If the UK Conservatives were a cornered army, they would raise the white flag; If they were a boxer who was taking a beating, they would throw the towel into the ring; If they were a ship taking on water, they would type three dots, three dashes and three dots (SOS), the distress call in Morse code, and if it were a plane about to fall, the pilot would say on the radio mayday, mayday, abbreviation from the French venez m'aider (come help me), a term introduced in 1927 by the British radio officer Frederick Stanley Mockford when much of European air traffic was between London's Croydon airport and Paris' Le Bourget airport.
That is, in its political equivalence, the state of the Tories after the defeats in the Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire by-elections, where they enjoyed overwhelming majorities won by Boris Johnson in 2019, strengths that have been taken from them by Labour. But things have changed a lot in four years. From a country that wanted to make Brexit a reality to see where it would take it, England has become a country for which the doctor has predicted a serious economic ailment (it is the one with the least growth in the G-7) that will require a very tough rehabilitation. .
Things are looking so bad for the Conservatives, about to enter their fourteenth consecutive year in power, that the Mid Bedfordshire seat, a rural area, has been theirs and theirs alone for ninety years, when Spain was a republic, the The world was suffering the blows of the Great Depression, Hitler was appointed chancellor and construction of the Golden Gate in San Francisco began.
“It has been a victory of seismic dimensions,” proclaimed the Labor leader Keir Satrmer, who already looks on one foot and three quarters of the other in Downing Street, although he has instructions from his advisors not to appear triumphalist, because arrogance is usually punished. by the voters. But, more swollen than a peacock, he has a hard time not scratching his belly with pleasure. And is not for less.
The other side of the coin is Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who increasingly sees clearly that he is not only on track to lose the elections, but to do so in a spectacular way, even more so than John Major against Tony Blair in 1997. Of the last hundred years, Labor has only governed thirty, and since the Second World War it has only taken Downing Street from the Tories on four occasions. Next year would be the fifth. That's what the weather forecast says.
The only consolation that the Government clings to after the beating it received, a terrible premonition for next year's general elections, is that abstention was very high, the opposition leader Starmer generates little enthusiasm, and what happened, more than winning votes for Labour, is that conservative voters stayed at home. Something they surely won't do when it comes to choosing the next prime minister.
But although that is the official line of the party, the most absolute pessimism is widespread among its ranks, and some even fear a defeat of biblical dimensions like that of the Canadian Conservatives in 1993 (their support fell by 20%, and the 156 seats of their absolute majority were reduced to just two). It would be punishment for the failure of Brexit, Johnson's irreverence with democratic institutions and Liz Truss's libertarian experiment. The technocrat Sunak, who is also very right-wing, has never had a chance, neither in his role as a pragmatic manager nor in his new role as an anti-system rebel. Starmer is not charismatic, but, as Napoleon said, he alone has to let the enemy destroy itself.
