It’s a mistake we all make, and shouldn’t.
I actually don’t know if the Conservative Party would have avoided doing it, if it hadn’t been forced into it by an electoral drubbing, and there are some Tories, not many, but some, who are guilty of the same.
Self-reflection, and self-criticism are both hard to do well but they are essential.
Both Labour and Reform have spent a weekend not pulling it off at all.
It’s Restore’s fault. It’s the media. Left wing tactical voting. Disloyalty to the leader.
‘It’s everybody else’s fault. It’s never ours.’
There is of course some tactical advantage in having opponents who cannot learn anything from events. Or who learn the wrong things. But it is astonishing how deep seated it is, and how much it’s been on display.
The Conservatives have been accused of two years of complacency, not having learned lessons, still sticking to where they were at the start of 2024. Dead in the water and going nowhere.
The fact is, as I have said for many many months, that just isn’t true. Indeed change, and quite a lot of change was integral to Kemi Badenoch’s ‘renewal pitch’.
Is it finished? No. Does it extend across all areas of the party? Not yet no. Will it work? Unknown at this point, but increasingly possible.
Has it happened? Yes.
The introspection and analysis of why the party ended up ‘talking right and governing left’ has been tricky and awkward but it has happened. You may argue about the outcomes, argue about the process if you want, but arguing it hasn’t occurred at all is a line now solely used by our opponents.
On the other hand, publicly at least, and since Friday, there has been no sign whatever that our opponents, for that is what they have made themselves, are capable of such a process.
The normally effusive and vituperative Zia Yusuf has had almost nothing to say for 72 hours on his chosen digital battle ground. Nigel Farage made a video in a field with no journalists invited to accept their defeat in Makerfield, but there was little in it that was about Reform’s own contribution to that. He also invented placings in Arbroath.
Starmer we are told, and not by him, has finally accepted that it’s unlikely he can stay in office, and that trying to fight that might just be a humiliation. He seems surprised to discover this reality. He feels betrayed, by others. His loyalist outriders on social media deluded to a point that’s hard to fathom, are convinced the media set out to make him hated.
It’s quite extraordinary. A former Labour supporter got it right yesterday, that if Starmer has any obvious legacy bar getting into Downing Street in the first place, it is that he has managed to anger and alienate more people across the widest range of people and politics, in the shortest possible time.
However, a PM having to face facts, and a rival party having to accept it just doesn’t deliver in by-elections and neither performing as well as both they’d have trumpeted they would, is never down to them. It’s always everyone else’s fault.
Reform still outperform everybody else in the polls. So what is it about themselves that sees that not translate in five by-elections? If I was in Reform that is absolutely the question I’d want to answer because therein lies the path to success.
Labour still have that big parliamentary majority. So what was it about Starmer and the views inside PLP that has led them to the place the Tories were after fourteen years, in less than two? If Burnham can’t answer that, or answers it in such a way it makes things worse, then we are in for a very torrid time and they’ll be eviscerated at an election.
The Conservatives had nowhere to go in 2024, but be held firmly in front of a mirror and told ‘you don’t leave it until you’ve told yourself what went wrong’. Admit the promises made that were undelivered or underdelivered. Accept that for all the factors that did not help from outside the party, in the end, the failures lie within the party and if you are remotely serious about getting back you have to own that.
The most bizarre thing thrown at the Tories this weekend, in a rather obvious bout of defensive cope, was ‘so you won a seat and some council seats’ so what? One swallow doesn’t make a summer.’
The reason that is hard to swallow as a Tory is nobody is suggesting it does. If you look carefully they really aren’t suggesting summer just arrived, even when weather wise it actually has. There are evident signs the Tories are far from dead, and that revival is real and possible. But nobody sensible thinks it’s bunting and celebration time. There is actually a brutal realism at work at the top.
One seat and some council wins against Reform, are nothing but encouraging moments. They guarantee nothing. Badenoch can’t drag the party into her own popularity slip stream all on her own. It will also take a long time to happen if it’s going to. The main reasons the Tories won in Aberdeen won’t translate fully in other seats. They know this. They’ve got better at reading the future from their own past.
Yes, they beat Reform in a handful of Essex council seats, but a month ago the Conservatives took a big pasting at Reform’s hands in local elections, where hundreds of seats were up for grabs. The reasons for that are raw with voters and still there from 2024. But Tories know that and accept that’s the case and that it’s their fault, so they just have to work harder at changing that around, and they are. Slowly.
I see no appetite to do all that from Starmer or Reform. Anything but the mirror, and despite the fact that such a weakness helps us, it seems a crying shame they can’t, for their own good, take a hard look and go ‘You know what folks, this is on us, and we need to do better’
Rather than what I fully expect, shooting the messenger and anybody else it can be pinned on.