It was a decisive victory based on a rather tepid estimation of Labour’s ability to address the profound crisis that the United Kingdom finds itself in. The public finances make for spectacularly ugly reading. Debt to GDP stands at around one hundred per cent, which puts the United Kingdom in similar company to close-to-basket-case countries such as France, Spain, and Italy. The United Kingdom owes around $6 trillion and annual public borrowing is around $260 billion. Gilt yields on long debt are rising relentlessly, meaning that the cost of borrowing is beginning to outstrip the ability of the government to raise revenue through taxes to pay it back. After years of austerity budgets under successive Conservative regimes, there is a massive backlog of work to fix roads, rail, hospitals, and schools. Meanwhile, the welfare bill continues to balloon as the population ages and options in the increasingly low-paid services economy become progressively unattractive. Paradoxically, this is leading to labour market shortages on the one hand and rising worklessness and absenteeism on the other. Britain, in short, is in a mess, and its citizens know it. They are angry, despondent, and ready for change. But what does change look like?

As noted, the most obvious effect of public anger was the unceremonious dumping of the Conservative Party in last year’s election. Previously regarded by its own supporters as the ‘natural party of government’, the Conservatives showed themselves to be unable to govern in the public interest during the post-Covid era. Boris Johnson, who himself barely survived Covid, was ousted in a party putsch. Having spent his Covid years either in intensive care or frolicking with his staff at a series of illegal parties in Downing Street, Johnson saw his stocks fall to subterranean levels, with a public fed up with double standards. His replacement, Liz Truss, an obstinate libertarian possessed of a radical zeal to boost growth through tax cuts, failed to read the mood of the markets. She crashed from office in spectacular fashion after forty-nine days, a record for the United Kingdom. The mild-mannered but ineffectual former chancellor Sunak was barely able to govern his own querulous party, let alone a nation manifestly in need of a steady hand. The election could not come soon enough to put him and his party out of the misery they inflicted on themselves and the rest of the nation.

A period in opposition is not only deserved but much needed in the case of the Conservative party. The difficulty for them is twofold. Not merely did they lose the election, they were thrashed. Many of their star names – Penny Mordaunt, Grant Shapps, Gillian Keegan, and Truss herself – lost their seats, leaving a rump of unfamiliar or unheralded figures to contest the leadership election once Sunak did the decent thing and resigned. This left a thin field of dubious talent to contest the leadership position. Robert Jenrick tried hard to sound compelling but couldn’t shake the impression that he was out of his depth. The prize was won by Kemi Badenoch, a figure who induces ambivalence, even among her own supporters. Though bright and analytical, she lacks charisma and likeability. With a newly self-confident Johnson lurking just off-stage, she will do well to survive 2025 in charge.

The other factor hampering the renewal of the Conservatives is arguably more substantial. This is the re-emergence of Nigel Farage as a key player in British politics. Having succeeded in pushing Britain towards Brexit on the back of a tiny minority party, the UK Independence Party, or UKIP, he starts from a much more favourable position with his new venture, Reform. According to the polls, Reform has established itself as a real threat to both Conservatives and Labour. Farage, the architect of Brexit, now positions himself as the saviour of the nation from Islamification, the unwelcome ‘tide’ of refugees and illegal immigrants, and, more generally, ‘woke’ culture.

Farage and Reform are riding a wave of sentiment as familiar in Australia as elsewhere in terms of a rightward shift of political sentiment away from the liberal cosmopolitan embrace of globalisation and towards a protectionist, nationalist defence of ‘Western values’. It was a potent formula for Donald Trump, and on the European continent for Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni, Geert Wilders, and Marine Le Pen (before her defenestration). It is one that has fuelled a strong upsurge of right-wing parties in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Austria. It is also one that is likely to be a disruptive presence in UK politics in the immediate future. There are, however, two caveats.

