The irrelevant Tories

I raised an eyebrow and began reading about it, then I stopped. Why exactly was I reading about it? Why was I taking some precious time out of my day to willingly find out about what Mark Francois thought? That’s when it hit me: the Tories lost. We no longer have to care about every single little thing that they do.

Some of their backbenchers are still lunatics, but it doesn’t matter. They cannot influence what happens in No10 anymore, because they’re not in No10. “The five families” do not matter. The European Research Group doesn’t matter. It’s over. It’s over!

I spent the rest of the day feeling like a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. After years and years of sighing and resentfully clicking on news stories detailing the tedious infighting of people who never should have reached Parliament in the first place, I was finally free.

From now on, I thought, I’ll only click on reports about the Conservative party when they are likely to make me laugh. I’ll only write about them if I find it personally entertaining. That’s where the bar is, and where it will remain for at least the next few years.

I suspect I’m not the only person who reached a similar conclusion this week, which ought to worry the opposition. Because they were in power for so long, the Tories have very few remaining MPs who remember what it was like to suddenly become entirely irrelevant. Even if they do, it is something that last happened around two decades ago, and if a week is a long time in politics, then the early 2000’s might as well be a different world.

In some ways, it actually was. The last time the Conservatives found themselves in such dire straits, the media landscape was in a very different place. National newspapers still ruled the roost, few people checked the news on the internet, and some of GB News’s presenters hadn’t even reached school age yet.

What this meant in practice was that the party could cycle through the various stages of grief in relative privacy, away from the usually prying eyes of journalists, who were too busy covering New Labour. The Conservatives went right for a while then slowly began their march back towards the centre, which eventually managed to bring them back into government.

It isn’t clear that this will happen this time around. Over the past few years, the right has managed to develop quite the media ecosystem – or feedback loop, depending on how you look at it. Hysterical columnists write about things they saw on Twitter, and those columns are then discussed on GB News, and the resulting TV clips get posted on Twitter, where they are likely to influence the columnists who spend their days scrolling, and so on, and so forth.

Locked in this echo chamber, MPs end up losing sight of what actually matters to regular people, and what should be done to keep their votes. It’s one of the reasons why they lost the election in the first place; by spending so much time knee-deep in culture wars, they didn’t realise that they were only talking to their own.

As the Labour party has shown under Keir Starmer, returning to government from opposition means facing some difficult truths, and leaving your comfort zone. How can the Conservatives follow a similar path if any move aimed towards former voters will get hysterically shouted down by supposedly friendly commentators?

Trapped between a mainstream media that will largely ignore them and a right-wing ecosystem that will only ever seek to radicalise them further, Tory MPs are likely to end up stuck down the rabbit hole for some time. 

In the meantime, the rest of us will just be getting on with our lives.