Voting for the Opposite of What You Want

By John O’Sullivan

Wednesday, July 03, 2024

 

We’re all familiar with the nightmare in which some terrible threat is chasing us but our legs, encased in heavy lead boots, move only very slowly onward as our pursuer gains on us. This election is the opposite of that nightmare: We seem to be moving toward a terrible threat — namely, the election of a Labour government with a majority of about 200 seats over all other parties — but our legs refuse to obey our commands to turn around, and we march relentlessly on to the gates that bear the ominous sign: Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.

 

Sure, there is a large unexploded nuclear bomb of an issue lying in full view of the voters, there between the campaign trenches (as we shall see later), but because it doesn’t fit neatly into the conventional partisan division of issues — indeed it divides the parties internally — it’s not discussed as an election issue or at all. We are thinking of almost anything else but that. And the politicians assist our forgetting with a series of distractions.

 

The biggest such distraction in recent days has been the scandal of Betgate. (At the moment, Wikipedia’s list of scandals honored with the suffix “-gate” is just a few short of 500.) Betgate began on the 12th of June when the Guardian reported that a £100 bet had been placed on the likely date of the election, several days before Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had announced it, by a Tory MP in a Welsh constituency. Nor was the miscreant, Craig Williams, merely an MP. He was the parliamentary private secretary to the prime minister, a job that is a mixture of personal aide, bag carrier, the PM’s proxy for dealing with constituency matters when he’s too busy with national affairs, and all in all a humble but necessary first step in any political career — in other words an insider with access to the information that made the bet a sure thing. Williams apologized for placing the bet — “a huge error of judgment” — but suffered no immediate penalty.

 

After that the scandal speeded up. On the 14th of June, the Gambling Commission, which had opened an investigation into suspicious election bets, contacted the Metropolitan Police about a bet placed by a police officer from the elite Royalty and Specialist Protection Command. On the 17th, the officer was arrested and charged with “misconduct in public office.” On the 19th, the Tory Party’s director of campaigning, Tony Lee, was reported as being investigated for having placed a bet on the election date. So too was his wife, Laura Sanders, who not coincidentally was also a Tory candidate in a Bristol constituency. On the 22nd of June, the Sunday Times alleged that the party’s chief data officer, Nick Mason, had placed “dozens of bets” over “an unspecified period of time” that the paper estimated would have delivered serious winnings. Other leaks suggest that there may be many more people under investigation in both the Tory Party and the Met. But the scandal seemed to be losing steam. Its most recent villain-victim was a Conservative front-bencher in the Welsh Assembly very far removed from Downing Street. Also — good-journalism alert — scandals tend to generate such rumors automatically and for the moment should be treated skeptically.

 

That said, Harold Wilson’s old adage, “A week is a long time in politics,” is vindicated yet again.

 

Betgate has ensured that the Tory campaign — which was already becalmed off Normandy — will not be reviving any time soon. It pushed all other stories, some of which might have helped the Tories, off the front pages. It suggested that people at the very top of the Tory Party are frivolous, corrupt, self-serving, borderline criminal, and extremely stupid. Many voters already had such an impression because of “Partygate” — the earlier scandal of Downing Street get-togethers that violated the onerous Covid social regulations that the partygoers had imposed on the rest of the country. That helped to bring down Boris Johnson and dissolved what little trust remained between ministers and activists. Now, just when Sunak might hope the curse of Boris had faded, here it was happening all over again. And what possessed Craig Williams to maximize his chances of being “caught” by placing the bet in his own constituency — the one place in Britain where a humble paid public servant would be recognizable as someone with access to insider information on the election date. In the dying days of the Tory government, the thought naturally occurs: He wanted to be caught — it’s a cry for help.

 

A bigger mystery, however, is why Sunak waited until the 25th of June to suspend Craig Williams and Laura Sanders as Tory candidates. It can’t have been that Tory voters would have no one to vote for in those two seats, since the two candidates were doomed electorally anyway. His stated reason was that he wanted to know the results of the Gambling Commission’s investigation before firing people. That’s a legalistic response to a political crisis. Losing a Tory candidacy is not the same as a penalty like a fine or a prison sentence — many Tory candidates would love to be relieved of that very burden in present circumstances. And not firing those who have either admitted error or been plausibly accused of wrongdoing suggests that the prime minister had something to hide.

 

No one believes that Sunak himself placed a guilty bet; he’s wealthy enough to turn up his nose at a sure thing. Two explanations of this reluctance to strike do, however, suggest themselves. The first is that he had no real idea of how many other senior Tories might be implicated in Betgate. Until he found out, he couldn’t issue a sweeping proclamation of executions. Even though his chances of retaining a parliamentary majority are nonexistent, he couldn’t risk ensuring an outright catastrophe by adding candidates he had dismissed to the several hundreds likely to be dismissed by the voters. And that at least seems a prudent calculation.

 

The second is that Sunak didn’t initially realize that closing down the scandal as soon as it emerged by a simple decree that all involved in it would be sent into exile was a brutal political necessity. Why not? Because he isn’t very good at politics — which, alas, is the opinion of almost all his colleagues.

