The Conservatives are not very popular. In this country. Ever.
Maybe that’s what you’d expect to hear from a metropolitan leftie who consorts exclusively with like-minded pinkoes.
And maybe that’s what you’d expect for a party that forms the large part of an austerity government making the difficult decisions to get the country back on its feet after the last lot squandered all the cash on schools and hospitals.
But I’m not talking about the current Conservatives, the more-than-usually unpleasant generation presently filling the higher ranks in that party. And I’m not just talking about now, three quarters of the way through a parliament, with any honeymoon a distant memory, and an opposition licking its lips at the prospect of an approaching general election.
I’m talking about any Conservatives, ever.
Jolly nice bunch of chaps and chapesses, with an interesting and occasionally coherent ideology about how the country should be run. Don’t agree with a word they say, but jolly well done them for still saying it while the rest of the world bleats on about fairness and the poor – yawn.
But, for some reason, they are not viewed as loveable eccentrics, but as the natural party of government. The electoral system, and the settled state of major British political parties, conspire to give the Conservative party many more decades of rule than it deserves. And this makes the country think it is more conservative than it is. The political establishment’s centre of gravity is well to the right of where it is nationally.
One reason for this is that we have one right-wing party and two left-wing parties. The Liberal Democrats may have temporarily held their corporate nose and lurched to the right, but the third party has in recent decades always sat closer to Labour than Conservative in terms of its instincts and principles. So the vote of the left has always been split, and the vote of the right never has been.
In 1983, the high-water mark of Conservatism, 53 per cent of the vote went to the two major left-of-centre parties, and Margaret Thatcher romped to a historic victory with 42 per cent. Thatcher actually came closer to bagging half the voters in 1979, when her smaller majority came from 44 per cent of the popular vote - but more than half of voters (51 per cent) still voted for the other two parties.
The two left-of-centre, anti-Tory parties always get more than half of the popular vote – you have to go back the 1950s for the last time that rule was broken. And the 1950s was a decade when the third party never hit 6 per cent.
Of course, the LibDems may look back nostalgically to the 1950s once the 2015 votes are counted. If they score 6 per cent in next year’s general election, there will be plenty in their ranks who will say, ‘Ah well, it could have been worse’. If they hold on to a quarter of the vote they got in 2010, they can feel they have avoided meltdown.
And it’s not just the high LibDem showing that makes the 2010 general election a compelling example of how un-Conservative the country is. If you see the Labour and Conservative votes as a reflection of the personal popularity of the leaders, Britain starts to look even less blue.
Who could have been a more attractive Conservative leader than David Cameron? Not yet tarnished by any real-world failures, posh but with the common touch – like Tony Blair, but without the expired CND membership card. Cameron in 2010 was the perfect non-specific magnet for disaffected floaters.
And who could have been a less attractive Labour leader than Gordon Brown? With memories of him saving the world long since replaced with the image of him claiming to have done so, Brown was the embodiment of a welcome out-stayed, screaming 'bigot' at strangers, and in dire need of smiling lessons.
Yet, with the likeability factor weighed absurdly in the Conservatives favour, they still only got 36 per cent of the popular vote. The 2010 election could not have been a more open goal for the Conservatives, in the vital area of the leaders’ electability. The Tories put up Prince Charming against Shrek, and barely scraped a third of the votes.
Is it possible that the votes simply aren’t there for the Conservatives? Maybe there just aren’t enough people who think they are that kind of people. Thatcher never got half the country to think of themselves as Conservative, and the figure has only slumped since then.
If the LibDems fall of a cliff next year, the left may fail to pick up half the votes for the first time in 56 years. But, in one of those twists that makes UK politics so damned watchable, the left may be sinking below half of the popular vote at exactly the moment when it least matters. Because finally, the right-wing vote may be split as well.
Nigel Farage is the most exciting thing to happen to the British left since John Redwood’s Tory leadership bid. At last, the minority of British voters who tend to the right have a real choice. They can go for a Tory party that may be economically right-wing, but doesn’t particularly warm the conservative heart. Or they can opt for a man in a tweed jacket who doesn’t mind saying that foreigners make him feel a bit icky. Finally, some serious options.
And maybe finally, an accurate reflection of the unpopularity of British Conservatism. Or if not 'accurate' then at least a new, reversed inaccuracy.
