What the Conservatives can learn from a potato head
What the Conservatives can learn from a potato head
ANALYSIS: The Tories should approach the leadership contest as though they have one shot.
A party ruined at the ballot box after years of leadership chaos, an empty agenda and caught in the cross-hairs of a fierce battle about its political direction. Sounds familiar, right?
The above refers to the current state of the British Conservative Party which descended on Birmingham on Sunday for their annual conference.
But as of two years ago, it could easily have been a precis of where the Australian Coalition found itself following the public’s repudiation of the unlikeable then prime minister Scott Morrison.
Fast forward two years and the Coalition is in a place no one thought they would be — neck-and-neck in the polls.
‘When we lost in 2022, Anthony Albanese looked like a two-term minimum PM,’ Guy Creighton, a political consultant who worked on both the Liberals’ and Tory party’s most recent losing campaigns, told Latika Takes, in his first comments since the UK election.
‘Thanks to Peter Dutton’s disciplined commitment to retail politics — things voters actually care about — he has completely reversed Labor’s fortunes.’
The Coalition’s competitiveness, under Dutton’s stewardship, in the polls should not be understated.
It’s worth recalling how delighted Labor was when the Coalition chose Dutton as their leader.
‘Voldemort,’ crowed cabinet minister Tanya Plibersek. ‘Mr Potato Head,’ mocked left-wing supporters online.
But lately, the supposedly unelectable Dutton has not only begun to talk about winning but embraced the taunts.
‘I get stick all the time for being bald — not bald by choice,” Dutton told 4BC radio recently.
‘I get called Potato Head or whatever — water off a duck’s back.’
Dutton has slowly learnt to shelve his sensitivities and is now attempting to use humour to neutralise his opponent’s attacks on his physical appearance.
But that is a sidebar to his true successes which are unifying what should have been a hopelessly split Coalition, reorienting the opposition’s focus away from culture wars and sticking largely to the staple issues of the economy and cost of living, and finally demonstrating political courage.
It is easy to forget that when Dutton chose to oppose the referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, it was an unfashionable view to hold. Similarly, he has broken through what was perceived to be a non-negotiable no-no for Australia in proposing a civil nuclear energy industry, only to find a critical mass of voters are open-minded about the idea.
‘Dutton continues to be underestimated whilst Albanese is still being overestimated,’ Tony Barry, director at the Melbourne-based apolitical research firm RedBridge Group, and former Liberal party strategist, deputy state director and adviser to Malcolm Turnbull said.
‘Dutton still has a lot of work to do but he has exceeded all expectations to date.
‘However, it’s still Anthony Albanese’s election to lose with the electoral arithmetic still very difficult for the Coalition.
‘At the moment we don’t know where these numbers are landing in a very fragmented electorate including the Teal seats.’
Barry has been one of the toughest truth-tellers to the Liberals over the past few years. So his assessment carries weight and underlines the giant leap the opposition has made from standing on the precipice of a near-extinction event in May 2022 when it lost 18 seats and slumped to its lowest-ever representation.
While Barry doubts the likelihood of Coalition victory, a feat that would rewrite modern political history, the fact that it is even a probability and that a minority Coalition government could be another possibility, is exactly why the UK Tory party should be paying attention to what’s happening in Australia as it prepares to select its next leader.
Technically the leadership remains in the hands of Rishi Sunak who has all but disappeared from public life, as he has made way for the four leadership candidates to showcase their wares.
Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch — the two right-wingers who are seen as the frontrunners, and moderate shape-shifters James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat, will battle it out on Wednesday when they give leadership pitch speeches on the final day of the conference.
The drawn-out process, which will see the quartet halved and the membership decide between the final two, has struggled to get much media airtime until now.
The reason is obvious and understandable — who cares about the decimated Tories, five years out from the next likely election? The answer is not many.
Ispos found that 62 per cent of Britons do not personally care very much or at all who becomes Tory leader and this included 36 per cent of Conservative voters.
But they should care and Peter Dutton’s example is why.
This applies particularly to the Tory party members. Their last pick was the disastrous Liz Truss whose time in Number 10 was outlasted by a wilting lettuce.