The first is that Farage’s nationalism is much more obviously English in tone and texture than it is British. The distinction is important, and obvious to voters. Farage confects in large measure the comportment of a figure in a Jeeves and Wooster novel, complete with cut-glass accent, tweeds, and brogues. There is little love for Farage in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, though the potency of the message might just cut through anyway, particularly if articulated by local leaders with a following. But there’s the rub. Even if Farage doesn’t intend his parties to become vehicles for his own personal advancement, they invariably do, much to the irritation of other senior party figures who would love to share the limelight. In an era of celebrity politics and politicians, they are running against the tide. Farage is the star, in much the same way as Trump is the star on the American right. Reform would be nothing without Farage – and (nearly) everyone knows it. Can Farage go all the way and win the next election?

The omens are not favourable. The United Kingdom’s first-past-the-post system is a cruel mechanism for ensuring two-party domination. Third parties can do well at the periphery of the United Kingdom, where there is a following for nationalist parties (Plaid Cymru, the Scottish Nationalist Party, Sinn Féin) or local adaptations of national parties, but they tend to fare relatively poorly without an implosion of Labour or the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats did surprisingly well in the 2024 election, but this was largely due to the tepid support for Labour and the poor performance of the Conservatives, especially in the south-west, where the Liberal Democrats tend to do best. The Conservatives are undoubtedly at the lowest point of their cycle of popularity and are unlikely to do as badly again, especially if Johnson reappears.

There is another scenario that might increase Farage’s chances, and perhaps Conservative chances as well. This is a Farage takeover of the Conservative leadership itself. Farage has danced around the option of joining the Conservatives for more than two decades. There is little blue water between Farage and the right wing of the Conservative Party as far as ideology is concerned. Indeed, the Conservative strategy of tacking further to the right to meet the challenge of Reform seems paradoxically to raise the existential question of what a right-wing Conservative Party stands for. The issue is the one alluded to above. History suggests that Farage will outgrow the party he creates. The same might be true of the party he takes over or is invited to lead – in this case the Conservative Party. What’s in it for the fabled ‘men in grey suits’, who have shown with great regularity an appetite to press the leader’s ejector seat when their interests are threatened? Power, one might reasonably suggest. But if the history of the Conservatives shows anything, it is that the interests of the party are greater than the interests of one person, even if that one person were to hold the keys to 10 Downing Street. We shall see.

In the meantime, Labour stumbles along hampered by the expectations of its supporter base as well as by its own ideological inheritance. On the former, Labour was of course once the party of the working class. Now, increasingly, it is the party of the urban middle class and public sector, relatively cushioned from the vagaries of the market. On the latter, Labour has always been the party of social justice, of the welfare state and the least well off. That combination of variables works in harmony in periods of relatively high growth, less so when growth is feeble and welfare costs are rising. How to square the circle?

The signs so far are that Labour is struggling to convince the electorate that it is able to do so, even if it has demonstrated performatively that it wants to do so. Through a mix of naïveté and miscalculation, Labour has already put the markets on notice that there may be little wiggle room between the ‘rock’ of the need to increase spending and the ‘hard place’ of increased borrowing and further hikes in taxation. It will be a grind for Labour to address the chronic issues confronting Britain. And all of this before we address the impact of Trump and his overturning of the global economic system, the imposition of tariffs on the United Kingdom, and his signalling the end of US support for NATO, which will in turn impose new and unexpected costs on the Exchequer. It might be that, as with like Covid, these events keep the public eye distracted from the hustle-bustle of Labour’s regime. Starmer may, for example, be able to flex his statesmanlike qualities in the international sphere, in turn buying time for his embattled chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to come to grips with the increasingly challenging economic position. There is certainly no shortage of distractions internationally, and, like Emmanuel Macron, he may decide that his energies are better utilised there than domestically.

Even so, the 2024 general election may turn out to be the best election the Conservatives have ever lost. 

This is one of a series of ABR articles being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.