I hope you enjoy horror films, dear readers, for British politics is about to be turned into an infernal, soul-destroying hellscape worthy of the sickest of Hollywood minds.
The next few years won’t merely be “a little bit worse”, as many delusional voters of a centre-Right persuasion have sought to convince themselves. The imminent Labour ascendancy will be truly calamitous. Every conservative nightmare will come true, and more besides. The Left-wing stormtroopers who are about to seize the keys to No 10 will enjoy almost unimaginable power, and will be far more competent at wielding it to annihilate their enemies than the Tories ever were.
Consider the following, all too possible apocalyptic scenario. On Friday morning, we could wake up to not just the greatest Labour landslide in history, but also to the Liberal Democrats as the official opposition. It would represent the Conservative Party’s greatest humiliation since its foundation in 1834. Sir Keir Starmer as Labour prime minister would face the clownish Ed Davey of Post Office scandal fame as leader of the opposition at Prime Minister’s Questions. The Tory leader, whoever he or she may end up being, would be left with two questions at the end of the session, by which time most viewers would have lost interest. The shadow chancellor would be a Lib Dem.
With Labour massively ahead in every poll, the real race is for second place in terms of seats in the House of Commons, and it could be nail-bitingly close, thanks to the Conservative Party’s epic implosion. Survation, the pollster, believes that there is only a 53 per cent chance the Tories will end up with more seats than the Lib Dems, a vanishingly small margin of error. YouGov predicts that the Tories will be just 30 seats ahead of Davey’s rabble.
Even if the Tories do edge it by a few seats – say 10 or 15 – their status as the official opposition, and the funding and privileges that come with it, would remain extremely precarious. The likely scale of the defeat will be crushing for remaining Tory MPs. Former top ministers will become obscure non-entities overnight. They will lose their ministerial cars and special advisers, and many will become the butt of jokes. Nobody will care what they say or do. Few will even return their calls.
The blame game will be savage. The Tory party will tear itself apart, perhaps even finally realising that it can no longer be the home of both Left-wing, high-tax, woke Remainers and Right-wing, low-tax, anti-woke Brexiteers. Some Tory MPs may join the Lib Dems, and others defect to Reform UK, further diminishing the party’s parliamentary numbers and potentially jeopardising its status as the official opposition.
Or take another scenario: what if a bunch of disillusioned Labour MPs eventually decide to quit their gargantuan group and join the Lib Dems instead? The Lib Dems could suddenly overtake the reduced Tory rump. The Conservative parliamentary group will need to be much larger than the Lib Dem one if they are to be confident that they can stay the official opposition for the remainder of the next Parliament.
If the Lib Dems were to overtake the Tories in terms of seats on Friday, the implication would be that the combined centre-Right parties – Tory, Reform and Northern Irish unionists – would account for just 10 per cent of the total in the House of Commons, with 90 per cent of MPs explicitly Left-wing, an unprecedented imbalance.
Britain’s system of parliamentary checks and balances would thus lie in tatters, and we would effectively become a one-party state, or at least a state where almost every politician thinks in exactly the same way. Lib Dems, after all, tend to be Left-wingers who find it easier, for industrial or cultural reasons in places such as Surrey, to be elected under a yellow rather than a red rosette.
The Tories would be hammered when it came to the allocation of select committee positions. The Public Accounts Committee would automatically be chaired by the Lib Dems. What would pass for parliamentary scrutiny would amount to airing Left-wing grievances on repeat: Starmer would be attacked for not spending enough, for not rejoining the EU, for not punishing Israel for fighting evil terrorists, for not hiking taxes.
Centre-Right and free-market voices and positions would be almost entirely absent. What is left of the Tory Right and Nigel Farage and his small number of Reform MPs would do their best, but they would be shouting from the outside in. As far as the Civil Service would be concerned, the Overton window will have slammed shut, and the views of millions safely ignored.
Ditto the BBC. If you think the broadcasters are too Left-wing today, be aware that it could be far worse were the Lib Dems to become the Opposition. Question Time would end up pitting a Labour MP against a Lib Dem, with Tories regularly excluded. Airtime balance on TV and the radio would consist in various shades of Left-wing opinion, with an occasional Tory or Reform panellist screamed down by everybody else.
There is little doubt that a Tory party relegated to third place in Parliament would embolden Labour in the most dangerous possible way. There is already talk of Starmer appointing Harriet Harman to the crucial role of chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, replacing Lady Falkner, one of the heroes of the anti-woke fightback. A ruthless purge is clearly on the cards, with the already tiny number of non-Leftists in the public sector set for the chop.
Labour, cheered on by the supposed Lib Dem opposition, would be emboldened to move faster and further in a socialist and woke direction. It would seek to leverage the Equality Act to conscript every company in the fight against “social inequality” via “positive discrimination”. It would double down on net zero and the war on cars. It would start copying EU rules, just for the sake of it. It would find it much easier to jack up taxes in its first Budget, including on wealth, inheritance and property. It would turn a blind eye to illegal immigration, and would gradually further increase legal immigration, egged on by radical open-border activists within the Left’s parliamentary ranks.
The best that can be hoped for now is that the Tories become the official opposition. Can that really be too much to ask?
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