Where the lettuce led, could Labour follow? Could the party of Keir Starmer repeat the success of a household vegetable and defeat Liz Truss in her own constituency?
The very question would once have sounded laughable. Truss won South West Norfolk in 2019 with nearly 70% of the vote and a majority of more than 26,000. Yet in its latest analysis, Ipsos has the seat down as a “toss-up”. Were the former, if brief, prime minister to be toppled on 4 July, it would be the mother of all Portillo moments; she would for ever be the incarnation of an epic Conservative defeat. That such a scenario is even conceivable tells us a lot about the current state of our politics – and what could be coming next.
The threat to Truss is simple enough and it’s the same one endangering scores of Tories in previously safe seats across the country: the right-of-centre vote is split, torn between Conservative and Reform, which might just allow Labour – who came third behind the Tories and Ukip in South West Norfolk in 2015 – to inch over the line. We’ll come to the wider phenomenon, but in this case there’s another element at work: the Truss factor.
“I’m not voting Conservative, because it’s her,” was how Carrie Batty put it, as she and her husband, Chris, soaked up some long-awaited summer sun on a park bench in the centre of Swaffham earlier this week. “Because of the chaos she’s caused our children with her wonderful budget.” The sarcasm was acid, as Batty, who’s 62 and retired, told me of the mortgage payments her two children were struggling to meet. She’d always voted Tory, “but not now, because I don’t want Liz Truss as an MP. She’s never apologised. She’s never taken responsibility for anything.”
Others confessed astonishment that Truss is even allowed to stand as a Tory candidate, given the damage she’s done. To show me what they’re up against, one senior Norfolk Conservative pinged over an image of a recent Eastern Daily Press front page. Its splash headline: “Truss: ‘I’m not worst PM ever’”.
As elsewhere, some of the disaffected Conservatives of South West Norfolk are moving to Labour, but most are considering two other options: the couch – several told me they’ll stay home on 4 July – or a vote for Reform. By his own admission, its local candidate, Toby McKenzie, a former teacher now involved in education management, is not fighting an all-out war for those votes – he’s a newcomer to politics, with a day job, so most campaigning is confined to weekends – but formerly habitual Tories are coming to him anyway. “They just don’t want to vote Conservative any more,” he says. When Nigel Farage jumped in the race, things took off: 30 new people joined up in a single day and McKenzie suddenly found he had a team of volunteers.
The Farage factor is undeniable. People called him a “disrupter”, and they meant it warmly. “Love him or hate him, he’s got charisma,” one woman told me. You might think the country had had enough of disruption over the last decade, or that charisma would have lost its appeal given how things worked out last time – with a celebrity prime minister who partied while the country obeyed the rules he made and broke – but apparently not. Instead, Farage remains a force capable of generating excitement, a commodity in short supply in this election.
For now, this is yet another lucky break in a run of good fortune for Labour, currently on a hotter streak than a Tory official in a betting shop. Reform may win the odd seat for itself, but it seems set to siphon off just enough Tory votes to ensure even improbable swathes of the country are painted red on 4 July.
For Labour, that prospect is the stuff of fantasy. Forget 1997 or even 1945. The Ipsos seat-by-seat survey would see Labour win the biggest majority for a single party in modern British political history, not so much a landslide as an earthquake. That’s one reason Labour veterans especially are sceptical of the polls – partly because they’ve been burned before, partly because losing is Labour’s default setting and defeat seems more natural than victory, and partly because few identify a red wave of enthusiasm on the doorstep.
But let’s say it happens, and thanks to that split on the right, the Tories are all but wiped out two weeks from now. Labour hearts will soar, of course, and so will plenty of others: the Conservatives will have received the punishment they so richly deserve. Even so, behind that lining of shining silver will lurk a cloud.
For then the scenario that played out in Canada in 1993 will become highly plausible, with a thoroughly crushed Conservative party displaced and eventually swallowed up by a further-right party called Reform. Farage has been explicit about that gameplan: shove the Tories aside now, become the challenger to Labour in 2029. The footsoldiers are in step with the strategy. In South West Norfolk, McKenzie is sanguine about letting Labour win this time: “It’s a question of going through the pain before we’re ready to take over,” he says.
Such talk is hardly a stretch. Such takeovers do happen. Look at France, where the Gaullists have been overtaken by Marine Le Pen. Or the US, where the Republican party of old has, in all but name, been absorbed by the Make America Great Again movement of Donald Trump. There is no reason to think it couldn’t happen here or that Britain is somehow immune to the virus of nationalist populism. We know from the referendum vote of 2016 that it is not.
And, make no mistake, this is the category – and the company – in which Farage belongs. It’s not just that he is a cheerleader for Trump; he is Trumpian to his core. Note his response this week to serial revelations about a string of Reform candidates, variously exposed as conspiracy theorists or, in one case, a supporter of the British National party. Farage did not take responsibility; of course he didn’t. Instead, he blamed the vetting agency that Reform had hired to spot these bad apples. But he didn’t allege mere incompetence. No, learning from the great orange master across the Atlantic, Farage cast himself, absurdly, as the victim of “an establishment stitch-up”.
At the moment, and just like Trump, Farage gets away with it. But that has to stop. Carrie Batty, whose family is still reeling from the Truss mini-budget of 2022, needs to hear again how Farage reacted to that fiscal event. He tweeted: “Today was the best Conservative budget since 1986.” Those lamenting that Britain has become a poorer country need to be reminded every day that it was Farage who pushed for decades to make the move that has cost us so dear: Brexit. Those set to reject the Tories need to be persuaded that the Conservatives’ core flaws are shared by their would-be replacements.
The Guardian