 

Labour’s leader, Sir Keir Starmer, must have been watching this Tory implosion with his fingers crossed in case a Labour gambler was exposed on the news. But when a Labour candidate in eastern England, Kevin Craig, was found to have placed a bet against himself, it seemed too comic a twist to hurt the party, especially when yet another Tory, Philip Davies, had raised him and placed a massive $10,000 on his own defeat. Mystified as to why? No dishonesty was involved, it seems; both men simply wanted to compensate for the disappointment of their political ambitions. Alas for Kevin Craig, he was immediately suspended by a neurotically risk-averse Labour campaign so that, sadly, his bookie may be able to deem the bet lost before the election is even held.

 

Labour is therefore cruising nervously to a landslide by avoiding controversy as much as possible and stressing what it will not do rather than what it promises to do. None of the other parties have made much of a dent in this well-armored defensiveness. Labour’s most effective critic so far has been the writer J. K. Rowling, creator of Harry Potter and a sharp critic of gender ideology, who has forced Starmer into contortions of embarrassment over the party’s failure to defend women-only spaces without evasive qualifications. She’s removing the camouflage over one of Labour’s most important internal disputes — its parliamentary majority will strongly favor transgender activists over its feminist critics — and she has science, law, and the recent drift of public opinion on her side. She even has the leading Tory women, notably “Equalities Minister” Kemi Badenoch, singing along with her from almost the same songbook. All of these advantages (including Rowling’s formidable gifts as a public spokesman), however, are more likely to provide a prelude to the first battles of the new Labour administration than a decisive factor on this election day. From the standpoint of Labour’s critics, this is a powerful issue, but it comes either too soon or too late when ten other issues are jostling with it for public attention.

 

That helps explain why the Tories have been trying out the innovative technique of appealing to the voters to please not give their opponent too large a majority. It’s a technique born of desperation, to be sure, but it’s more realistic than either a defense of the Tory record or the promotion of policies that no one thinks will matter the day after July 4. Given that support for Labour is rooted more in inevitability than in enthusiasm, this tactic may succeed in reducing the Labour vote by promoting apathy as an alternative to casting a vote you may regret. But it also gives lukewarm and disaffected Tories permission to vote Reform since a large Labour majority is already baked in the cake. Moreover, a confession of defeat is still humiliating even if it’s necessary — which it is when even rare good news for the Tories comes equipped with a curse. Thus, the Office of National Statistics has just announced revised figures showing that the U.K. economy was expanding faster than estimated in the first part of this year — and faster than any other G-7 economy. And the curse? Commenting on these statistics, Paul Dale, chief U.K. economist at Capital Economics, remarked, “Whoever is Prime Minister this time next week may benefit from the economic recovery being a bit stronger.” But that also looks like evidence that the present prime minister has called the election too soon to benefit from what appears to be a rising economic recovery.

 

To give the Tories some small credit, they have shown real signs of fight in these last desperate days. Sunak was judged a feisty winner in his second debate with a ponderous Starmer, and almost the entire party hierarchy came out swinging at Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform Party, after he diverged from the U.K. all-party consensus on Ukraine.

 

As the BBC summarized the controversy:

 

Farage said he had been arguing since the 1990s that “the ever eastward expansion” of the NATO military alliance and the EU was giving President Putin “a reason to [give to] his Russian people to say they’re coming for us again and to go to war.”

 

He added: “We provoked this war. Of course, it’s [President Putin’s] fault.”

 

Applying realist logic to this dispute, we can see that the Tories in their desperation have identified the worst possible threat to their interests, which is not Starmer’s Labour but Farage’s Reform. The former may threaten Britain’s prosperity and national character; the latter threatens the viability of the Tory Party as a party of government. If Reform were to take enough votes from it to push the overall number of Tory MPs to below, say, 80 while winning 20 seats of its own, that would start a realignment on the right that would end only God knows where. And though they lack allies on every other front, the Tories can rely on all other parties and almost all the media to join in attacks on Farage. Cabinet minister after minister duly launched denunciations of him as several varieties of a “Putin stooge,” and these attacks received support from commentators, newspapers, current-affairs programs, and social media across the political spectrum.

 

There were obvious weaknesses in this combined attack. Farage had warned in 2014 that continued NATO expansion would invite a Russian response, and when Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine came in 2022, he had condemned it as “reprehensible.” If that counts as pro-Russian propaganda by a Putin stooge — and I write this as someone who has been and remains a strong supporter of both NATO expansion and Western support for Ukraine’s resistance — then we risk making impossible, even criminalizing, any rational debate about Ukraine policy. We have already gone quite far down that rocky road when we treat reasonable questions about Western policy — Are we embarking on another “forever war”? What outcome short of Ukraine’s regaining its full territory, including Crimea, do we envisage? — as some variant of “disinformation” intended to subvert democracy. That’s not sensible since we have persuasive answers to such anxieties. Besides, any sustainable argument about Ukraine policy has to take into account the success or failure of Ukraine on the battlefield and of NATO and the EU in other arenas. That’s unpredictable, and if there is a breakthrough for anyone, we’ll deal with it when it happens.

