rwanda scheme is expected today. Whatever happens, there will be appeals, further legislation, and then more appeals, though the courts will ultimately do what Parliament tells them to do. Then there will be the European Court of Human Rights.
You will point out that the 2015 election did Cameron no good: that he was out the following year, brought down by the referendum he had pledged. But if you deliver the means that your party wants, you must also be willing to seek the end it wants, too.
Or at least be seen to do so – as Johnson was in 2019 when he promised Brexit by October 31, and found himself unable to deliver the pledge. That missed deadline turned out not to matter in December’s election, because what swayed enough voters was his commitment, his intent, his conviction. Can Sunak persuade voters likewise?