Charge of the Tory brigade
Former colleague: PM’s early election call “madness, suicidal, charge of light brigade”.
Image by Richard Caton Woodville Jr. - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Melesse using CommonsHelper., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4574200
Half a year, half a year,
Half a year forward,
Still in the valley of Death
“Now my six hundred.
Forward, Conservatives!
Charge for the votes!” he said.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, Conservatives!”
Was any Tory dismayed?
Not though the PM knew.
Sunak had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Farage to right of them,
Lib Dems to left of them,
Labour in front of them
Campaigned and wondered
For Tories, tolls the bell?
Boldly they rode, not well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell
Rode the six hundred.
With speeches like sabres blunt,
Followed his script throughout.
“Inflation is lower,” he said.
“Two thousand pounds of tax!”
Charging ahead, while
Britons ignored him.
“I’m just a regular bloke!
No Sky TV. Poor me!”
D-day, “To home, I flee.”
Shattered by blunders.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.
Farage to right of them,
Lib Dems to left of them,
Labour in front of them
Campaigned and wondered
For Tories, tolls the bell?
SpAds and Ministers fell.
They that had won so well
Now faced the jaws of Death,
Their own political hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.
O what a gory fate!
O the wild charge they made!
Britons ignored them.
Tories forever unmade
Must join Nigel’s Brigade?
Barely one hundred?
Back to the future: How 2024 is like 1854 for UK Tories
If you think the Biden campaign is in dire straits, spare some tears and sympathy for the British Conservatives (aka the Tory Party) on the eve of the worst defeat in their 200-year history.
When British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called the general election 6 months early with his party 20 points behind, a former Cabinet Minister called the PM’s decision “madness, suicidal, charge of the light brigade”.
In 1854 during the Crimean War, 607 British cavalrymen attacked a well-defended Russian position. Only 198 survived. Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to honor the soldiers’ bravery and condemn their commanders’ folly. (See full text of the original poem.)
635 Conservative Party candidates are running in this election. In the last election 5 years ago, the Conservatives won 365 of 650 seats in the House of Commons. One projection shows the Conservatives being reduced in the voting on July 4th to 3rd-party status with fewer than 70 seats.
Dunkirk? Not
To be fair to Prime Minister (PM) Sunak, he had a case for calling an early election – the “Dunkirk strategy”. The PM knew that he had little chance to win. But, Sunak hoped that positive economic news in May and June would help his party win more seats now than in an election 6 months from now. His goal was to lose with enough seats in the House of Commons to mount a comeback in the next election. But, a bad campaign turned Sunak’s hopes for Dunkirk into the charge of the Tory Brigade.
Coming soon: UK election post-mortem
After the votes are in, I will post a short comment on the results.
It certainly looks as if I was wrong with my initial premise. I agreed with the reasoning behind the PM’s early election call to take advantage of good inflation news. There’s no evidence in public opinion polls of any Tory bounce from lower inflation. Nor is there evidence that 2% inflation even helped to slow the Tory slide.
One issue that I plan to take a close look at after the election – what do the final results and any pre-election polls about 2nd choices say about the potential strength of a new party from a Tory merger with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK? In Canada after the Canadian Tories’ 1993 election disaster, the Reform-Tory merger took 10 years. (It’s not my place to comment on whether such a merger would be in the UK’s best interests. Rather, I will estimate the vote share that a merged party might have got.)
P.S. After the 1st exit poll on 4th July election night, I adjusted the last line of the poem to “Barely one hundred?” from “Not even one hundred?”