 

But as the recent French and European elections have both shown, European public opinion is not quite so monolithic on these questions as before, though public policy remains so. Even in Britain, the European country with the strongest pro-Ukraine public opinion, there was pushback against the anti-Farage barrage. When Boris Johnson denounced his argument that the West had provoked Russia, Farage produced a Daily Mail front page from 2016 suggesting that Boris had said much the same thing. A former U.K. ambassador to Russia wrote to the Times saying that Farage was more or less right. And Farage was defended in similar terms by Michael Portillo, who occupies a unique position in English life as a former Thatcherite secretary of defense whose 1997 defeat in a bid for a seat in Parliament was wildly celebrated by anti-conservative opinion but who has gone on to become a much-loved public figure on all sides by reinventing himself as the host of a television program in which he journeys around the U.K. and Europe on railways. With this peculiar kind of anti-political authority, Portillo said he didn’t see any sign that Farage was defending Putin. And that benediction probably gave nervous Tories permission to defect to Reform.

 

Thus encouraged, Farage continued to defend what he had said on Russia and Ukraine (and other controversial comments) in speeches and interviews. He is now a practiced debater and performed with polished effectiveness. Even so, his choice to respond may have been an error not because his defense was weak but because it shifted public attention from other issues on which he and Reform enjoyed support without the drawbacks of controversy.

 

Certainly that’s what seasoned political observers think. It’s an opinion neither confirmed nor denied by the UK Polling Report’s analysis of the last 104 opinion polls from June 7 to June 29. This shows support varying widely for all parties in the last three weeks as follows: Labour’s support varies from a 34 to a 43 percent share of the national vote, Tory support from 11 to 25 percent, and Reform from 8 to 24 percent. In the last few days that has settled down to something like — by my back-of-the-envelope calculation — Labour 40 percent, Tories 20 percent, and Reform 17 percent in national vote shares. There are other minority parties, of course, notably the Liberal Democrats, who will do well at Tory expense, but UK Polling Report guesstimates that these figures will translate into the following distribution of parliamentary seats: Labour 377, Conservative 189, Liberal Democrats 37, Scottish National Party 24, and Greens 1.

 

As the Report realizes, however, this guesstimate is likely to be seriously distorted by such factors as local historical voting patterns, by tactical anti-Tory voting between Labour and Liberal Democrat voters, by Muslim voters abandoning their usual Labour loyalty for sectarian Muslim parties over the issue of Gaza, by tactical Tory voting, and by the unknown number of “shy Reformers” (many of whom were previously “shy Tories”) who don’t admit to their voting preferences because they fear “official” disapproval — not without justification, incidentally. Conservatives are likely to lose — and Liberal Democrats and Reform likely to gain — from these combined distortions. All in all, on Thursday night, the British electorate will be giving the electoral kaleidoscope a terrific shaking-up with unpredictable consequences — if only in terms of parliamentary representation.

 

In terms of stable policies, however, the election will represent an extraordinary continuity. As many commentators have observed in recent years, British politics is in the middle of a vast realignment in which political parties change their class composition with middle-class elites moving left and blue- and white-collar workers going in the opposite direction. ( I discuss this in a recent Claremont Review article on Matthew Goodwin’s book Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics.) This analysis is not confined to the Right but spreading across the spectrum. In a recent New Statesman article, John Gray, once a regular National Review contributor and now an independent-minded post-liberal thinker whom many Brits regard as another Orwell, defined the election as one in which the fundamental choice at issue — namely, national democracy versus global technocracy — wasn’t really being discussed at all.

 

Indeed, Gray was understating his case. That choice is not a topic of debate because all the parties except for Reform are on the side of global technocracy without ever saying so explicitly. The Tories have been split on this choice since the Brexit referendum, and the return of David Cameron symbolizes the party’s decision to remain ambivalent on it for the time being. They are facing oblivion in deference to that unadmitted orthodoxy on issues like net zero and migration. But all the other parties that might serve in government – Labour, Lib-Dems, Scot-Nats, the Greens — are more completely submissive to the same set of orthodoxies. Voters will throw out the Tories, as Peter Hitchens points out, in order to get more and worse of the same.

 

It is not hard to predict a bad result from that “change.” As Gray, who understands that our new masters are not how they present themselves, points out:

 

Rule by technocrats means bypassing politics by outsourcing key decisions to professional bodies that claim expert knowledge. Their superior sapience is often ideology clothed in pseudo-science they picked up at university a generation ago, and their recommendations a radical political programme disguised as pragmatic policymaking. Technocracy represents itself as delivering what everyone wants, but at bottom it is the imposition of values much of the population does not share. A backlash was inevitable.

 

And a backlash will be inevitable under Labour in due course. But they will stick with the policies much longer because they really believe in the orthodoxies — including the delusion that they are experts. They would benefit greatly if they were to seek advice from the sadder but wiser Grays and Portillos who have been there before and know how this movie turns out. Alas, they won’t.