My son was just about to become a teenager when the Conservatives assumed power in 2010, fourteen years on , he has known nothing but Conservative Prime Ministers , Chancellors and Conservative thinking dominating what gets done in the country he has grown up in.

The Conservative approach to Government is coming to an end to be replaced by that of the Labour party. This will be a much greater shock to those who have known nothing but Conservative politics but it will be a shock to my generation too.

Rather than see-saw politics with Government’s changing every four or five years, the last 27 years have seen only two changes of party in Government. We used to complain about politicians not having time to put in place their policies, now it seems they have too much time. The system of Government that relies upon multiple consultations and endless debate between two chambers of the Houses of Parliament has reduced us to at best sceptical and at worst cynical that we will see change.

CHANGE

Change is written all over the Labour Party Manifesto and it looks to our endorsing a new way of doing things.

The news that a Savanta poll is now predicting that  Labour could win 516 MPs, which would hand Sir Keir Starmer a colossal 382-seat majority — far outstripping Tony Blair’s majority in his 1997 and 2001 landslides will worry conservatives – but it doesn’t seem to be worrying the General Public

The analysis by Savanta and Electoral Calculus for The Telegraph showed the Conservatives could slump to as few as 53 seats, down from 365 in the 2019 election, while the Liberal Democrats could climb to 50 seats, up from 11, to rival the Tories as a leading opposition party.

The idea of one party having over 500 MPs is radical. It would be pretty uncomfortable on Government back-benches for a start!  It is highly likely that the seat where I am currently typing – Windsor – would go Labour

The same could be said for the Cities of London and Westminster where I cast my vote.

North Dorset, where I grew up could be a Liberal Seat and Yeovil where I watch my football is almost certain to be Liberal.

We are waking up to a world where our local representation is likely to be quite different.

Conservatives – without a voice

A couple of Sundays ago, I walked round the Eton Museum, amused inter alia by its obsession with corporal punishment. But what impressed me most was that Eton has produced so many Conservative Prime Ministers.

There is an entitlement about the place that things will continue this way and I suspect that the school sees what is going on today as a purging of bad blood in advance of a revival of the natural order by the end of the decade.

But we know from financial markets , that when there is too high a drawdown in a particular period, there may not be sufficient residual value for a party to bounce back (the Liberal are still waiting 100 years after they lost their constituency to Labour.

It may be, that so appalling were the mistakes of the past five conservative prime ministers in managing “conservatism”, that the party has been holed below the waterline and is sunk. It may be that it will be salvaged by outsiders – Farage and Co who will represent the party as Corbyn did, at its radical and purist form. Such a party would have natural allies in the US and Europe in parties of the right.

It may not be a very pleasant thought to the few current Conservative MPs likely to be in parliament on July 5th, but their party leaders – Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt may not be among them. Ironically, the ideologue with the most in common with Nigel Farage is Liz Truss, and therein lies an even deeper problem for Conservatives.