When Tory party members choose their next leader ahead of the November 2 announcement, they should prioritise electoral viability over any temptation to engage in a bout of self-indulgence.
After all, the Conservatives face a similar dynamic – a lacklustre Labour Prime Minister in Sir Keir Starmer who ran on a micro-target strategy and won a majority on a historically low primary vote, an overall slump in support for the two majors and a rise of minor parties, including Nigel Farage’s Reform.
Polls might be a bit pointless at this time in Britain’s electoral cycle but a survey by BMG Research showed Labour’s support continuing to fall to 33 per cent and Reform’s climbing to 18 per cent, just six points shy of the Conservatives. Starmer’s own personal ratings have tumbled to below that of Sunak’s. And there’s five years of government, and painful decisions, to go.
‘It’s a difficult time to be an incumbent government and it’s even more difficult if you’re perceived by swing voters to be a mediocre incumbent government,’ said Tony Barry.
‘There’s a new tribalism and fragmentation fueled by grievance which is making it very difficult for incumbent governments everywhere.’
Unlike Australian Labor, there will be no prolonged honeymoon for the new Labour government, if at all. This is the result of the wide but shallow majority Labour won but mostly the result of the new government’s unforced errors, and Sir Keir’s inexplicable penchant for freebies from a Labour donor who was awarded a pass to Number 10.
Starmer has failed to justify or explain why he is such a grifter and he is in deep danger of cementing this reputation in the public’s eyes, just weeks into his premiership.
On the policy front, it’s difficult to see how Labour will grip immigration, that the riots that started immediately after he entered Downing Street, show remains a front-and-centre issue in British and wider European politics.
The unrest, some of which was directly targeted against asylum seekers living in British hotels, shows that immigration will remain an outsized political battleground in the UK for the foreseeable future.
‘Everything that’s happening in the UK right now just reinforces the existential weakness the Tories had on immigration during the election,’ said Creighton.
‘Nigel Farage’s Reform took millions of votes away from them largely because conservatives lost their legitimacy on dealing effectively with the issues of asylum seekers and immigration.’
Labour is also vulnerable. One of Keir Starmer’s first acts was to scrap the Rwanda deportation plan. So the government has no deterrent and no credible way of stopping small boats from crossing the English Channel.
And for as long as the boats come, Farage’s hand only grows stronger, likely at the expense of both Labour and the Tories.
Mr Creighton says for this reason, the Tories should be choosing its new leader sooner rather than later so it can focus on tackling the effects felt by the record levels of immigration, rather than getting bogged down in culture wars, including the faux battle about whether Britain should withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights.
‘The focus for the next Tory leader should be on substance over ideology,’ he said.
‘Conservatives need to reflect the concerns of their electorate and they’re not doing that by bandying terms around like the ECHR.
‘It’s important to remember that Labour’s primary vote was significantly reduced from their 2019 results.
‘To become an effective opposition they have to give a reason for all of the Reform voters to come back into the tent.’
Centre-right politics has suffered a serious setback in the UK.
But revival is possible. It is now up to what remains of the Tory party to show the discipline, focus and courage they were incapable of demonstrating when they had power.
A starting point would be choosing a leader who can take them to the next election, and dare to try and win it.
This is an updated piece first published by The Nightly.
As a voter in both UK and Australia (thanks to the Tories change of rules for people living overseas) I think the big difference is that Australian politicians have a more realistic view of their country's place in the world. UK politicians still believe in British "exceptionalism" and Britain as a world power. They seem keen to claim any minor innovation is "world class" or "world leading" and that the UK is the sixth richest nation in the world. This confuses GDP with national and private wealth. On GDP India is the 4th largest in the world but only a minority of Indian citizens are personally wealthy by world benchmarks. So tough economic measures are needed in the UK - trouble for Labour is that Starmer seems to make poor political choices about which ones. As someone said instead of a radical Government Labour is led by a Lawyer and a Bank of England economist. Clement Attlee, the greatest UK Labour Prime Minister, had a difficult economy - but he still founded the NHS and nationalised the railways. Two strageies that the majority of Britains wanted.